Comment by EngManagerIsMe
3 years ago
What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake?
Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.
Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way.
As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.
This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
A middle ground would be to offer public searchable logs, but strip the usernames. I would be fine with that.
I mean you self answered here. Any person in that discord could be transcribing all the data to a public site, so nothing really changes.