Discord is a platform that originally emerged with the idea of bringing gamers together in one place and offering an alternative to forums, which were already well on their way to becoming obsolete. Over time, that line began to blur as Discord itself started introducing features characteristic of forums.
Now Discord has decided to move even closer to forums conceptually by making information shared on public servers publicly accessible to everyone, even those who do not use Discord. So, if someone helps you solve an issue on a public server, that answer which was helpful to you will also be available to others via internet search.
Starting November 16, every Discoverable Server will have a web page featuring summaries of discussions from public channels, and starting mid-December, individual messages will begin appearing as web search results. These messages will not include those posted up to that point, and likewise, usernames and avatars will be removed from published messages. Discord said there are over 63,000 total discoverable servers on its platform.
For now, we have been told that server administrators will have the power to control whether they want server content to be publicly displayed on the web. Furthermore, users on an individual level can turn off the option if they do not want their messages to appear in web search results.
However, what we haven't been told is whether this data will be used to train AI models. That is not an unreasonable assumption to make, given the immense importance placed on data nowadays. Discord has not commented on this.
Private servers and servers with fewer than one thousand members that have existed for less than 8 weeks will not be affected by this change.
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