Comment by rhyssullivan1
3 years ago
Most Discord communities aren't meant to be indexed I agree! Thanks for linking that article it was interesting to read
There's lots that have support channels though for programming libraries, for games, etc and having all of that content locked away can be really damaging.
One of the interesting things I've noticed is when a community for a more niche game / programming library joins Answer Overflow, they often shoot up to being top performers on the site which is great to see.
Along with that, not all channels are indexed, mainly just help channels. What's nice with this is it keeps that cozy feeling of a private place to talk, while helping more people find a community they will enjoy and keeping information accessible.
Long term, I'd like to implement forms of anti-abuse tools for communities to use so they can understand what the types of people who join their server from Answer Overflow are like. For example, if it turns out that 90% of the people who join are abusive, then it'd make sense for them to turn off indexing.
You could possibly make the argument that for the long term health of some communities, having indexed content helps to keep the community active
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Glad to see this is something you care about preserving.
Good to see you're careful to only share particular channels.
I have more thoughts on marketing this and also on guidelines for server administrators implementing search indexing. For marketing, most importantly, it could be good to make it clear you're focused on selective sharing only of channels which it would be a public good to make indexable. For administrator guidelines, most importantly, I think there should be several measures to ensure that users are aware of and agree to having their communications in particular channels publicly indexed.
I ran this by GPT-4 for some more context and detail. [1]
I think with measures like this we may be able to realize the good of indexing without going too far to driving away the safety of the walled garden aspect of Discord.
As an aside, for users of existing Discords, I encourage you to learn to use the search features built into Discord. Discord itself indexes servers and the search has good filtering functionality. I suspect if you already know which Discord server has the information you're looking for, you'll have a better experience with the internal search than trying to lean on Google.
If you want to do better than the internal search, perhaps creating a vector store of the channel and setting up an AI chat application in front of it would be a solution.
[1] https://chat.openai.com/share/254632c2-c25b-4299-88c9-2ce49e...