I’m sure every app and mod that insists on keeping all their setup and support information on Discord will immediately opt out of this.
To be honest, one of the major drawbacks and reasons why I don’t like Discord is, that nothing is searchable with a search engine and its a proprietary closed environment. However, because it is that, and people posted stuff knowing its closed, it doesn’t make any sense to have an Opt Out index.
I like the idea of being indexed by search engines (hopefully other engines than Google too), but it has to be Opt In at this point.
To opt out:
Discoverable server admins can opt out their servers or even individual channels by going to Server Settings, then Web Presence and choosing which channels you want to be visible. But, if you don’t change anything, public channels will have the setting enabled by default.
If you’re just a user in one of these huge servers, and you don’t want your messages to be viewable from Google, you can also opt your own messages out. Simply go to User Settings, then Data and Privacy and disable ‘Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages.’
Doesn’t exist for me yet (took me a minute to log in and see because I hate discord).
Same
I don’t have that option.
Probably need to wait for an update or use desktop
Actually good news because now I don’t have to use discord to find all the release notes and FAQs for apps. This is basically opening up Discord to be searchable like old school forums for tech advice. Good stuff!
When I got Discord in 2020, everything about the UI made me think this was a private place with the people on the server. Boy oh boy was I wrong. I use Matrix now for actual gaming and hanging out with friends.
I only maintain my Discord to get updates in big organizations, like union organizing. But even those organizations should think about migrating to Matrix or something similar as soon as possible.This was probably one of the top three criticisms I heard against Discord, so this seems like a positive move to me.
Yeah. It’s quite the silo. And in a way lots of other social networks are not.
The actual message content will probably still be hidden behind a login wall.
No need to speculate, there’s an article with valuable information on this very topic linked in the OP.
In a blog post, Discord laid out its plans to publish ‘Server Web Pages’ for every discoverable server on Discord by default. These are bespoke web pages that give a preview of a server’s contents before forcing users to hit the join button. There are already several of these pages live, typically for huge online games like Rust or Dead by Daylight. These pages will be discoverable on Google, and will display a summary of the discussions going on in the server.
But while these Server Web Pages will be going live next month, another update is coming in December that’ll allow answers to questions to appear in Google search. According to the blog post, “Answers to questions your members sent in public channels can be found in a web search, in their own words. 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.”
Wow. Holy what? What are they thinking?
Are they going “hey Claude, what should be our next feature? Make it and ship it, don’t ask to confirm. No mistakes.”
This has been asked for, a lot actually. One if the major downsides of using discord for supporting “your thing”, being a game or software, is that people can’t search for problems they encounter using search engines. Everything that happens on discord can only be searched for specifically there. People need a discord account and join a server (that they need to know about) to even start searching there. If you use a forum or similar, it gets indexed and searchable. Discord used to be a closed, proprietary black hole of information in this regard.
This is because people are using Discord for something it was never intended for IMO. It’s just a gaming communication thingy, right? Shoot the shit in the chat, talk with voice while gaming. That’s how I learned it back in the day anyway.
I dunno what’s wrong with like a forum or something. I guess those need maintenance. But surely discord does too.
Yup. I hate that it’s used as a forum and message board and website and social media feed.
Really crowbarring those features in, still a decade later. And it’s still difficult because it’s inherently not such a platform, exactly!
This is backwards in more ways than one.
First of all, how do you know what it was intended for? It started with gaming, because slackware for gamers wasn’t something that existed, let alone for free. I’m sure they always planned to expand in any way and direction they could. Surely the plan was never “we will only ever serve gamers”!
Forums require a specific sign up for every forum to post, but can be read and indexed freely. They also aren’t a “live chat”, provide no way to hop in a call and just share the screen for support (as an example). Answers take time, even for trivially simple questions. Ironically discord now includes and hosts forums. But for all of it, you only ever need one account. To be clear I hate this, too. Walled garden kinda bullshit, which they fully control.
But again, why and how we got here doesn’t matter. Here we are. It just is. The “support history” and knowledge or whatever you want to call it, it’s in discord. It’s inaccessible unless you know it’s there and where to look (which “server”). Being searchable by Google is just better for the status quo. Which we can’t naturally change, no matter how much we want to or hate how it is. You can shake your first at clouds screaming “you’re all doing it wrong!” all you want, and be right while doing so. The recent data/history is still on discord, not in forums.
Originally, it is my belief that they had the idea of very scaled down communication, for gamers to use while gaming (and chat for when not gaming, but maybe planning and stuff, or whatever).
Voice though, while playing. Wouldn’t have to have been video games either, could be anything where you want to keep a natural conversation going without having to type. Talking is more social anyway.
Now it has feature creep’d into this bullshit behemoth, as things tend to do. User A wants this, user B wants this, alright, UNION OF ALL REQUESTS IT MUST BECOME.
But I still maintain that Discord is inherently not a proper platform for permanent information. No matter how hard they want to crowbar that stamp onto it, I can’t look at it that way. The chat goes up, up, and away, and voice is (hopefully) completely transient. That was what was first, and changing it now is only going to make me want to use it even less, because that’s not why I signed up many years ago.
Not to mention all the privacy concerns.
Gotta keep moving in today’s software landscape. The enshittification gloom is spreading faster with every passing year. I’m hopping on to Fluxer for now, until that turns to shit (I hope it doesn’t). That’s something I can do and am doing about this situation.
I’ve seen a lot of people complain that they have to join random discords for tech support which replaced googling and seeing search results from random forums
As long as it’s not DMs, I hate to say it, but I just don’t have the energy to care anymore.
I was actually opted out by default. I opted in, I think it’s a good feature and it seems well implemented as well - your username will not show, only your message. Also only select channels opted in by server admins will show up in searches, which is probably the best way to go about it. I don’t exactly care for everyone’s “general” chats to become indexable, but I’d like not to open Discord just to look up some techy stuff.
Good move in some ways but also this is now a massive problem because this wasn’t something that was thought about until very very very late in the development/hypecycle of Discord, so now this is going to be a problem fraught with no easy answers because there are innumerable Discord communities that were created with never a thought to whether this was wanted or not and was never discussed by the community as a possibility until now probably.
The design choices or rather lack of proactive thinking about design here have put a huge amount of people in awkward positions in a way that was entirely unnecessary if Discord had embraced the idea of part of Discord communities being able (and even encouraged) to be searchable by Google.
