Researchers Dump 2 Billion Scraped Discord Messages Online

If you were in a public Discord any time over the past decade, you weren’t just chatting with your friends—you were participating in a massive sociological experiment. According to 404 Media, a team of researchers at Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil scraped more than 2 billion Discord messages from public servers and published the anonymized data online. So hopefully you were very cordial in your messages, because they’re forever now. The exact tally of all the messages, which were published as part of the research group’s paper “Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015 – 2024),” is 2,052,206,308 collected from 4,735,057 users across 3,167 servers made between the time of Discord’s public launch in 2015 and 2024. In total, the researchers said, that accounts for about 10% of the platform’s open servers. The reason they gave for publishing the massive dataset of user messages was to give scientists a sizable sample of human activity that coul ... Read full article.