We make friends with owners of large public Discords and they had no problem with being included. The owner of that Discord even enjoyed reading the blog post.

You can also search past messages and the blog post ends with saying the follow-up will be about search. Search is not rolled out to everyone but will next week.

https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500046858...

Neat. That seems like a major addition.

Can I download the full transcript of a channel for safekeeping in case things are deleted in the future?

We don't have an archive downloader, but you can use our API to scan over the history and save it.

https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/channel

Thanks for sharing. I guess I'm not quite in the target market. It seems like a very interesting evolution beyond prior closed chat systems like AIM, ICQ, etc.

They didn't do anything wrong. They just used a feature Discord provided. It was Discord who failed to anticipate a possible problem with the feature. It's not like they are blaming or publicly shaming someone.