Technology

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It's easy to get the impression that Discord chat messages are ephemeral, especially across different public servers, where lines fly upward at a near-unreadable pace.

Joseph Cox at 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet, a service that sells access to a database of purportedly 3 billion Discord messages, offers data "credits" to customers who pay in bitcoin, ethereum, or other cryptocurrency.

Searching individual users will reveal the servers that Spy Pet can track them across, a raw and exportable table of their messages, and connected accounts, such as GitHub.

As Cox notes, Discord doesn't make messages inside server channels, like blog posts or unlocked social media feeds, easy to publicly access and search.

As noted by 404 Media and confirmed by Ars, clicking on the "Request Removal" link plays a clip of J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man (the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi version) laughing at the idea of advance payment before an abrupt "You're serious?"

Those who haven't paid for message access can only see fairly benign public-facing elements, like stickers, emojis, and charted member totals over time.

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