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Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

(update.botghost.com)
139 points exists | 5 comments | 23 Jun 25 20:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.885s | source
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czk ◴[23 Jun 25 20:40 UTC] No.44359845[source]▶
I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things.

A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if discord is primarily concerned about the massive logging capability of services like these.

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1. gizmo686 ◴[24 Jun 25 13:45 UTC] No.44366205[source]▶
Discord locked down the ability of bots to read message contents back in 2022. For bots used in over 100 servers, doing so now requires explicit approval from Discord (in addition to the standard approval the server owner would need to give). For most bots, the rest of the bot API is rich enough for this to not be an issue.

That cuts out a lot of the value for LLM training; and will reduce the blast radius if Discord ever decides to fully pull the plug on message access.

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2. HWR_14 ◴[24 Jun 25 14:16 UTC] No.44366522[source]▶
To read message archives or to read messages in realtime? Because I was working on a sideproject that required monitoring the messages in a channel, not just slash commands.
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3. gizmo686 ◴[24 Jun 25 14:21 UTC] No.44366572[source]▶
Read messages in realtime.
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4. HWR_14 ◴[24 Jun 25 17:39 UTC] No.44368709{3}[source]▶
At least I know now before I put more effort into it. Thank you for the warning.
5. czk ◴[24 Jun 25 17:46 UTC] No.44368791[source]▶
this is good to know! thank you for the info