Comment by thepasswordis
2 years ago
How old are you? An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms.
2 years ago
How old are you? An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms.
My interpretation was he ran a discord server for a topic who's demographics happened to include a large number of teenagers and folks with mental illness thus unintentionally resulting in a discord containing a lot of them, not that he was specifically running a discord server targeting mentally ill teens.
I'm afraid I'm too young to understand that reference or context around chatrooms.
Anyway, the Discord server is purely for business and professional purposes. And I use the same username everywhere including Discord, so it's pretty easy to verify my identity.
I doubt it's explicitly for mentally ill teenagers. It could be, say, a video game discord, and so the demographics are mostly teens who play the game, and obviously some subset will be mentally ill.
It's probably something like this. I'm interested in a specific videogame and have bounced around a lot of discords trying to find one where most of the members are older. We still have some under-18s (including one guy's son), but they're in the minority, and that makes everything easier to moderate. We can just ban (or temp-ban) anyone who's bringing the vibe down and know that the rest will understand and keep the peace.
Teens don't have as much experience with communities going to shit, or with spaces like the workplace where you're collectively responsible for the smooth running of the group. They're hot-headed and can cause one bad experience to snowball where an adult might forgive and forget.
About the only thing that makes mentally healthy adults hard to moderate is when they get drunk or high and do stupid stuff because they've stopped worrying about consequences.
> Teens don't have as much experience with communities going to shit, or with spaces like the workplace where you're collectively responsible for the smooth running of the group. They're hot-headed and can cause one bad experience to snowball where an adult might forgive and forget.
Some people, not just teens of course, feel utterly compelled to go tit-for-tat, to retaliate in kind. Even if you can get them to cool down and back off for a while, and have a civil conversation with you about disengaging, they may tell you that they're going to retaliate against the other person anyway at a later date, in cold blooded revenge, because they have to. That necessity seems to be an inescapable reality for such people. They feel they have no choice but to retaliate.
When two such people encounter each other and an accident is mispercieved as an offense, what follows is essentially a blood feud. An unbreakable cycle of retaliation after retaliation. Even if you can get to the bottom of the original conflict, they'll continue retaliating against each other for the later acts of retaliation. The only way to stop it is to ban one if not both of them. Moderation sucks, never let somebody talk you into it.
> An adult running a discord server for mentally ill teenagers seems like a cautionary tale from the 1990s about chatrooms
It sounds like a potential setup for exploitation, grooming, cult recruitment, etc. (Not saying the grandparent is doing this, for all I know their intentions are entirely above board-but other people out there likely are doing it for these kinds of reasons.)
Discord is already considered a groomer hotspot, at least in joking. You can join servers based on interests alone and find yourself in a server with very young people.
Its in vogue today.