Discord is More Dangerous than TikTok

Malcolm Collins
A lot of discord servers are based around specific individuals who are high status for some reason or another. Suppose you had a young guy, a horny guy, like a lot of rising YouTube creators, you put them into an environment where most people have some level of admiration for them. Then you give them total control through admin privileges on discord of what messages are seen from the groups. As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not mentally stable, it's heavily psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them for removing everyone who disagrees with them or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are pushing forward. Well, I mean, go back to the comment I made about like, is a cult using the trans movement for cover.

Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming like, some form of gender identity, right? On April 4, 2023, postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors aged nine to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages of nine and 13. I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Ankazone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids.

Man and drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone. Today is an interesting topic because I had never really engaged with Discord as a platform that much before. But as old people, I'd gotten into it a little.

Malcolm Collins
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 where I. Okay, exactly. So why do you play video games?

Simone Collins
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?

Malcolm Collins
I guess it's a low stress task where I know, you know, the input needed to succeed and 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 until. 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 channel.

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. So that's. Yeah. Which has led me to actually engage with Discord as a platform, finally, which. Is saying a lot, because you don't find most people worth engaging.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. So I finally reached a point in sort of working with the platform and using the 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 began to realize how extremely dangerous discord is as a platform. Much more dangerous for young minds than something like TikTok, 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 down this particular rabbit hole is I also really like tea videos.

If you're familiar someone, you watch them too. This means, like, drama videos. Okay. That kind of tea. Yes, drama about, you know, YouTube creators and other sorts of, like, celebs.

Celebs. I really wish people would do one on us, but no one really has. Yet because there's nothing. What are they going to talk about? Yeah, I think it come up.

I've often thought the scene where, you know, my kid fell in the water and I was like, pretty lackadaisical and getting them out. Yeah, but that's not filmed or anything. Like, if that was something. No, but I mentioned it on our channel and, you know, it's other t 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.

Simone Collins
Like, I know. Well, that's just the difference between, uh, I, progressive commentators and conservatives, which that itself, that incident online where I think a christian influencer shot their dog, found it hurt in the streets was such a classic indication, right? Of like, one is actually just trying to be kind to a suffering being that that one loves and the other is trying to, it's credentialism and trying to follow the correct. I 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.

Malcolm Collins
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 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, 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 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, there was little things that, like, happened within our server in its first few days. Like, this is day three of operation, right? So not an old server. And some individuals started putting the number of kids they had after their names. So 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 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. Or how social norms are created, released. Yeah, it's like you left something under a rock and then you look and like some civilization has formed, you know, that classic trope, and you're like, oh, I did not intend any of this. I was just pointing out that there was a server here and now it has social norms and fights over because I had made the admins edit. Just to give you an example of another social norm that formed a different color than the other individuals because I thought they should be rewarded if they're doing additional work.

But then this caused the perception that they were higher status in other individuals. Well, if they do more work, aren't they higher status? I mean, that's the way I see it, right? But I hadn't chosen them based on anything that I was really thinking through. I was just like, some people recommended them who had helped us with other things or who set up the server.

Most of them are just because the guy who set up the server said, these are good guys. And so I was like, sure. And then another person, two other people have reached out to me saying they really liked one of the admins. I think it was different admins as well. They were doing a good job, like, in communications I've had with other fans that I have regular email communication with.

And so I saw that and was like, okay, things must be going well, right? But anyway, so there was some anxiety around, like, status being inferred by the different colors. And next time I check the server, moderators are all the same color as everyone else. And then so one of the moderators who I had given authority to had made that change. And they were also talking about, like, how do you.

Which is, I think goes with the spirit of the channel, you know, the level of, like, equality and free speech that we try to motivate within the channel. But then there were other things that were really interesting. There was an instance of, oh, yeah. Trying to decide how I make moderators. And somebody proposed, obviously trying to look out for our best interests, that I should make moderators, people who donate to the Collins foundation.

And I was like, well, only three people have ever donated to the Collins foundation. To my knowledge, the person who did it, despite their super woke D and D group, the founder of Skype. Skype and then ourselves. And I don't know, do we have. A couple of other people?

Simone Collins
Yeah, a couple of other people have donated. Okay. Okay. So we've had a couple other people, but I think that those are, like, the big ones in terms of, like, and they don't use our platforms. They don't care.

Malcolm Collins
Like, they. They don't care about any status within the discord servers. But in addition to that, I don't want to create a pressure that would motivate people who aren't donating because they want the money to, like, go to good stuff, but are donating for some sort of social status. I don't want to create that, especially among people who have less wealth than I have. Like, that seems actively immoral to me.

And it's something that, well, it also seems exploitative. I don't know. Yeah. So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But it gives you the idea of how people are thinking about norms, how they're thinking about rules, like the no racism rule, for example.

That's a, how do you deal with facts that leftists would call racist. Right. How do you like, and so, you know, there was some debate on how exactly that's going to work, you know, and we decided that it's, you know, no motivated reasoning based on race. But you can, you know, if something's backed by evidence, you can investigate the evidence, which is interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, I can understand why someone suggested, you know, donations being sign of, basically demonstrated dedication to the projects that this whole effort represents. So I also think that that's really admirable. It's nice. We just don't want, we don't want to impose on anyone.

The truth is the type of people with the time to be good discord admins is probably going to be inversely correlated with how much money they make. Because if you're making a ton of money, you often are considered more competent in the eyes of society by your resume and everything like that, and therefore have more demands on your time, which, you know, if we're looking for competent people who society hasn't realized they're competent yet, they're going to be less wealthy. So they're the very last people I would want to ask for money, you know, which is interesting. But I want to get into how discord is almost set up to create grooming because, and organically forming cults. So one, I love the, the naming of discord that it's literally named after Discordia.

You know, Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, right? Like, what a better name for it. I bet she'd be good at causing all kinds of destruction and chaos. I know. Isn't it cool?

Hi, Eris. Oh, poo. You tricked me, you bonehead. What are you up to, girl? Oh, just cooking up trouble, you know, having fun.

Simone Collins
And there's nothing you can do about. It, but you've got to think about how the platform works. And this was one, the reason why I'm doing all the talking now is because Simone didn't pre talk this episode with me because she said she wanted to be surprised by everything I was saying because she didn't know where I was going with this. But the idea being is that a lot of discord servers are based around specific individuals who are high status for some reason or another, either seen as running some project or they are seen as like, a YouTube celebrity or something like that. Like, that's where a lot of these t videos are coming from.

Yeah. All the servers that I know of typically are built around either a cluster of people or a person, and typically their sub stack or a podcast or a YouTube channel, for sure. Yeah. So just think about it like this, Simone. Suppose you had a young guy, a horny guy, let's say a guy in his teens.

Malcolm Collins
Like a lot of, you know, rising YouTube creators and I have mentioned in the past that when guys are in that page place in puberty, they often do things that are immoral in the pursuit of sex. Although, you know, you see women doing the same thing with, like, hypnotist. Sappho is an example of a furry. What's the word? PDF file.

And she targets, you know, young people through discord. She might be trans, in which case, you know, what does that mean anymore these days? So within the discord server. By that, what I mean is a lot of people who I think historically would not have been called trans are called trans now and still have their hormonal profile of a male. And so that would still explain the behavior.

But anyway, so you take an individual like that, you put them into an environment where people are talking, and most people have some level of admiration for them. Then you give them total control through admin privileges on discord of who gets booted from the group, what messages are seen from the group. So you can do sort of temporary punishments where I could, like, for example, like shadow ban someone or mute someone, they would say, or make it so that everyone else is muted to them, like weird things like that. As soon as you've done that, you've created an environment where somebody who is not mentally stable, it's heavily psychologically motivated with no real negatives at all to them for removing everyone who disagrees with them or everyone who disagrees with an idea that they are pushing forwards. This sounds so stressful.

Well, I mean, go back to the comment I made about, like, trans individuals today, and we've done the episode on like is a cult using the trans movement for cover. Well, suppose you had a cult about affirming, like, some form of gender identity, right? It's genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4, 2023, postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors aged nine to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages ages of nine and 13.

I hope it encourages them to transition. When the Ankazone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Man and drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones. Orion was the manager, coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how he talked about him to others.

Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess thats what youd expect, just telling a retard to buy hormones. They bought estrogen but no antiandrogen. It wouldve been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like twelve.

Haha. Isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girl. I know people may have thought that I was being maybe controversial or reaching when I said that a cult is using the trans movement for cover, but it's only natural if you make some group a protected class in society that no one is allowed to criticize without being called transphobic, that individuals with mal intent will start using that group for cover and the most transphobic thing you can do is to not call out those individuals. Yes, there is really a group of people out there who uses the trans identity and the COVID it provides them in order to groom kids and attempt to get them on hormones for their own sexual satisfaction.

To be against fighting against this community is the most genuinely transphobic position I could imagine a person taking. Because to say that in calling out individuals like this, we are calling out all trans people. You are implying that all trans people are actually like this and that if we prevented the protection trans rights gives some individuals from covering this community, that we would be removing all of the meaningful protection the trans rights activism is meant to achieve. Don't blow up our spot, bro. All t slurs are like that.

If you can trust me around your kid, it'd be transphobic. Not to me with daycare tots. To Orion and many of his associates, their identity was little more than a political shield. It clearly worked given he publicly fantasized about assaulting women in bathrooms. Me, when transphobic little girls ask me what I'm doing in the women's restroom when I'm obviously a woman.

The two fantasized about assaulting JK Rowling's grandchildren. Not letting t slurs get with your kids is transphobic. Someone should r Harry Potter woman's grandkids. Orion then goes on to call them turf music. And don't give me that oh this.

Is just like edge cases or fringe people in the community type of thing. Alak Vaid Minon, who was put in. Out magazine's out 100. So the top 100 most influential lgbt people that year said, these days, the narrative is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse little girls. The supposed quote unquote purity of the victims has remained stagnant.

There are no princesses. Little girls are also kinky. Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think. The community really does need a very serious cleanup, and grooming is a serious problem. We might do another video just dedicated to this topic, but if you're like, well, I understand that some people are doing some bad things, but think of the damage this could do to the wider lgbt community.

And it's like, bro, like, think about these messages you're reading. What about the kids who are being convinced, who are not actually trans to get on hormones at extremely young ages and having their entire lives ruined just so that they can be some creepy, grown up sex toy? Like, do you have zero sympathy for these individuals? They can never come back from that. And worse, now, every time they hear about trans issues, they are just reminded how their bodies were ruined for the gratification of some sicko.

How often does this happen? How many more of these people do we need to catch before we say, okay, some individuals are using this ideology for nefarious means, and we need to call out that this can happen, that weirdos can use stuff like trans identity to go into restrooms and attempt to assault little girls and do something about this. Although we are getting off topic here, so I'll see if I can find another way to talk about this issue. To make this more pc. Like, suppose it's like a cloud gender community.

Malcolm Collins
Everyone who disconfirms cloud gender identity gets booted from the server. Everyone who in any way even questions themselves or isn't sure or used to identify as this but goes back is removed from the community. But there isn't a perception among people in the community that these people are being silenced or removed. It's not really super loud and obvious that this is happening, and a lot of people may not care. They might say, oh, well, we've created norms where disconfirming something is a form of violence to people.

Right? Like, and the left often does this. Right. But you could also see people getting a big head. Like, as I said, a popular male creator.

A bunch of people are fawning over him in the server, and then maybe he creates a separate thread for the girls who like him. Right? Well, now you've got a thread which is private, and everyone in it is a girl who likes him. That creates within women. And you often see within women, of course they're going to end up finding him more arousing.

You've created an environment where every other woman in the environment sees this individual as high status and arousing in some way. So you're going to get sort of a reinforcing loop of, oh, this is like, if you talk about, like, hypergamy or whatever, like, obviously women like dating men who are higher status than them. Men like that as well. But, like, women like it a bit more than men like it. So, and this is in terms of long term partnerships, whereas men, they're often okay with at least having sexual partners who are lower status than them, but long term partners, they look for.

So in this environment, you get these loops, like you have at concerts where, like, women cheer and then it just goes, oh, my God, all the other women are cheering. This person must be so hot. And then they end up, like, passing out because it creates a feedback loop that can't turn itself off. We have records of this happening to women going all the way back to Litzemania. What was it?

Simone Collins
Hans lits. I can't pronounce names. Lizt, the composer. Yeah, yeah. And then we had it for the Frankie Sinatra.

We had it like Frankie Sinatra. Whatever. Sinatra. Whatever. So we see this going way back into history.

Malcolm Collins
This isn't like a modern thing. So anyway, my assumption here is that as soon as you've created this and you've got some hornedog guy, and especially if it's a guy who has any sort of biological predilection for younger presenting phenotypic traits in females, or males for that matter, if that's what he's into, you now have. If what he's seeking is sex, you now have the perfect environment. That one motivates him going down the path of attempting to groom people. And the perfect environment for grooming someone, it would actually be almost kind of impossible for someone not to end up being groomed.

Then you have the second problem. What if the guy doesn't want sex? What if he wants power? Like, what if he wants a common thing for young people? And we mentioned this in the book, there's a thing about this in Japan.

They have a name for it, which is, I can't remember. There's an anime about it that I love. I'll edit it. It's called, like, evil eye something or, like, thinking. But anyway, what it means.

All right, Claude says the term you are looking for is chimbuyo, which literally translates to, quote, middle school second year syndrome, end quote. It refers to a common phase in adolescence, usually around the 8th grade or so, hence the name where teens may exhibit delusions of grandeur, believing they have special powers, a secret identity, or otherwise exceptionally unique or important. Some common chimbuyo delusions. One, believing they have a hidden supernatural power like controlling the elements or reading minds. Two, claiming to be reincarnated from another world or to have a secret dark past using made up, overly complicated names for everyday objects or actions.

Four, affecting a distinctive fashion style often involving gothic, occult, or fantasy elements, is. There'S a trend in young people of a certain age to like, believe they have magical powers and like, they, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like I'm actually an energy vampire or I'm actually, you know, if I do this ritual in the right way, the wind blows like this, or like, oh. Yeah, like modern, modern Wiccans. Yeah, modern Wiccans would be a great example of this.

Malcolm Collins
But they're not all Wiccans. You know, some of them do that with a christian lens. Some of them do it with some sort of other esoteric or mystical lens around it. But it's a very common thing for people to believe because these power fantasies just really appeal to people during these ages where they're attempting to find their identity if they have a community that will affirm them. Well, if you've created an environment like this, and I'm sure this happens much more in like, female dominated discords, you know, why not once you've gotten a group around you that you can just remove anyone from who defends and you've created like private channels around this, why not try to get them all to worship you or something, right?

Like, if that's what gets you off, if that's what your desire is, and it would happen organically, right? Somebody might have a few ideas. I actually think to an extent this could be what we're seeing with, you know, Rubiard and what a vault hissed. If people have seen his CIA video which goes in a very mystical direction and he talks about thinking that he is getting like that he has supernatural perception of the world and that this is also supported by evidence and historical tradition, that some people just have this supernatural perspective of reality and this might be a true thing. Like, I don't want to shit on his, but let's assume that it's not.

Let's assume that every now and then people just get this inclination that they have a supernatural perception of reality around a certain age range, which, you know, he falls squarely was in, he's like 22. And then he is in a community where he drops this as an idea. And of course people are going to feel uncomfortable. I mean, he's the big guy. He's got half a million subscribers.

Unconfirming that. And some of them might be like, actually, I have this too. Right? And then it begins to create a snowball effect where he feels encouraged to. And I'm not saying that this has happened to him yet, but I'm just saying you can see how somebody who starts in this position in a completely like, goodwill position to be increasingly encouraged, by the way server dynamics work on discord to make more and more extreme claims about supernatural abilities or something like that.

Simone Collins
Yeah, well, it seems like this kind of community setup is likely to create an echo chamber effect for any group or any behavior where it's very easy. Once you establish what it. What makes you higher status, then that thing is going to get out of control because then people are going to chase after that thing and need to augment it or emphasize it in order to maintain higher relative status. Right. There's no way around it, whether it's the number of kids you report you have next to your username or how supernatural your abilities may be.

I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, keep in mind that a lot of people don't sort for status in the external world. I think a lot of people think that most humans are driven by the affirmation of other individuals when the reality is, is that a huge class of sort of. I'd say the unthinking masses are more driven by their perception of how other people see them.

Malcolm Collins
And they are totally okay with cheesing that perception when it benefits them emotionally. So have you ever been. And I'd ask the followers, you know what I'm talking about. Someone like when you're in a conversation with maybe like an old person and they're telling you a story and they're trying to be like a mentor to you, and it is very obvious to anyone who was actually interested in your perception of them that they would know they're just like, you don't think very highly of them and you are amusing them so that they feel like a mentor because, you know, it's important that they feel like a mentor too, of their continued patronage of you. Well, or, you know, it's like a parent.

Right? And they're giving you some long narrative that is more about telling a narrative to themselves than it is about actually altering the way that you see them. It's more about telling themselves how you see them than it is about altering your own perception of them. And people can do this very frequently. And I think within communities that go into a mystical direction, you can really easily get spirals around this, where an individual wants the people around them to believe that they have power, and they want to believe that they believe the people around them believe they have power more than they actually want the people around them to believe they have power, if you understand what I'm saying.

Simone Collins
Yeah. And that this can create spirals that go really far, really fast, to the point where now the person is. And one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because now the person is drawing information about reality from unreal things, from internal intuitions, which end up being confirmed by a community and end up creating these sorts of cults. And I think that this is where, of the places where you get these gender cults, the extreme, like right leaning and left leaning gender cults, you know, when you get something like a trans community, where everything is about gender expression, I mean, what is looks maxing, if not an obsession with gender expression, which is often more right leaning. They begin to define their.

Malcolm Collins
Or like, these workout communities, or like these, you know, I think that some iterations of, like, the red pill community went a bunch of different directions. Some of them were sane, and then some of them, I think, are more just like gender dysphoria cults, but they are trying to affirm that they are their birth gender. And people can be like, why so frequently, on both the left and the right, do you get these gender dysphoria cults within these sorts of feedback environments? And there's a few reasons. One is that gender is the thing that people are most frequently uncomfortable about when they're going through puberty, which is the age at which people mostly choose a new religion.

So between 15 and 21 is when most people leave their birthday, religion or culture. So it's a primary thing of interest when you're most likely to get recruits. The other thing is that it's very easy to get into what I'd call, like, gender spirals, where, like, you just have to fit this identity that you've created for yourself as like, the correct way to be who you are. And if you can't do that, you just might as well die. But Simone, you wanted me to not prep you on any of this.

What do you think? 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, yes, the criteria that people are competing on becomes very, very focused is that you agree then. So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this.

Simone Collins
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 the criteria that people are competing on becomes very, very focused is that you agree then. So it's three things that lead to discord servers being uniquely good at this. One thing is it's very easy for a person who is high status outside of discord and otherwise being normal outside of discord to be completely weird within a discord server without that much risk of it leaking.

Malcolm Collins
I mean, obviously it does leak, but, but they can feel like it. But like, you know, I'm talking to like, two, three people here in this private channel. Like, I can see everyone who's in the channel. I might have a longer relationship with them. So it's a lot hard.

It's a lot easier to go sort of crazy or to go sort of like, subtle, abusive without being a fear of it coming back to haunt you or being called out on it. Also, a lot of online dating then, in the way that with the advent of swipe based dating, things also fell off the rails, and we actually saw. Quite different from that. Oh, really? Yeah.

So consider. Well, this is where the second thing was. Discord is really important, the illusion of consensus, because it allows a mod within a server to always create the illusion that there is consensus with anything that they are saying or of their status vis a vis the world. Right. And so with swipe based dating and stuff like that, everybody still knows that they need to judge whether this person is worthy of their time, the person who they're interacting with, that is somewhat taken out of individuals hands within discord servers to an extent.

And so I think that that's what makes it quite different from those environments. It's this added tyranny from various mods that makes it extra crazy. Yeah. And keep in mind, I don't think a discord server like ours is really at that much risk, because one we would like, our goals are not aligned with this. We're an older married couple that's not out there looking to groom people.

We really, I think already, as shown by our actions, are not interested in money, particularly, or at least money from our community. Right. We're not interested in. There's just a lot of the motivations in this extremist, anti mystic stance we take on. Everything which we've done in order to protect our kids prevents a lot of these sort of self power fantasy spirals, which can become really easy if you allow for mystical thinking.

And finally, we. I don't really act as an active mod within the server. And the people who are active mods are sort of active around. Actually, it's a great test, I'm going to say. Okay, so, you know, like, within the discord server, we're, we're actually, you know, halting the track series for a while because it's a lot of extra work and Simone is, you know, about to give birth.

So we just didn't want to do it for now. And in halting that, like, the videos don't do as well as our other videos, but, and they take a lot more time, but they're much more popular among the type of people who use our discord server. So it could be the type of environment where if we have set these social norms around belief systems with something like that, we can see do they actually protect against weird sorts of spirals? I mean, one of the things that we've already seen was in our discord server, which I don't know if it's a positive thing or not because we've talked about, you know, making it high status for people to have more kids is going to encourage higher fertility. I don't know.

Simone Collins
A lot of people who are active on the server have zeros next to them. And I think most people in the prenatalist movement, the model modern technophilic one, are younger and they don't have kids yet. I understand. So the question at hand is, should we say that this should not be a social norm within the community? Should we say that you shouldn't put the number of kids you have?

Malcolm Collins
Or is it good that we are constantly, in terms of every social interaction, reminding people, this is the goal, this is the goal. This is the goal. I mean, I do think what I like about it as something that's present. And what I'd love about seeing more about this in modern society is that it does give someone a reminder that having kids has some kind of status bump to it and that it is an asset to you. And it is a cool thing if you have kids, because in many circles now, if you have kids, it's just assumed that you are now less fun, less cool, more poor, more stressed, more sleep deprived.

Simone Collins
All these bad things. It is a drop to your status. So, yeah, I would say anything that indicates no matter how many people have zeros by their names, that having a higher number could increase their status is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Well, here's an interesting thing that was going around the discord server today, and I was wondering if you had thoughts on this. They were asking what happens if the discord. Because apparently discords can get banned for, like, bad political thought. Like, QAnon boards got banned and like, anyone who has friends was members of Q and on boards got their boards banned. But aren't they private?

Simone Collins
I mean, there's no, like. No, no. They say that once you get over 500 members and we're already to 200 in three days, so that means an. Outsider will join it, flag it, and then it gets. No, not an outsider.

Malcolm Collins
The mods at discord often monitor the service and they say, definitely want to get over a thousand, which is what we're really aiming for. So join. We're going to have the link in below, but, yeah, it is actually a really cool group. Like, I like interacting with it and I did not expect to, so that's cool. Your question is what happens when it gets banned?

Well, so I would tell them this. You know, if they're signed up for our sub stack, they get an email every time we do an episode. So that's really easy to track. But I don't know, like, if we get banned on a few platforms, we'll find a way to tell you where to find us on one of the remaining platforms. We're on so many platforms.

Simone Collins
Yeah, but they're referring to a place to chat and hang out. Because you can't. Right. Well, we create a new community and some other, I don't know, more right wing app or something like that. I mean, I'm sure you could have something like discord that is totally crypto based or something like that, you know, like blockchain based.

Malcolm Collins
And that is difficult to meddle with, but I don't want to deal with that right now. I've looked at some of those communities and they're actually pretty hard to use, so I just haven't dealt with it. But they. They exist if we have to go that route. But I think that we do a pretty good job of not crossing the line.

So unless things get, like, really crazy, I mean, we are primarily on a Google hosted platform, so I can see the fear here. Right. But, yeah. So I wonder if you had any final thoughts on this theory. It makes a lot of sense.

Simone Collins
It makes me want to keep our children off discord. So I would definitely say I would. Discord will be strongly disallowed for our kids. I think it's incredibly dangerous. Except for our server.

Malcolm Collins
They can join our server. Nothing else? Well, no, I mean, I can just see how easy it would be if you are following one of your heroes for them to heavily begin to twist. Because the thing about discord is it's not like Reddit or Twitter where you're acting in a larger ecosystem. You can go in every time you go to that server and it feels like a friend group, and yet it's actually being heavily moderated, everything that you're seeing within that community.

And so you can feel as if you're getting true friend information when it is actually an incredibly twisted interpretation of reality. Oh, so it's like mainstream news outlets. I mean, welcome to the club. Yeah, but I think people know to be like when you're a young kid, right? You don't get a lot of your perspective of the world from mainstream news outlets.

You get it from your peer groups. Yeah. And it unlocked for me a big understanding of why individuals who I think pretty obviously are not trans, are transitioning now and why part of the red pill movement has become this intense gender dysphoria movement for. With, like, look, smack ding and work out everything and, like, gender displays and like, oh, this is how to be the man of the perfect man. Right.

Like, it's a big issue for them is because that's an incredibly appealing way to brainwash a young person. And now you've given them the tool to do it. Yeah. Gosh. Well, that's scary.

Simone Collins
But it's cool that the discord server is picking up. And I had no idea that discord could be so fascinating. But I think it's another important thing just to walk away with is that I think it's underrated how many people navigate the Internet through private chat channels. Not necessarily just discord, WhatsApp groups, other things like that. Remember when we met the woman who runs an ngo that teaches people Internet literacy and how to, like, start businesses and do basic project management?

The key thing that she found was that people in refugee camps, people from less economically advantaged areas, didn't use the Internet the way that we do. They don't use Internet browsers and Google things and ask questions and reference Wikipedia and articles and whatnot to understand reality. They navigate the Internet and reality through Instagram, through WhatsApp, through Facebook, and through other text based groups, probably like Discord. But whatever their local version of it might be. So I think it's important to keep in mind that these dynamics that you're seeing with discord aren't just showing up among super nerdy communities that use discord servers.

This may just be how many groups, especially low tech groups, or just understanding reality in the world in general. Well, and I think this brings me to a final point, is just as Discord can be used to draw people into cultural groups that they do not intend to be drawn into, I think that they can also have this secondary counter effect of protecting kids in a way. So if you're controlling the discord groups your kids are in, like if you are a catholic family and your kids are in discord groups for young catholic kids, where their faith is part of the social status of the way the discord server is run, and you have some level of adult supervision within these communities, it could be incredibly powerful at preventing them from deconverting. Same with, like, our wider community. I mean, we've created a set of structured cultural norms, which is why I feel so safe with my kids in our discord server, because I know that it's going to reinforce the cultural values that we try to preach on this channel.

Malcolm Collins
And through that it creates one, this sense of community for them, but also a values aligned community that they can return to. So I think that there's a high utility for something like this for child rearing. And that's why it's worth us continuing to grow it where we can and not get it banned, because it will have utility to our children in terms of not getting sucked out into the world. Yeah, that makes sense. And, well, I'm glad you brought me up to speed on this because sadly, I do not have time to really check it out myself.

Simone Collins
But I'm glad you're there. All right, love you to Desmone. And love you too, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins
If you want to check out our. Discord servers here at the link and I put it in the comments had. Anything to do with it. Don't you dare demonize cheese, ever. I mean, when has cheese ever made someone sick?

Simone Collins
At least? Come on, our ancestors have been eating off cheese for. Yeah, she's referencing. I have food poisoning right now and we're trying to determine the culprit. I suspect it was old sausages.

It was old sausages. It had been cheese because I eat a lot of cheese. And I was thinking today actually with milk, because I was like, well, can I trust the milk? And I was like, milk is a great food because you always know when it's off. Yeah, but you have a God tongue with milk.

Well, I can't. Right? I'll drink expired sour milk forever because you somehow are so prissy with your milk. But I'll happily chug it. It just has a patina.

It has a bite. At that point. It's partially fermented. What's so wrong?

Malcolm Collins
We'll get started on the episode, and I'll move this bit to the end. Okay? Of course.

Discord is More Dangerous than TikTok

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to Discord's Risks

2. The Mechanisms of Influence

3. Ethical Considerations and Responsibilities

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Content Warnings:

Transcript