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 bet