New Discord Bot Listing Site Caught Scraping from Competitor
One of the top listing sites for Discord bots is the appropriately named Top.gg, which found itself at the center of social media drama on Wednesday when a new competitor launched by lifting their listings verbatim and passing them off as their own.
The new listing site was created by a company called Autocode. Some bot developers use Autocode’s services to help them create their bots, and it seems Autocode’s founder wasn’t happy about being snubbed from Top.gg’s listings. His response was to Ctrl+C the Top.gg website, put a new skin on it and launch it as their own listings site.
Naturally, the CEO of Top.gg, Kristin Chen, wasn’t happy with this development. She tweeted out a thread after discovering that her website had been copied, saying, “It’s so unethical to steal multiple years of hard work from our team, volunteer staff, & community that didn’t agree to this.”
Woke up to @autocode scraping the entire @JoinTopgg site & launching on @botgg @producthunt. 🙃 It’s so unethical to steal multiple years of hard work from our team, volunteer staff, & community that didn’t agree to this. Friends, would love any advice/support in this situation. https://t.co/FIsSVI6DkT
— kristinmchen.eth (@kristinmchen) March 30, 2022
Autocode’s founder and CEO, Keith Horwood, jumped into the replies, but didn’t seem to make anything better. Instead of offering a quick and sincere apology, he expressed his own disappointment that Top.gg turned down his suggestions for a partnership months prior. According to Horwood’s tweet, he had attempted to get a meeting with Chen or the Top.gg for six months, but that was brought into question after Chen tweeted a screenshot of a Discord conversation between them.
Hey Kristin 👋. I’m a little disappointed here — I tried to get a meeting with you for 6 months about partnership to no avail.
— keith (@keithwhor) March 30, 2022
We built something to give folks more ways to showcase their creations. It’s their data, not yours or mine, and they can remove it if they’d like to.
In the Discord conversation visible in Chen’s screenshot, she and the Top.gg team seem more than happy to take a meeting with Horwood. In fact, Horwood was an advertiser on Top.gg and likely because of that relationship, the Top.gg team wanted to keep him happy. However, Chen did note that Top.gg was not interested in bringing on partners at the time.
Horwood’s messages to Chen in their Discord chat did seem to suggest that he was not an easy client for Top.gg, as he referred to his company as one of Top.gg’s “most finicky ads bidder”. The partnership he pitched was that Autocode would stop advertising on Top.gg, and instead Autocode would somehow encourage their users to advertise on Top.gg directly. Specific details were not outlined in the chat, and presumably would have been worked out between the two parties, though Top.gg was apparently not interested in a partnership and those conversations did not occur.
Top.gg has nearly forty thousand Discord bots listed on its platform, and they each undergo a manual curation process. Top.gg has unusually high standards for the space, with many other listing sites allowing far more bots and servers onto their platform. “We really care about quality and trust and safety,” said Chen who noted that their database reflects over five years of carefully curated content from Top.gg staff. They’ve also developed relationships with bot developers and grew a thriving community.
When Horwood responded to Chen’s Twitter thread, he commented about his concern over Autocode users not being included in Discord bot lists, such as Top.gg.
However, several Discord bots that use Autocode are included on Top.gg’s platform. Horwood stated in his Discord message to Chen that Autocode “powers over 160,000 Discord bots”, and it’s not clear whether he had hoped all of them would be included in Top.gg’s database. Given their manual review process and quality standards, though, it is reasonable to see why many Autocode bots would be left out. After five years of existence, Top.gg features nearly 40,000 Discord bots in total, which is one fourth the number of total Autocode bots, according to Horwood’s claim.
The following day, Autocode released an apology. “We screwed up,” the apology admitted. “As part of the launch we imported thousands of pre-existing listings. I can give you reasons why we thought this was a good idea for our users, but the real reason we did it was simple: we’re a competitive team.”
The Autocode team apparently felt that copying these listings would be okay and part of giving users a great experience (since who would want a bot listing website with no bot listings?) and called it “playing to win”.
After adding thousands of listings to their new website, many Discord bot developers were upset to find their product copied onto the new website without their permission and using the same description as used on Top.gg. Mimu Bot, which is a Discord bot that adds a cute currency system to your server, responded about how bots listed on the new Autocode listing website were implied to be using the Autocode platform in their development. “I can code myself,” Mimu tweeted, explaining they had no need for Autocode. The implication this bot was coded using Autocode felt like an “insult”.
As such, Autocode apologized to the Discord developer community, saying they shouldn’t have added listings without approval from bot developers. “We have removed all imported listings and will be working to grow a great Discord application listing site relying only on new submissions,” read the apology. Currently the Autocode listings website has 45 Discord bots listed on it, far less than the thousands which were live at launch.
Autocode also apologized to the Top.gg team, reiterating their competition. “There are style points for how competition is handled. We scored a solid -100,” said Autocode. However, Top.gg’s Chen doesn’t see this as a fair tactic in the name of competition, and calls the explanation a “sad excuse for bad behavior”.
Top.gg has been a dedicated effort of over five years to create a database of quality and useful Discord bots and servers. There are certainly many Discord bot listing websites out there, and Chen believes what sets Top.gg apart is their commitment to quality. Time will tell what comes of the Autocode bot listings website and whether it manages to provide real value to the Discord community or is just a place for the full range of over 160,000 Autocode-created bots, regardless of quality.
