This week, the popular gaming chat platform Discord sailed back into the bad books of many users after it announced official plans to make what you say in discoverable servers searchable on Google.
Discord was already in hot water with users earlier this year when it announced it was adding global age verification. "Discord alternatives" searches jumped 10,000% overnight, while the majority of our readers polled agreed that it was time to leave the platform.
The age verification situation was finally cemented in September when Discord made it official. There wasn't a ton of outcry, whether because users accepted their fate or already ditched Discord for an alternative.
Is it time to raise the pitchforks again? Not quite. Let me explain.
Is Discord's Google search move really that bad?
Discord's planned change begins rolling out on November 16, when every discoverable server will receive a server web page. This page is expected to be populated with AI summaries of what users are talking about.
Usernames and avatars will not be included with any text pulled by Google from Discord's discoverable servers.
Discord plans to drop the full change, where your publicly posted words will be discoverable by Google, in mid-December.
This isn't as bad as you think, but it's certainly still invasive. Discord's discoverable servers are not the same as private servers you and your friends use. They're not the DMs you send to other Discord users.
They are the Discord servers that don't require an invite to join and that must have at least 1,000 members. Discord says there are about 63,000 of these servers currently on the go.
Messages you've sent in these servers before the mid-December switch flip won't appear in Google. However, anything sent after the deadline will indeed be searchable.
If you frequent these types of servers and don't want your words appearing in the world's most popular search engine, you can opt out.
How to opt out of Discord's discoverable server Google search changes
Don't want what you type in certain Discord servers to show up in Google? Here's how to opt out.
- Click the User Settings button in the Discord app. It's a gear located in the bottom-left corner.
- Click Data and Privacy.
- Ensure the toggle next to "Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages" is turned off.
As far as I can tell, that should do the trick. Keep in mind that your messages from before the switch won't be indexed, so there's not much reason to go back and delete posts you've made in the past.
If you run a server and are not sure if it's discoverable, Discord has a full guide on how to enable, disable, and configure the setting.
Windows Central's take
Discord's angle here is that it wants valuable content created in discoverable servers to be found by a much larger audience.
It imagines a richer collection of game guides, tips, and tricks in Google now that it's opening up its content, and for that I don't blame the company.
The fact that this change comes with so much heads-up time, as well as easy-to-find toggles to disable, makes it easy to negate. Just be sure to hit the right toggles before Discord makes the switch mid-December.
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