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.

  • snowsuit2654@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    15·
    24 hours ago

    “anonymized” sure. I highly doubt they read every message. I’m sure there is lots of de-anonymizing information in the messages themselves

    For example–

    Anon1: “hey jeff, wanna play Minecraft?”

    Anon2: “sure”

    Thus we know Anon2’s name is Jeff. I imagine there’s a lot of this.