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You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it shoul

by Sanzig 1y ago

You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Similarly, we have a huge problem right now with massive partisanship in the west. Changing one's opinion should be viewed in a positive light, but unfortunately our society doesn't seem to see it that way. Someone with an odious opinion when they were young, who changes that opinion to something more moderate when they grow up, should be viewed as a positive change. But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment. So yes, shame on these researchers. I know they claim to have anonymized the data set, but let's be honest, that never works. It's always easy to find common threads and identify someone, and it's particularly easy now when we have access to all sorts of machine learning models that can really do very effective denonymization.

trevor-e 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand the outrage. Before Discord, everyone used forums. And those were archived by Google for the entire world to see. What's the difference?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  One is against the rules of the platform and the other isn't.
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? You'd have a more convincing argument if you said something like "oh these servers have the implication of semi-private chats so people may be more inclined to share personal information" or something. Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo when people dont obey their 500+ page long legalese ToS designed to maximise ownership over each user.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      >Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? I do. >Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? I don't get upset, but I recognize that they would be breaking the rules. >Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo Remember the golden rule. If you want agreements you make with others to be upheld then you should respect agreements others make with you.
sillysaurusx 1y ago
Wrong or not, it’s the world we live in. It falls to the parents to teach their kids what not to say from a young age. Besides, most of the salacious talk happens in DMs and private channels, which weren’t scraped. If you can find evidence of some way to use this data harmfully, I’ll agree with you. Till then you’re making a fuss possibly without merit. In general I’m skeptical of the power of data alone to meaningfully harm someone, except in obvious cases like private health info, exposing affairs, financial documents, and so on. Public information is public, and it’s arguably wrong to keep it locked up rather than the other way around. Datasets like this are the only way open source ML has any chance against the big players.
stronglikedan 1y ago
There is no expectation that anything said on social media will remain private - zero - and anyone that thinks differently is just lying to themselves and everyone else.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Discord "servers" are groups you click on an "invite" to join, there is some framing where you are lead to believe the conversation is not public. Bluesky had a similar freakout when HuggingFace packaged up a snapshot of the firehose and this discussion was had ad infinitum - in Bluesky's face every post is explicitly public -- but a very vocal minority of users still felt they had been wronged because no one asked if they were OK with being a part of a research project. There's definitely a gap between what users /should/ be aware of and what impression they actually get using a service, and you have to keep in mind most people are not techies that have spent years of their life wrestling with issues of privacy and data ownership, so announcements like this can come as a surprise, the first time they considered that what they said in one context can be moved to another.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    “Three men may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Although, calling it an invite is probably not good or clear communication on Discord’s part. If an invite is publicly posted for anyone to see and there’s no vetting of who is getting the invites… that’s just a public space.
    - smileybarry 1y ago
      But “publicly posted” discord invites can mean links in streamers profiles, project websites, etc. While anyone can type that website’s URL, it’s generally expected a group of the public would see & follow that invite, e.g. a streamer’s viewers. It’s not a public space like how a shop on the street is a public space. Plus, even if the server is in Discovery (and thus really publicly advertised), they’re still mostly sorted into 10+ rooms. Just because a library is public, doesn’t mean I should expect Study Room B will be recorded by John Jameson and entered into a public dataset.
d--b 1y ago
> Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. Just because something is public means that someone is actually going to save it for later en-masse. Educating 14-year-old kids so that they don't post public chat with their real name is more important than shaming the researchers.
knowitnone 1y ago
if it's anonymized, is it your mistake and can anyone point single you out? I've not seen anyone point out 14 year old posts but I suppose it occurs. But at what arbitrary age can we start to hold them accountable for their posts? 70? What about people who flip flop on views whenever it suits their needs? "It's easy to find common threads and identify someone?" Prove it because I don't think it's that easy.
Macha 1y ago
I am incredibly happy that my teenage growing up period occurred on now-defunct forums and pre-Facebook social networks.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
> An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Through the rest of us abandoning the, let’s call it, presumption of endorsement: that you having said or even done something stupid ten or five years ago (or even less, if you’re young) means you still endorse it now. Right now it feels like things are moving in the opposite direction, extending that presumption from things you said to things you allowed others to say, to things others said elsewhere that are entirely unrelated to things you allowed them to say in your presence.
squigz 1y ago
> But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment. I have to seriously question the actual prevalence of this. If someone posts and says "Look at what this person posted 12 years ago!" I'm not going to take them very seriously. I don't know anyone who would. This sounds like the usual "cancel culture" stuff that mostly boils down to "people face consequences for their present shitty behavior" Anyway, as an avid Discord user, manager of a Discord community, and privacy advocate, I sympathize with this position, but as a software user and developer, and advocate for accessible FOSS (and accompanying information), I unfortunately have to side with the release of this and similar datasets. I would much rather this than the inevitable loss of so much valuable information.
jowea 1y ago
Why does Discord the company get to own the message history on public servers but Twitter or Reddit or traditional forums can get scrapped by anyone wanting to make their own commercial AI willy-nilly? > These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Understandable, but really, if you want to solve that, then you're up against all of social media. The only difference is that Discord wants you to make a free 2 minutes account so you can join the public server to look at what they said, instead of putting it on Google.
vincnetas 1y ago
Instead of "right to be forgotten" i would like to live in a world with the right "to be forgiven". We know that everyone has done stupid shit in the past and some in present. Idea is not to pretend that this didn't happen, but let it go and accept that people can change (grow up) if they demonstrate regret and willingness to change. Side effect is that if they do repeat offences you can draw some conclusions from that instead of just forgetting it. Let's bring back the concept of reputation.

by Sanzig 1y ago

trevor-e 1y ago

I'm not sure I understand the outrage. Before Discord, everyone used forums. And those were archived by Google for the entire world to see. What's the difference?

charcircuit 1y ago
One is against the rules of the platform and the other isn't.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? You'd have a more convincing argument if you said something like "oh these servers have the implication of semi-private chats so people may be more inclined to share personal information" or something. Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo when people dont obey their 500+ page long legalese ToS designed to maximise ownership over each user.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? I do. >Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? I don't get upset, but I recognize that they would be breaking the rules. >Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo Remember the golden rule. If you want agreements you make with others to be upheld then you should respect agreements others make with you.

sillysaurusx 1y ago

Wrong or not, it’s the world we live in. It falls to the parents to teach their kids what not to say from a young age. Besides, most of the salacious talk happens in DMs and private channels, which weren’t scraped. If you can find evidence of some way to use this data harmfully, I’ll agree with you. Till then you’re making a fuss possibly without merit. In general I’m skeptical of the power of data alone to meaningfully harm someone, except in obvious cases like private health info, exposing affairs, financial documents, and so on. Public information is public, and it’s arguably wrong to keep it locked up rather than the other way around. Datasets like this are the only way open source ML has any chance against the big players.

stronglikedan 1y ago

There is no expectation that anything said on social media will remain private - zero - and anyone that thinks differently is just lying to themselves and everyone else.

jazzyjackson 1y ago
Discord "servers" are groups you click on an "invite" to join, there is some framing where you are lead to believe the conversation is not public. Bluesky had a similar freakout when HuggingFace packaged up a snapshot of the firehose and this discussion was had ad infinitum - in Bluesky's face every post is explicitly public -- but a very vocal minority of users still felt they had been wronged because no one asked if they were OK with being a part of a research project. There's definitely a gap between what users /should/ be aware of and what impression they actually get using a service, and you have to keep in mind most people are not techies that have spent years of their life wrestling with issues of privacy and data ownership, so announcements like this can come as a surprise, the first time they considered that what they said in one context can be moved to another.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  “Three men may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Although, calling it an invite is probably not good or clear communication on Discord’s part. If an invite is publicly posted for anyone to see and there’s no vetting of who is getting the invites… that’s just a public space.
  - smileybarry 1y ago
    But “publicly posted” discord invites can mean links in streamers profiles, project websites, etc. While anyone can type that website’s URL, it’s generally expected a group of the public would see & follow that invite, e.g. a streamer’s viewers. It’s not a public space like how a shop on the street is a public space. Plus, even if the server is in Discovery (and thus really publicly advertised), they’re still mostly sorted into 10+ rooms. Just because a library is public, doesn’t mean I should expect Study Room B will be recorded by John Jameson and entered into a public dataset.

d--b 1y ago

> Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. Just because something is public means that someone is actually going to save it for later en-masse. Educating 14-year-old kids so that they don't post public chat with their real name is more important than shaming the researchers.

knowitnone 1y ago

if it's anonymized, is it your mistake and can anyone point single you out? I've not seen anyone point out 14 year old posts but I suppose it occurs. But at what arbitrary age can we start to hold them accountable for their posts? 70? What about people who flip flop on views whenever it suits their needs? "It's easy to find common threads and identify someone?" Prove it because I don't think it's that easy.

Macha 1y ago

I am incredibly happy that my teenage growing up period occurred on now-defunct forums and pre-Facebook social networks.

mananaysiempre 1y ago

> An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Through the rest of us abandoning the, let’s call it, presumption of endorsement: that you having said or even done something stupid ten or five years ago (or even less, if you’re young) means you still endorse it now. Right now it feels like things are moving in the opposite direction, extending that presumption from things you said to things you allowed others to say, to things others said elsewhere that are entirely unrelated to things you allowed them to say in your presence.

squigz 1y ago

> But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment. I have to seriously question the actual prevalence of this. If someone posts and says "Look at what this person posted 12 years ago!" I'm not going to take them very seriously. I don't know anyone who would. This sounds like the usual "cancel culture" stuff that mostly boils down to "people face consequences for their present shitty behavior" Anyway, as an avid Discord user, manager of a Discord community, and privacy advocate, I sympathize with this position, but as a software user and developer, and advocate for accessible FOSS (and accompanying information), I unfortunately have to side with the release of this and similar datasets. I would much rather this than the inevitable loss of so much valuable information.

jowea 1y ago

Why does Discord the company get to own the message history on public servers but Twitter or Reddit or traditional forums can get scrapped by anyone wanting to make their own commercial AI willy-nilly? > These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Understandable, but really, if you want to solve that, then you're up against all of social media. The only difference is that Discord wants you to make a free 2 minutes account so you can join the public server to look at what they said, instead of putting it on Google.

vincnetas 1y ago

Instead of "right to be forgotten" i would like to live in a world with the right "to be forgiven". We know that everyone has done stupid shit in the past and some in present. Idea is not to pretend that this didn't happen, but let it go and accept that people can change (grow up) if they demonstrate regret and willingness to change. Side effect is that if they do repeat offences you can draw some conclusions from that instead of just forgetting it. Let's bring back the concept of reputation.