While I would prefer both Discord and Telegram to have alternatives, they are popular for a reason. They are in experience what the Internet was in the 00s to the people actually using it a lot.
There are bigger platforms, which drive engagement and collect data as their business model, and they are convenient for everyone making decisions, except they don’t solve any problems too well. Like a casino. It doesn’t lead to anything good, but it’s entertainment in itself.
TG and Discord are good at solving problems. They are Internet communication optimized - subscribe to a channel (or in Discord join a server, TG too has subchannels now, making a channel with subchannels similar to Discord) and say what you want to say, and read what you want to read.
Needless to say that this is pretty similar to IRC of old, and a reiteration of IRC with less load on servers, better security, structured messages, file transfers … would perhaps be nicer, but a business model should be devised for such.
Are the authors of this new to the internet?
This warning is like 15 years too late.
No, they’re using the internet in general. Discord is just a platform that they can talk on and it’s fairly easy to use. It’s not like Discord advertises these servers and gets people to join them. What’s really happening is that these people are either seeking out these servers or are being sent invites from people already inside.
My point is that Discord is not the issue. If they crack down on Discord they will just find somewhere else to go. You’d have to control the entire internet in a similar way to Russia or China in order to actually stop it this way. It’s a societal issue that they are trying to solve by censorship instead of actually fixing the underlying issues that push people to extremism. I’m sure the majority of these issues would be solved by a system that actually prioritized mental health and getting people the help they need instead of one that pushes these people out of society because they are “insane.”
There certainly can’t be any data to back this up… Now way making access to mental healthcare reduces fringe groups and gives them more constructive ways to deal with their emotional state. /s
This is very much a misunderstanding of the mechanism. The youth are using discord because its convenient, easy to set up, and all of their friends are on there. It also has the structural issue of being an opaque echo chamber, which allows communities to become more ideological as they arent subject to outsider criticism. If it wasn’t discord, it would be Telegram, or Reddit or whatever.
At least Reddit is structured to be public and searchable (or at least it used to be).
Discord is annoying for a bazillion reasons, but a big one is it’s ostensibly a ‘close friends gamer chat’ platform, yet its taken the role of project support chat, niche topic forums, ‘influencer’ chat rooms, and things that should absolutely be public facing.
…Another, I guess, is political discourse.
In other words, Discord the company is having their cake and eating it; pretending they’re an innocent ‘between friends’ private chat platform while absolutely structuring it to encourage scams, mega communities with notification spam, patreon-like benefit tiers, and weird stuff that absolutely seeds recruitment for, and engagement on, extremist channels.
I’m being radicalized by a fascist government. But I’m not a “youth”.
Yeah its like. Maybe just maybe the federal government not following its own laws leads to people not following the law.
Revolutions are never “legal”.
exactly and the best way to get one is for a government to expect its citizens to follow laws but does not itself.
They are if you win.
Except the extremism comes from within. These people don’t realize they are the wolves
Old person: “wow! And the place they do this at is called ‘Discord’?! How brazen!”
It‘s public knowledge they use Roblox so if course they‘re using Discord too.
Have you seen the russian bots on Telegram?
It’s literally everywhere.
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