Comment on Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I see a lot of drama here in the thread, people decrying data leaks, how Discord is very very bad, and a number of people wanting the “good old days” of forums.
Yes. I like forums too, but, uh…
These researchers scraped publicly posted messages. Keyword here being “public”. How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
I actually remember the times when forums were at their peak. I hung out on BZPower for Bionicle things, and the Relic News Forum for Homeworld modding. You know what they had? Google bots that scraped messages, looked for certain words, and populated websites with advertisements based on what it could scrape from forums.
Pretty sure Lemmy doesn’t do encryption either, unless there’s some very special, private Lemmy server that nobody has access to. So the researchers could’ve just as well scraped the fediverse.
How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
Forums were the primary way that groups would talk with one another pre-global scale social media.
They could contain public subforums, but the majority of all of the forums that I’ve been a part of were not viewable without an account, which was manually approved or required a small payment (to make bans have a chance to actually stick).
People in general have no idea and just wasn’t to get spun up in drama and manufactured outrage.
Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.
People saw “scraped Discord messages” and immediately jumped to “oh shit fuck my private chats have been leaked everybody panic”.
Gibibit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah this being just as easy on bb forums or literally any webpage with a public comment section was my first thought as well…
Isn’t most of the internet scraped anyways, by the internet archive? The concerning part is that this is 100% going to be used to train some coomer brained AI. Scraping, botting, scamming: all those things are going to happen on large public communities.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yea a lot of this stuff is usher in new laws to prevent data scraping.
Propaganda spreads easily by fake accounts. How would we detect these huge operations if they’re creating accounts and deleting them after or trying to hide among us. We would need lots of these huge data dumps so we could mine it and find patterns. So the powers that have the influence spread the message that we must hate all this scraping. We need laws to prevent it. That’s the end game.