this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I see a lot of drama here in the thread, people decrying data leaks, how Discord is very very bad, and a number of people wanting the "good old days" of forums.
Yes. I like forums too, but, uh...
These researchers scraped publicly posted messages. Keyword here being "public". How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
I actually remember the times when forums were at their peak. I hung out on BZPower for Bionicle things, and the Relic News Forum for Homeworld modding. You know what they had? Google bots that scraped messages, looked for certain words, and populated websites with advertisements based on what it could scrape from forums.
Pretty sure Lemmy doesn't do encryption either, unless there's some very special, private Lemmy server that nobody has access to. So the researchers could've just as well scraped the fediverse.
Forums were the primary way that groups would talk with one another pre-global scale social media.
They could contain public subforums, but the majority of all of the forums that I've been a part of were not viewable without an account, which was manually approved or required a small payment (to make bans have a chance to actually stick).
Yeah this being just as easy on bb forums or literally any webpage with a public comment section was my first thought as well..
Isn't most of the internet scraped anyways, by the internet archive? The concerning part is that this is 100% going to be used to train some coomer brained AI. Scraping, botting, scamming: all those things are going to happen on large public communities.
Yeah, a lot of this push is about ushering in new laws to prevent data scraping.
Propaganda spreads easily through fake accounts—but how do we detect large-scale operations if they’re constantly creating and deleting accounts or trying to blend in with the rest of us? We’d need access to massive data sets to mine for patterns and expose coordinated behavior.
But the powers that benefit from shaping the narrative are the same ones pushing the idea that all scraping is bad. They want people to hate it, so they can justify laws that lock down access. That’s the end game.