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Hot Bots Bite

July 3, 2025

Dino 5 18 25_thumb[3]No smart software involved. Just an addled dinobaby.

I read “Discord is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost: The Ensh*ttification of Discord.” (I really hate that “ensh*t neologism.) The write up is interesting. If you know zero about bots, just skip it. If you do know something about bots in “walled gardens.” Take a look. The use of software robots which are getting smarter and smarter thanks to “artificial intelligence” will emerge, morph, and become vectors for some very exciting types of online criminal activity. Sure, bots can do “good,” but most people with a make-money-fast idea will find ways to botify online crime. With crypto currency scoped to be an important part of “everything” apps, excitement is just around the corner.

However, I want to call attention to the comments section of Hacker News. Several of the observations struck me as germane to my interests in bots purpose built for online criminal activity. Your interests are probably different from mine, but here’s a selection of the remarks I found on point for me:

  1. throwaway7679 posts: [caps in original] “NEITHER DISCORD NOR ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE APIs, API DATA, DOCUMENTATION, OR ANY DISCORD SERVICES. The existence of terms like this make any discussion of the other terms look pretty silly. Their policy is simply that they do whatever they want, and that hasn’t changed.”
  2. sneak posts: “Discord has the plaintext of every single message ever sent via Discord, including all DMs. Can you imagine the value to LLM companies? It’s probably the single largest collection of sexting content outside of WeChat (and Apple’s archive of iCloud Backups that contain all of the iMessages).”
  3. immibis posts: “Reddit is more evil than Discord IMO – they did this years ago, tried to shut down all bots and unofficial apps, and they heavily manipulate consensus opinion, which Discord doesn’t as far as I know.”
  4. macspoofing posts: “…For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn – basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.”
  5. altairprime posts: “LinkedIn lost a lawsuit about prohibiting third parties tools from accessing its site, Matrix has strong interop, Elite Dangerous offers OAuth API for sign-in and player data download, and so on. There are others but that’s sixty seconds worth of thinking about it. Mastodon metastasized the user store but each site is still a tiny centralized user store. That’s how user stores work. Doesn’t mean they’re automatically monopolistic. Discord’s taking the Reddit-Apollo approach to forcing them offline — half-assed conversations for months followed by an abrupt fuck-you moment with little recourse — which given Discord’s free of charge growth mechanism, means that — just like Reddit — they’re likely going to shutdown anything by that’s providing a valuable service to a significant fraction of their users, either to Sherlock and charge money for it, or simply to terminate what they view as an obstruction.”

Several observations:

  1. Telegram not mentioned in the comments which I reviewed (more are being added, but I am not keeping track of these additions as of 1125 am US Eastern on June 25, 2025)
  2. Bots are a contentious type of software
  3. The point about the “value” of messages to large language models is accurate.

Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Social Media, Technology 

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