Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
2025/02/02 by Yan Aquino, Pedro Bento, Aquino, Yan +29 · 17 voices · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Public Relations and Crisis Communication #cs.DB #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.00627
openalex publication_date 2025/02/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract
Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data accessibility challenges. This paper introduces Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024), the most extensive Discord public server's data to date. The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's Discovery feature. Spanning from Discord's launch in 2015 to the end of 2024, it offers a robust temporal and thematic framework for analyzing decentralized moderation, community governance, information dissemination, and social dynamics. Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines and privacy standards via anonymization techniques. Organized into structured JSON files, the dataset facilitates seamless integration with computational social science methodologies. Preliminary analyses reveal significant trends in user engagement, bot utilization, and linguistic diversity, with English predominating alongside substantial representations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Additionally, prevalent community themes such as social, art, music, and memes highlight Discord's expansion beyond its gaming origins.
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Discussions
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) [hn, 152 points, 179 comments]
- Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online [lemmy, 7 points, 0 comments]
- Workign on a paper on the ethics of researching semi-public spaces and this drops: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 This seems to be grounded in a misrepresentation of Discord's norms of interaction. The titl [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
- Paper on the people who scraped Discord because techbois think there's nothing wrong with theft and have no concept of consent arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00627 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- This is the THIRD paper I've seen in the last year that uses people's data in a way that is deeply ethically problematic. If games scholars keep doing this it is going to seriously harm everyone's abi [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]
- Interesting! The reason I think discord is a particularly interesting example is because someone did publish a massive dataset several months ago scraping all the public servers they could find. [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- That's a lot of Discord messages. "The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's D [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- ⚡ Hackernews Top story: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- does no one in academia do irb anymore or what? arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) view on hacker news [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052041 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052041) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- "Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)" Discord's data shows how public chatting has changed since 2015. There are concerns about privacy, hidden info, and maki [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) #HackerNews https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052041) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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