The changes start coming into effect next month
You might want to hold off on that horny posting in your favourite discoverable Discord server. The chat service announced today that any servers that are listed as discoverable, meaning anyone can find them simply through Googling, no invite link required, will now also show messages and discussions posted in said servers on Google.
This is being done because, as Discord admits, forums aren't as popular these days. "Prior to Discord's launch, message boards were common, ranging from community-driven forums to official ones run by game studios," reads a post explaining the update. "These message boards excelled at hosting long-form, structured conversations about helping people, theory crafting, and more. While they still exist today, many have moved into Discord servers. This has led to valuable information being locked in Discord conversations, inaccessible to the wider internet. We want to fix this."
I have certainly seen this complaint myself on a number of occasions, so, to a certain degree I'm sure this will be welcome. It does immediately raise one concern for me though, that being everyone's favourite topic at the moment: AI. As it currently stands, it's Discord policy that AI companies are not allowed to train their models on a user's messages. How does this change with these messages now being publicly available? What safeguards will be put in place to prevent this, if any?
As the post explains, discoverable servers will have server web pages where messages and discussions can be found through your search engine of choice. Every discoverable server will have a server web page from November 16th, next month, but you can opt out ahead of time and once the feature is live. It's from mid-December where channel messages will be viewable on these server web pages. "Server admins decide which channels take part, and server members can choose whether their own messages appear. Usernames and avatars will not be shown alongside these messages," the post notes.
Also worth noting is that in "the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea, the member setting for Channel Messages is off by default given legal restrictions, so members’ messages won’t appear on the web unless they turn it on. Users in the teen age group are excluded completely and cannot enable Channel Messages until they’re an adult. Everywhere else, it’s on unless members turn it off."
On the one hand, sure, it'll be nice to have some of this information that was previously much harder to access publicly available. On the other, the open web is infested with corporations that are looking to harvest your data without any consequences, currently, and now something as simple as sending a Discord message could potentially aid in that. I'm glad that you have individual control over whether your own messages get seen, I just struggle to see this as an overwhelmingly positive move.