Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google

I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee

I'm a Discord server admin and I'd love to turn this on because having more discussion of my game indexable by search engines seems like a good thing in general. For new messages it seems like there's no problem, in combination with the opt-out option. But for existing users, how am I supposed to disclose the change to people? What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?

Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.

Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.

I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.

Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.

This is needed, but likely not enough yet. With the rise of Discord servers as community forums, we've lost the wealth of Q&A they used to provide. Being able to search for a user with the same issue as you and find it was no small part of what's let us all learn to program in the first place, as well as critical to the training data that powers the AIs we use to answer similar questions more quickly.

There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.

The real risk here isn't AI training - It's deanonymization. People posted in a "private" community under nicknames.

However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.

i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.

that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)

It's about time! I wish Slack would offer this feature too for people who want it. I think it's going to be great for open-source, open-communication types of projects and organizations and it's well needed for the world!

With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.

For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.

I really like discord. This seems like a good move, there is plenty of information locked inside discord at the moment. For instance I'm part of the Wooting keyboard discord and there's a lot info there on problem solving, customizing, etc. There are tons of other discords like this, especially for games. I personally have a dota2 guild discord, but none of these are likely to be searchable as mostly they are private (often with public invite links somewhere) and don't have many users (I think mines at 180ish).

This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.

This is a very important and good change. Currently Discord communities are black holes of information.

Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.

I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.

Funny to see the differences in reaction to this on various communities. Privacy fears, locked down Internet, what a diverse set of views.

Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.

You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.

Well that is honestly a good thing in my book as long as everyone knows when a chat is public.

Maybe it should be put in Forum Mode only or something. Because just finding random chats is likely not going to be helpful at all.

Discord is ok once you get used to it. But golly the various settings panels is a scattered confusing mess, beware.

Low key privacy violated

All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)

Why tho

Maybe I'm jaded. Is this discord announcing that it is entering the training data business?

Hopefully it won't turn discord into Reddit where everything is over moderated because of all the SEO spam.

The open internet is so back. But also I'm very worried for my privacy :)

Unlike so many people here, I think discord not being indexed by search engine is pretty OK and is even a feature. All other spaces of internet have been invaded by bots, astroturfing, sucking every single bit of data possible... The more the data is easily scrapable, the more it enshittifies everything around it. Moreover people don't behave the same knowing that something is private vs something is public (yes things are mostly public on discord, but at least there's a sense that someone has to actively look for your messages instead of having them indexed by default)

I've never gotten into using Discord because I find the interface to be way too busy.

This is very bad, due to the fact that, while Discord is used as private and server messaging app/website, it could expose secrets that users might be telling people in their private chat.

I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.

Google is going to be the reddit and discord search tool. It's useless for everything else.

How about private channels?

The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels

Cool, but when will Google let anyone find public website content effectively?

Maybe someone will vibecode a replacement.

I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process

Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?

A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*

[flagged]

[dead]