Discord plans to make individual messages from public servers searchable — TechCrunch

Discord announced that it will make some conversations on public servers searchable on the internet. The changes will affect servers in the Discoverable Servers category that administrators have allowed to be displayed in the internal Server Discovery directory. TechCrunch reports.

Discord said the new feature is intended to help users find useful information that currently remains in discussions within the platform. According to the company, more than 63,000 Discoverable Servers bring together communities that discuss gaming strategies, fandoms, language learning and other niche interests.

Server pages and search results

Starting November 16, each Discoverable Server will have a separate webpage. It may feature automatically generated summaries of discussions in active public channels. From mid-December, selected messages from such channels may also appear in search engine results.

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Server administrators will be able to independently determine which channels participate in the feature. Individual members will be able to opt out of having their own messages searchable. Usernames and avatars will not be displayed in posts available through search.

Restrictions and user concerns

The change does not cover private servers, direct messages or group direct chats. The feature will also not apply to teenage users. In the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea, the message searchability option has been disabled by default due to legal restrictions.

The announcement has raised privacy concerns among some users. They note that posting a message on an open Discord server does not always mean a desire to make it available to a broader internet audience. Questions were also raised about the possible use of such conversations to train artificial intelligence models.