You know the old internet lament about how forums have disappeared, making it harder to find answers for your very specific sicko tech support questions? It seems like Discord is trying to do something about that in what sounds like the worse way possible: by making messages in certain Discord servers searchable on the web.
Let me attempt to mitigate the full-body revulsion you likely just felt by explaining how it works. This new feature goes into effect next month on November 16th. That’s not comforting, huh? Okay, well, it’s opt-out by default! Nope, that isn’t much better either. Okay, how about this: The change only affects discoverable Discord servers, meaning public servers with over 1,000 members that you can join without needing an invite link. In its announcement, Discord also said admins on these discoverable servers can select which channels will show up in search results before the feature goes live. Only messages from adult accounts will show up, and if you’re a member of a discoverable server and you don’t want your messages to show up at all, you can opt out yourself in your privacy settings. Your direct messages, private servers, and group DMs are not a part of this.
Discord said this new feature is intended to help large, public communities find their people, and help individuals get answers to their burning questions. The example Discord provided is a user searching up a commonly asked question about a video game and getting an answer pulled straight from that game’s official Discord server.
Over the years, Discord has largely replaced the common message board, resulting in a prodigious loss of the specialized knowledge those forums were typically repositories of. With this forthcoming ability to search discoverable Discord messages, large public communities can make their FAQs more easily reachable, cutting down on the number of times a newbie joins a server and asks a question that’s been asked ad infinitum since the day the server was made. A potentially valuable service to be sure…but I still can’t get over the idea of “your Discord messages can potentially turn up in a Google search” so I’ll be opting out toot suite.