Discord is More Dangerous than TikTok

Link to Discord: https://discord.gg/UzUgHpuDVG

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm dives deep into the potential dangers lurking within Discord servers, particularly for young and impressionable minds. He explains how the platform's unique features, such as private channels, illusion of consensus, and mod privileges, can easily facilitate grooming, gender dysphoria cults, and echo chambers that distort reality. Malcolm and Simone also discuss the importance of parental oversight in online communities, the power of status-seeking behaviors, and the need for caution when navigating these virtual spaces. Join them as they explore the dark side of Discord and offer insights on how to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Well, what I'm curious about is your theory as to why Discord servers specifically are so good at this. I'm assuming it's the fact that they're much more limited in what you see.

So then ultimately the criteria that people are competing on becomes very very focused. Is that you agree

Malcolm Collins: then? So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today is an interesting topic because I had never really engaged with discord as a platform that much before. As old people, I'd gotten into it a little, I didn't really see the point. It didn't seem like a way that I could build up any sort of large audience or advance my career. So I just saw no point to it because I, you know, I'm sort of past the point in my life.

Okay,

Simone Collins: exactly. So why do you play video games? This is, this is my thing with video games. Is this going to make me money? Is this going to advance my career? Then why am I trying to figure out this task when I have so many other tasks? Now you understand [00:01:00] the

Malcolm Collins: low stress task where I know, you know, the input needed to succeed in social situations just aren't that way.

If I'm engaging in a community like discord, you know, it hasn't been optimized to give me the right amount of reward for my effort. So. But anyway, this is why I hadn't been engaging with the community. Well, recently I started to, because we created a discord for this channel based on some fan created a discord for this fan created discord, and then I've been promoting it and it's doing Incredibly well, like three days after launching at any point day or night, there's always like a conversation going on.

So we've got about 50 active members and yeah, I've been very surprised.

Simone Collins: Cool people too, from what I've glanced at.

Malcolm Collins: So that's, Which has led me to actually engage with discord as a platform finally, which is saying a

Simone Collins: lot because you don't find most people worth engaging.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I, I finally reached a point where.

In, in sort of working with the platform and using the [00:02:00] platform and setting everything up where I feel like I understand one, why people use it into how it works as a platform, but in doing that, I also begin to realize how extremely dangerous discord is as a platform. Much more dangerous for young minds than something like tick tock, for example, which I think would really surprise people who are not obsessed with the way sort of social interactions work and human emotions work and everything like that.

Right? Like that's my obsession to anyone who's read our books on like governance and everything like that. When I'm building up how governance work, I start by looking at how do humans interact, how do humans judge status, what sort of motivates our base human. Actions because through understanding humanity, I can understand better why different mechanisms for organizing us will lead to different, you know, large scale macro outcomes.

Well, with discord, I was looking at it and what really got me [00:03:00] down this particular rabbit hole is I also really like, tea videos if you're familiar. So when you watch them too this means like drama videos. Okay. That kind of tea. Yes. Drama about, yeah, you know, YouTube creators and other sorts of like celebs celebs.

I really wish people would do one on us, but no one

Simone Collins: really has yet. Because there's nothing at, what are they going to talk about?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I, Oh, they could come up with that. I've often thought the scene where, you know, You know, my kid fell in the water and I was like pretty lackadaisical and getting em out coming.

Yeah. But that's not

Simone Collins: filmed or anything. Like if that was something that No,

Malcolm Collins: but I, social media viral on, I mentioned it on our channel. Mm-Hmm. And you know it, other TV videos, they're like, oh, the person, like when they saw their dog had been hit by a car, they shot it instead of taking it to the vet.

And it's like, yeah, of course you would do that to a severely injured animal. Like, no. Well,

Simone Collins: that's just the difference between. Progressive commentators and conservatives, which that itself, that incident online where I think a Christian influencer shot their dog after they [00:04:00] found it hurt in the streets was such a classic indication, right?

If like one is actually just trying to be kind to a suffering person. Being that, that one loves and the other is trying to, it's, it's credentialism and trying to follow the correct, I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't even say that to the conservative, it is the dog's best interest that they care about to the progressive. The dog is a tool to modify their own self image and emotions.

Therefore, they care not for the suffering of the dog. Anything that extends the dog's utility to them is warranted. Which and anything that makes them look good in terms of how they're interacting with it is warranted. What I'm saying is that we've said enough stuff that they could find stuff like that on us, okay?

But one of the most common types of tea videos comes from people's servers and specifically their discord servers and these servers end up either being used as grooming platforms or becoming hotbeds of like [00:05:00] CP and like other sorts of bad information that really they should be doing a better job, like moderating or policing or something like that and this is obviously, like, a What I'm thinking when I'm putting up the server, like how do I keep this from being used as a platform for one of those types of things?

And what immediately came to me was discord is almost set up from the ground level to encourage, grooming behavior virtue spirals, and the formation of organic cults. And this is something we talk a lot about on the show, is how you can get like these organic cults forming. And this is what we, a, there was little things that like happened within our server in its first few days.

Like this is day three of operation, right? So I'm not an old server. And Some individuals started putting the number of kids they had after their name. So it's say their names and then a number and then kids. And then it became so common that people removed the word kids and it was just a [00:06:00] name and then a number, and then it became people shaming people for not.

putting that in which shows sort of in real time how something like religious traditions can evolve, which is how social norms

Simone Collins: are created. Released.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's like, it's like you, you, you left something under a rock and then you