A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.

Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called “Searchcord” based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    24 hours ago

    I don’t hate Discord, I simply hate that so many projects and companies have unanimously decided to use it as the wrong tool for the wrong job.

    It’s fine for its intended use case, which is bickering with my friends about video games and fiction, and spamming each other with .gifs and meme images.

    • MBech@feddit.dkEnglish
      201·
      24 hours ago

      Discord is genuinely a great tool for what I used to use Skype for. Talking to my friends, and sharing dumb memes with them in a groupchat format. Companies need to learn that using it as a forum, a Q&A service, a wiki or any other information sharing purpose, is simply fucking retarded.