Dan

He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way nobody could have predicted.

This is the biggest, toughest article I’ve done about so-called “AI psychosis.” It’s the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life—one that completely unraveled after he started talking to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

4. I wrote my master's thesis on the potential uses of Discord as an "activist supraplatform": a platform ideally suited to organize activity as an engine of poltiical campaigning. Really interesting to be proven broadly right in ways I never would have expected. Should've published it lol

3. People often protest online using the tools that are already part of their lives, in the vernacular of their everyday use. Discord isn't necessarily "ideal" platform: it works because it's likely downstream from Discord's deep integration into the lifeworld of the protestors.

2. Large Discord servers can be extremely chaotic, but they are hierarchical: while there are similarities to IRC chat mediated groups--like Anonymous--the ability to structure permissions by roles means that directing action (per point 1) is a lot more organized.

Nepal’s Social Media Ban Backfires as Politics Moves to a Chat Room

Okay, as someone who is writing his dissertation on #Discord, this is fascinating:

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/w...

1. Discord is really good for directing a specific activity in a large bounded group; it's a pattern of activity *broadly* different from the one-to-many networks of 2010's protests.

One of the smallest thing I hope comes from the 50501 protests is that folks doing network analysis of social movements stop calling everything "connective action".

Discord just hired Kantar to "help advertisers understand the true impact of their Quests campaigns"

Kantar has also done extensive laundering for the Tobacco industry over the years.

Interesting stuff

www.tobaccotactics.org/article/kant...

Discord told 404 Media that scraping its services without written consent was a violation of its Terms of Service and Community Guidelines "Discord is diligently investigating this activity and will take appropriate enforcement actions," it said. The company also stressed that it took the scrape seriously and was committed to protecting the privacy and date of its users. "Based on our initial investigation, we determined that user accounts accessed Discord servers that were discoverable and widely accessible and scraped data without our permission. It appears the researchers took steps to protect people’s identities, but this still violates our policies and we are fully investigating." UPDATE 5/22/25: This story has been updated with a comment from Discord.

Update on the Discord dataset: It's no longer online (zenodo.org/records/1517...) though no way to know if the researchers removed it or the platform where they posted it did. The 404 Media article was also updated with Discord clarifying that the researchers did violate their policies.

Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.

Another week, another research ethics controversy.

TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized.

But let's unpack this one... 🧵

www.404media.co/researchers-...

I've been working on a paper on and research ethics and semi-public space, and posted this in the Aca-Discord yesterday:

The thin a justification is that they exploit the 'server preview' feature to avoid using self-bots, but a lot of moderators are angry about this across the board

Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) 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 o...

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 title is "Discord unveiled"; it tacitly posits that the data is not public while claiming it as such

Critical Making in the Age of AI Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a su...

I am excited to share my open access collaboration with @ekj.bsky.social, *Critical Making in the Age of AI*, available today from Amherst College Press. It includes theory and practice from our own pedagogy, as well as examples from our own amazing students: www.fulcrum.org/concern/mono... #dhmakes

A sparkly graphic featuring the D/ARC mascot, Batty, and celebrating 700 members. Visit darcmode.org for more details.

The 🦇 D/ARC 🦇 server reached a huge milestone this week: 700 members! 🥳 So proud of this kind and wonderfully supportive community, and thrilled it continues to be found by those who need it! 🥹 Huge thanks to Dan and @iceberge.bsky.social for being the best Mod team a gal could ask for. 💯✨

AI for Humanists project logo

🚨New AI for Humanists tutorials just dropped!🚨

We have new code notebooks for using LLMs to:
- measure document similarity
- classify texts with zero-shot prompting

We explore narrative vs non-narrative texts, historical poetry, ChatGPT poetry, & book reviews.

Tutorial effort led by Greg Yauney!