Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
keegomatic@lemmy.world 2 days agoNo, it’s definitely still valuable. It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web. I’m sure it will be even more valuable moving forward because you don’t want to train LLM models on LLM-generated stuff, and there isn’t as much incentive on a platform like Discord for bots to masquerade as users… unlike on a persistent public and searchable forum like Reddit, where there are obvious incentives to fabricate posts and comments to sell stuff/astroturf/spin public opinion. Bots exist, of course, but they’re identifiable and can be excluded.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s fair.
I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.
Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.
keegomatic@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, they claim that as of 2022 they had trillions of messages in their database, and this website claims four billion messages are sent per day as of 2022, apparently according to Discord, although I wasn’t able to verify that source.