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A Spy Site Is Scraping Discord and Selling Users' Messages
The centralization of everything is exposing just how many people and companies exist as parasites in our online ecosystem. We've known for years that Meta was using its free products, Facebook and Instagram, as data-capturing devices. And while maybe we expect it from the companies who own the products, it still manages to surprise when someone else is doing it, a third party, from a source we didn't expect.
Such is the case with a site called Spy Pet and harvesting huge amount of Discord info. Maybe it's naivety on my part, but it seemed like this info would be harder to get than, say, writing a scraper for Reddit (which with its r/ and u/ naming standards, and public-facing data, makes things incredibly easy). But here we are. One more thing packaging and selling my life. I use the same Discord and Reddit usernames. I suspect a lot of people do. An unwise decision. A stalker's delight.
A couple of years ago I promised myself: any new username must be entirely new. So far so good. I'm only winter in geminispace. I'm only [redacted] on NeoCities, [nope!] on a telnet BBS (of all things!). When I was 14, I used the same alias for years on BBSs, finally changing it in the dying days of that scene. Then again for early php web forums for the journalling scene. For a brief moment, I understood. It's just post-that, the social media era until geminispace, where I'm unfortunately easy to track.
It feels kind of weird, faintly disappointing, that so much of everything done online boils down to traceability. Either for now, or for the future. Data's valuable, data's cheap, and who cares what you're building, as long as you can sell out your users later. And so much of this stuff isn't even _good_, you know? Discord is chat with some decent video capabilities. Reddit is just discoverable forums. And I realize that reducing them down in this way glides over the exactly why they're so useful ("IRC is a mess", and "forum discoverability was always difficult", respectively). But I feel like what we're doing now isn't so wildly different from what we were doing 20 years ago. It's just that now we're all doing it in the same place, making it incredibly easy to find out what any given person is up to.
I'd like to get off Discord, but that's where my community is. That, and (wait for it) Reddit. The old forum we used to congregate around is a husk, collecting a handful of posts every month. Part of what I struggle with online is how many people are happy with the shitty status quo: every page we visit and resource we request ruthlessly tracked, such that if I search for glasses on my phone, that's all my ads on every webpage for the next six months. But a larger part of what's been eating me is how many people are just kind of okay with this. How even if they're unhappy, they're still not willing to change. I'm not perfect, I've still got Reddit/Discord/Facebook/etc accounts. But I'm also in the quiet twilight of geminispace, trying something different, even if it feels like rowing on the ocean on a starless night.
I've mentioned before that my partner is Extremely Offline, doesn't understand what I see in an open and kind of chaotic space. And to an extent, I understand where she's coming from. But the Discord-scraping news is part of a general trend where I've been feeling that the online is actually far less chaotic, much more boring and predictable, than it ever was. Apps lead us to patterns, to standardized actions. The people I knew who were doing weird, subversive things in the late 90s and early 00s are mostly just posting on Facebook. Their younger selves would be appalled. I'm more disappointed than anything else. All this used to be cool. Where have all the weird people gone?