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Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

(update.botghost.com)
139 points exists | 1 comments | 23 Jun 25 20:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.595s | 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. mystified5016 ◴[24 Jun 25 21:03 UTC] No.44371038[source]▶
Yup. I ran a bot a long time ago and it was pretty trivial to quietly scrape the entire history of any server it was in.

I only ever did this on my own server for good reason, but still.

Really a bot doesn't have any more access than a user does. You as a user can manually scroll back through the entire server history, you can check on roles, and you can see the names of channels that are hidden from you.

But it becomes a problem when bots are doing this at scale and selling the resulting data. Sort of like some other bots that people like to argue are doing the same thing a human could.