Technology

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."

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.

I'm being radicalized by a fascist government. But I'm not a "youth".

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.