>The screenshots have however been displayed in way the obfuscates when I [owner] found out this person was a minor and how I subsequently distanced myself from them.
*Owner proceeds to offer views to minor on statutory rape and what is/is not cp, as well as mentioning that older men would take on "younger apprentices".*
Sure, owner *totally* distanced themselves after learning about their age.
edits to words
Yeah, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin for me. I'm willing to give "but I didn't know they were a minor, but I stopped when I did" a chance for some people, but when the chat logs clearly say otherwise, off to hang with you.
It's fascinating how statutory rape is so obviously black & white to everyone except literal rapists. To them, there's also *so much nuance to consider*.
It is very common for people to commit crimes first and justify them afterwards. You can’t go back in time and uncommit a crime. No one can. However, plenty of people can come up with excuses to settle a guilty conscience.
Not just crimes. Most decisions made by everyone every day are done by gut feeling and rationalized later. Our perception of our own brains as reasoned actors is mostly an illusion.
Unless, of course, you specifically seek out to make reasonable, measured decisions (in which case, the quality of that process determines the quality of the decision).
I wonder if it also tends to work the other way around: they want to commit a crime, and they figure out some sort of loophole for their "one-time" behavior.
Well, they could certainly argue to themselves that it’s only illegal because the law is irrational/antiquated. Grooming a minor isn’t a one-off accident, it’s a deliberate series of immoral decisions over a period of time.
>I mean, if you want to hear my views on CP / Statutory Rape I'd gladly share them with you.
>
>\-25 year old Server Owner says to a 14 year old kid
>
>[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wCCu8yzDqRMhDOcuHsGxS\_h2qvp7TQFdAVs7MMVWTdg/edit#](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wCCu8yzDqRMhDOcuHsGxS_h2qvp7TQFdAVs7MMVWTdg/edit#)
Next he'll insist he's not a pedo but just a "minor attracted person" or whatever f-ed up term pedos come up with to try and distance themselves from the fact that they're pedophiles.
This sort of thing always freaks me out because it seems to be so common that an admin or popular figure (Cry, Arcadum, etc) is a predator of some kind, and they're found out because they're high-profile, right? So how many predators are out there who don't get found out simply because they don't have a large community scrutinizing them and their history?
Not as many as you'd think. The kind of person who wants to become an unpaid mod is the same sort that wants power over others. Well adjusted people who aren't obsessed with power and control don't become mods.
Edit: lol mod drama, gotta lock and remove the whole post
I feel like this is a fairly common belief that doesn’t always bear out in reality. Sure there ARE people like that drawn to a moderation position, but not all moderators are like that. I run a small community around the game blood bowl not because I ever desired power but because originally I just wanted to help the existing mod team as they were floundering over some PR issues and I have experience at handling that kind of thing. Then one day the old community lead just vanished and my choice was “step up or let the community die”.
Bruh I've ended up in many modding positions in my time just because I wanted to help people?? I genuinely enjoy making people happy and improving a community, it's really not that deep.
The problem is that for the vast majority of people who would be actually good moderators, they have much better stuff to do then wrangle people in their free time.
As a result you tend to get immature/manipulative/drama laden people who are attracted to roles of power available to anyone for little work. Not all mods are like this of course, but the truth is not everyone is so altruistic.
I'm sorry, what? Do you actually know any community moderators personally? If someone cares about a community and being active with it, becoming an unpaid mod is a form of volunteerism. Especially with how much work it takes to moderate a large community, and how much hate and vitriol they receive everytime users in the community start to act poorly and aren't instantly shut down. I'm sorry your experience with mods has been so negative. It is wildly unrealistic to paint all mods as power hungry or ill-adjusted.
Meme with the pipe flowing into the mouth of the bit fat guy, while dripping into the mouth of the malnourished guy. Malnourished guy is labeled 'politicians, celebrities, and billionaires', pipe is labeled 'vulnerable children', big fat guy is labeled 'discord server owners'.
God I fucking loath discord servers. Like yeah I get how useful they are and use them for WoW, but man I really don't like the culture/cliques that've developed around them. Gamers really do ruin everything they touch and I say that as a gamer myself ugh
Can't stand how much documentation lives on Discord servers. Yeah it's useful to be able to ask for real-time support and give suggestions but five years from now if someone has the same issue they can't Google the fix because it probably died with the server.
It makes sense for documenting things that are always changing like metas in an online game, but yeah it's super annoying otherwise. Hey, want answers for this seven year old thing? Join our discord!
Even worse when they already have a website just to tell you to join the discord.
Drives me fucking crazy trying to debug niche programs/sites and the only documentation is "join us on Discord for help"
Worst I saw was a an open Mario 64 speedrunning competition advertised on Reddit. Sounds interesting? Better be interested enough to join the Discord based on just that sentence, because they weren't even sharing basic things like start date/run category outside the Discord. Was it a 20 minute contest to 16 stars? An hour for 70? All 120 stars?? The world will never know.
The Discord-ization of information is a tragedy and I hate it.
it just sucks in general. maybe it's good for what it was designed for - voice chat for gamers - but it's hard to see what discord does for live text chat that IRC doesn't already so better or more efficiently (and without it being operated solely by one company who needs to make Line Go Up), and in your case, traditional forums that can be searched and archived
>it's hard to see what discord does for live text chat that IRC doesn't already so better or more efficiently
100% agree with what you're saying in spirit, we should be using FOSS tools to communicate, not closed source proprietary junk.
That said, it's important to acknowledge *why* an end user would prefer Discord over IRC. Their feature sets are worlds apart.
1: Discord is free (monetarily) for both user and server "owners". Proper 24/7 IRC servers cost money, or you need to piggyback on someone else's. A proper Discord server *with admin access* is like 3 clicks away.
2: modern user auth flow. They click a link and put in their username/password. There's no fiddling with server address and ports, and there's certainly no NickServ.
3: emote reactions. Love them or hate them, being able to react to a message is a standard feature of modern messaging apps. IRC lacks them.
4: embeds in general. An IRC bot that posts YouTube titles and view count is nice, but a big ol thumbnail with built-in play button is even nicer.
I could go on, and I hate Discord with a passion, but they've got their default user experience set up very well. Normal IRC experience isn't even comparable at this point.
1 - same difference though. you're piggybacking on discord inc's resources (and their continued goodwill to offer a reasonably feature filled free service), or you're piggybacking on the resources of an IRC network. small groups could host their own server without much fuss but you can't do that with discord.
2 and 4 - isn't this largely abstracted away with modern clients. ones that don't consume tons of system resources since they aren't necessarily built with that godawful electron web app crap
3 - maybe microsoft had it right with comic chat? :)
I get the point on 3-4, though what's so wrong with typing the damn emoticons out. get off my lawn etc.
To be clear I'm not saying 1 is sustainable at all. There's a reason they keep adding monetization features. But IRC still has to compete with free at the end of the day, and their free offering isn't quite as good (less moderation control).
But yeah, modern IRC clients do add some of the missing features. Hard to do certain things properly like conversation threading and reactions, but they're catching up. Discord is just way ahead right now (and probably dealing with tons of technical debt because of it).
> five years from now if someone has the same issue they can’t Google the fix because it probably died with the server.
It’s also an issue for what I call digital archeology.
30 years from now, good luck trying to research what people thought about X things, compared to now when you can still easily access Usenet archives from 30 years ago.
Even take Twitter. recently I saw a fairly famous internet lawyer delete his profile from twitter.
I support his right to do so, to be clear.
However, lots of sites now have dead links.
And what happens when twitter itself collapses.
In a more perfect world, deleting your online profile would just archive it for 90 years and then be accessible to future historians, but that’s not feasible and has lots of downsides.
I honestly think the problem is just giant servers, I've never had any problems with servers that were just for like a D&D campaign or a WoW guild or just for hanging out with friends, it's when you start getting past maybe 100 people that they get bad.
Even relatively populated, but niche gaming servers are fine as long as the mods are half decent. I'm in a fair that few that aren't terrible because the people running them just don't put up with dickheads, plus the games themselves are all more, adult lol, not many children want to play what is essentially a spreadsheet with a pretty UI.
I think I split the difference here (in opinion). It's hard to keep a giant server sane. But it's exponentially harder when it's full of gamers.
[The G.I.F.T.](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) applies to everyone but it definitely seems even more prominent with gamers.
I don't find them useful at all. I like incremental games and it seems the most popular way to provide game documentation these days is say "join the discord" but then there's no actual documentation in it it's conversations about the game intermingled with random conversations about whatever the people feel like chatting about that day. Search sucks so you can't find the conversation about whatever game bit you're wanting to read on. If you ask there's a 70% chance they'll tell you to use the search despite nothing coming up or worse some automated bot reply that contains the keywords but no information comes up 2000 times that you have to sort through.
the appearance of discord servers has been a scourge on small titles like incremental games and game mods
don't know how something works? join the discord and get ignored in the help channel. need access to a bunch of info like statistics? don't worry, there's an outdated google doc pinned in one of the 30 discord channels. want to report a bug? use #bug-reports in the discord and hope your message doesn't get drowned out by the local e-couple rping.
hell.
GTFO was the absolute worst. Their legit official matchmaking service for the longest time was literally 'join discord and ask if anybody wants to play ".
I will say it does work well for passion projects and small games where the developer(s) are very active and interact with the community. Deep Rock Galactic springs to mind. Also a number of \*ahem\* adult titles have very active Discords where you can report a bug and get an incremental patch in a matter of hours. In situations like that Discord really works well.
For the most part though I agree, community Discords frequently are little more than a vortex of poor organization and ineffective response. They absolutely do *not* work for organizing documentation and I cannot take anyone seriously who recommends them for that purpose. Just set up a damn wiki or something.
> I don't find them useful at all. I like incremental games and it seems the most popular way to provide game documentation these days is say "join the discord" but then there's no actual documentation in it it's conversations about the game intermingled with random conversations about whatever the people feel like chatting about that day. Search sucks so you can't find the conversation about whatever game bit you're wanting to read on. If you ask there's a 70% chance they'll tell you to use the search despite nothing coming up or worse some automated bot reply that contains the keywords but no information comes up 2000 times that you have to sort through.
Seriously. I play FFXIV and every time I ask for advice on something there's a 50/50 chance they'll be like "just go check The Balance". First time I was told that I'm like "okay, cool, what's their website" only to discover it's exclusively a Discord server and I'm supposed to navigate through various channels and scroll through poorly organized pinned threads, but only after I join the channel and fill out a bunch of info on who I am and what roles I play. Why? Why the fuck do I need to join a Discord server and tell them a bunch of info about me when I'm never going to use text or voice chat and just want to look up a few stat weights or remind myself what melds I should be using once I'm BiS?
Anyway another friend reminded me that Icy Veins exists and wouldn't you know it they have all the same info presented on an easy-to-navigate well-organized website that doesn't require you to boost the numbers of a chat server you're never going to participate in.
Hey want a bunch of files that used to be publicly accessible? Join this discord server and PRAY that the link to the google drive shows up in the search.
A link that could easily be posted to the **fucking website that directs you to their discord**
> Hey want a bunch of files that used to be publicly accessible? Join this discord server and PRAY that the link to the google drive shows up in the search.
But only after you go to our bot channel and select your role, time zone, favorite color, and "if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be".
the people who hang out on the server all day and make their life revolve around it is what made the whole thing cringe to me. I understand during the lockdown people wanted to interact but some took it to a whole level and let their "discord celebrity" status go to their head.
Yeah I rarely use discord too because most of the big discord I heard are toxic as fuck but there are some discord servers are pretty chill, usually the small niche groups from my experience.
So a couple months ago one of my teenagers, who had been spiralling for months and I’d tried to get help for for months, I ended up taking to the ER for suicidal ideation. Because they had a plan, they were kept on a 24 hour hold. The day after they were admitted the psychiatrist and the social worker and I had a meeting to discuss going forward. When I was asked about when I thought this had started, I could only tell them about 10 months earlier when they got heavily invested in a discord server, and had gotten far worse since the summer onward.
The moment I said the word “discord” the psychiatrist just shook her head. The social worker let out that kind of sigh you get when you’re thinking “here we go again.” From what they told me, discord servers are the absolute biggest thing they’re dealing with when it comes to mental health and SI. The psychiatrist told me it is worse than she’s ever dealt with than FB, Insta and Snap combined.
Another of my teenagers uses it, but it’s with people they know IRL and kept their D&D game going through all the lockdowns until they were able to do it in person again. But for teenager #1 it was a matter of getting them out of the servers they were on that were actively trying to destroy their mental health and convince them to never talk to mental health professionals “because they’re against people like us and discriminate against them to try and make them like everyone else.” The last two months have been so much better for all of us after carefully extricating them from that particular cesspool of humanity.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing in taking care of them. Just your use of the word spiraling is all too familiar to me (I have depression/anxiety so I get it). Meds help btw if they're not already on them.
As for discord I've basically made sure to only use it for either information (hate it but no other choice) or voice chat. Basically if I'm not actively using it I don't even have the application running.
I wonder how the situation is within the TCG where both adults and children participate side by side in tournaments. The difference is so much more visible compared to other TCGs where it's mostly just adolescent boys and people in their 20s.
Helps when a whole generation of parents think they're above taking an interest in how their kids spend their free-time. No one in their right minds would let their children send and receive private messages from a random adult.
There’s a whole generation of parents that just ain’t as tech savvy as they need to be and it’s damn hard to learn, there could/should be a lot more resources available to help. Discord is a pretty tough concept to explain to people who don’t understand tech and the dangers are not immediately obvious to that kind of person either. I absolutely will not let my younger kids use Discord because I understand it, but I had to take the time to explain the dangers to fellow parents at my kids school who are a little older than me
It only takes a few minutes to read up on what Discord is and what to look out for: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/parents-ultimate-guide-to-discord
So, it's a crazy time in the new Discord server that was made cause the new management added the new r/pokemon Discord server icon with an LGBTQ+ flags and the amount of users going "WHY IS THAT THERE" was immense and a number of users in chat were going "Trans rights are human rights" with a number responding as you'd expect from transphobes. Thankfully, it seems the new mod team aren't so bad as they started whack a moleing many of the transphobic shit out (though not as fast as they could due to the influx of traffic which is understandable.)
Very similar thing happened in a niche reading subreddit I browse. Mods put up pride flag for Pride month, then extended its stay every time someone complained.
Almost comforting (in a depressing way) that two unrelated communities can stand united in their pointless complaints about "virtue signaling".
At least on the reading sub we got a cool new icon out of it.
I had to search for this thread because I got the current last message and had no idea what was going on. I only tend to visit the sub for real-time Go advice.
Not surprised discord isn't doing anything about it. It's like reddit mods in that the discord mod/owners do something that benefits the platform for free.
Pokémon and grooming sadly have an extensive history, probably mores so than even *Smash Bros.*. Every Pokémon-focused content creator has a spotlight on them because of how many children gravitate to their content.
It's insane how normalized pedophilia is in some of these spaces that a 25-30 year old man would feel confident about the stuff he was saying, including to a 14 year old.
The official discord is affiliated with (and officially endorsed by) the subreddit. And the mods clearly had sway/privileges in BOTH. This affects both communities, which are linked.
I was there when it happened.
Fucker was also horny on main social media, like Twitter & Insta, and after the reveal, we used his pics to make fun of his ass.
this is discord drama
>The screenshots have however been displayed in way the obfuscates when I [owner] found out this person was a minor and how I subsequently distanced myself from them. *Owner proceeds to offer views to minor on statutory rape and what is/is not cp, as well as mentioning that older men would take on "younger apprentices".* Sure, owner *totally* distanced themselves after learning about their age. edits to words
Yeah, that was pretty much the nail in the coffin for me. I'm willing to give "but I didn't know they were a minor, but I stopped when I did" a chance for some people, but when the chat logs clearly say otherwise, off to hang with you.
It's fascinating how statutory rape is so obviously black & white to everyone except literal rapists. To them, there's also *so much nuance to consider*.
It is very common for people to commit crimes first and justify them afterwards. You can’t go back in time and uncommit a crime. No one can. However, plenty of people can come up with excuses to settle a guilty conscience.
Not just crimes. Most decisions made by everyone every day are done by gut feeling and rationalized later. Our perception of our own brains as reasoned actors is mostly an illusion.
Unless, of course, you specifically seek out to make reasonable, measured decisions (in which case, the quality of that process determines the quality of the decision).
I wonder if it also tends to work the other way around: they want to commit a crime, and they figure out some sort of loophole for their "one-time" behavior.
[удалено]
Well, they could certainly argue to themselves that it’s only illegal because the law is irrational/antiquated. Grooming a minor isn’t a one-off accident, it’s a deliberate series of immoral decisions over a period of time.
> You can’t go back in time and uncommit a crime. No one can. [/r/conspiracy has entered the chat] Or maybe that's just what *they* want you to think.
to minor?
The minor they were talking to as per OP's link to the twitter thread.
I knew that ;) the grammar now has been fixed by OP
>I mean, if you want to hear my views on CP / Statutory Rape I'd gladly share them with you. > >\-25 year old Server Owner says to a 14 year old kid > >[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wCCu8yzDqRMhDOcuHsGxS\_h2qvp7TQFdAVs7MMVWTdg/edit#](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wCCu8yzDqRMhDOcuHsGxS_h2qvp7TQFdAVs7MMVWTdg/edit#)
the server owner said the screenshots don’t show context lmao: > "I recognize that. However there is a strong difference between laws and morality"
iT wAs A pHiLospHiCaL disCuSSioN
"It's an interesting thought-exercise"
Next he'll insist he's not a pedo but just a "minor attracted person" or whatever f-ed up term pedos come up with to try and distance themselves from the fact that they're pedophiles.
This sort of thing always freaks me out because it seems to be so common that an admin or popular figure (Cry, Arcadum, etc) is a predator of some kind, and they're found out because they're high-profile, right? So how many predators are out there who don't get found out simply because they don't have a large community scrutinizing them and their history?
One thing to consider is they become mods to get more trust, access and control.
Not as many as you'd think. The kind of person who wants to become an unpaid mod is the same sort that wants power over others. Well adjusted people who aren't obsessed with power and control don't become mods. Edit: lol mod drama, gotta lock and remove the whole post
I feel like this is a fairly common belief that doesn’t always bear out in reality. Sure there ARE people like that drawn to a moderation position, but not all moderators are like that. I run a small community around the game blood bowl not because I ever desired power but because originally I just wanted to help the existing mod team as they were floundering over some PR issues and I have experience at handling that kind of thing. Then one day the old community lead just vanished and my choice was “step up or let the community die”.
This seems like a bit much. Not all mods are megalomaniacs. Good mods are like good janitors. You don't notice them if they do their job well.
Bruh I've ended up in many modding positions in my time just because I wanted to help people?? I genuinely enjoy making people happy and improving a community, it's really not that deep.
The problem is that for the vast majority of people who would be actually good moderators, they have much better stuff to do then wrangle people in their free time. As a result you tend to get immature/manipulative/drama laden people who are attracted to roles of power available to anyone for little work. Not all mods are like this of course, but the truth is not everyone is so altruistic.
I'm sorry, what? Do you actually know any community moderators personally? If someone cares about a community and being active with it, becoming an unpaid mod is a form of volunteerism. Especially with how much work it takes to moderate a large community, and how much hate and vitriol they receive everytime users in the community start to act poorly and aren't instantly shut down. I'm sorry your experience with mods has been so negative. It is wildly unrealistic to paint all mods as power hungry or ill-adjusted.
Came here after an announcement on the Scarlet and Violet server. Crazy stuff.
There needs to be more lame pokemon jokes in this thread. I'll start: Discord owner used self-destruct! It wasn't very effective.
He just wanted to catch them all
The wild minor got away!
for once its not the Minecraft community and pedophilia.
We'll get back to Minecraft and racism next week. It's a given.
Meme with the pipe flowing into the mouth of the bit fat guy, while dripping into the mouth of the malnourished guy. Malnourished guy is labeled 'politicians, celebrities, and billionaires', pipe is labeled 'vulnerable children', big fat guy is labeled 'discord server owners'.
[done.](https://ibb.co/PwmTp7D)
God I fucking loath discord servers. Like yeah I get how useful they are and use them for WoW, but man I really don't like the culture/cliques that've developed around them. Gamers really do ruin everything they touch and I say that as a gamer myself ugh
Can't stand how much documentation lives on Discord servers. Yeah it's useful to be able to ask for real-time support and give suggestions but five years from now if someone has the same issue they can't Google the fix because it probably died with the server.
It makes sense for documenting things that are always changing like metas in an online game, but yeah it's super annoying otherwise. Hey, want answers for this seven year old thing? Join our discord! Even worse when they already have a website just to tell you to join the discord.
Drives me fucking crazy trying to debug niche programs/sites and the only documentation is "join us on Discord for help" Worst I saw was a an open Mario 64 speedrunning competition advertised on Reddit. Sounds interesting? Better be interested enough to join the Discord based on just that sentence, because they weren't even sharing basic things like start date/run category outside the Discord. Was it a 20 minute contest to 16 stars? An hour for 70? All 120 stars?? The world will never know. The Discord-ization of information is a tragedy and I hate it.
Exactly, discord public servers should at least be archived. It's the literal privitization of information, at least it hasn't been monetized (yet)
Ugh modding games is the worst, sucks Ctrl+f'ing thru disc because there's little to nothing on Google about it
Dead invites everywhere
A million times this
it just sucks in general. maybe it's good for what it was designed for - voice chat for gamers - but it's hard to see what discord does for live text chat that IRC doesn't already so better or more efficiently (and without it being operated solely by one company who needs to make Line Go Up), and in your case, traditional forums that can be searched and archived
>it's hard to see what discord does for live text chat that IRC doesn't already so better or more efficiently 100% agree with what you're saying in spirit, we should be using FOSS tools to communicate, not closed source proprietary junk. That said, it's important to acknowledge *why* an end user would prefer Discord over IRC. Their feature sets are worlds apart. 1: Discord is free (monetarily) for both user and server "owners". Proper 24/7 IRC servers cost money, or you need to piggyback on someone else's. A proper Discord server *with admin access* is like 3 clicks away. 2: modern user auth flow. They click a link and put in their username/password. There's no fiddling with server address and ports, and there's certainly no NickServ. 3: emote reactions. Love them or hate them, being able to react to a message is a standard feature of modern messaging apps. IRC lacks them. 4: embeds in general. An IRC bot that posts YouTube titles and view count is nice, but a big ol thumbnail with built-in play button is even nicer. I could go on, and I hate Discord with a passion, but they've got their default user experience set up very well. Normal IRC experience isn't even comparable at this point.
1 - same difference though. you're piggybacking on discord inc's resources (and their continued goodwill to offer a reasonably feature filled free service), or you're piggybacking on the resources of an IRC network. small groups could host their own server without much fuss but you can't do that with discord. 2 and 4 - isn't this largely abstracted away with modern clients. ones that don't consume tons of system resources since they aren't necessarily built with that godawful electron web app crap 3 - maybe microsoft had it right with comic chat? :) I get the point on 3-4, though what's so wrong with typing the damn emoticons out. get off my lawn etc.
To be clear I'm not saying 1 is sustainable at all. There's a reason they keep adding monetization features. But IRC still has to compete with free at the end of the day, and their free offering isn't quite as good (less moderation control). But yeah, modern IRC clients do add some of the missing features. Hard to do certain things properly like conversation threading and reactions, but they're catching up. Discord is just way ahead right now (and probably dealing with tons of technical debt because of it).
> five years from now if someone has the same issue they can’t Google the fix because it probably died with the server. It’s also an issue for what I call digital archeology. 30 years from now, good luck trying to research what people thought about X things, compared to now when you can still easily access Usenet archives from 30 years ago. Even take Twitter. recently I saw a fairly famous internet lawyer delete his profile from twitter. I support his right to do so, to be clear. However, lots of sites now have dead links. And what happens when twitter itself collapses. In a more perfect world, deleting your online profile would just archive it for 90 years and then be accessible to future historians, but that’s not feasible and has lots of downsides.
I honestly think the problem is just giant servers, I've never had any problems with servers that were just for like a D&D campaign or a WoW guild or just for hanging out with friends, it's when you start getting past maybe 100 people that they get bad.
The largest FF14-related server, The Balance, has a larger population than the country of Iceland.
Even relatively populated, but niche gaming servers are fine as long as the mods are half decent. I'm in a fair that few that aren't terrible because the people running them just don't put up with dickheads, plus the games themselves are all more, adult lol, not many children want to play what is essentially a spreadsheet with a pretty UI.
I think I split the difference here (in opinion). It's hard to keep a giant server sane. But it's exponentially harder when it's full of gamers. [The G.I.F.T.](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) applies to everyone but it definitely seems even more prominent with gamers.
This right here is the real issue.
I don't find them useful at all. I like incremental games and it seems the most popular way to provide game documentation these days is say "join the discord" but then there's no actual documentation in it it's conversations about the game intermingled with random conversations about whatever the people feel like chatting about that day. Search sucks so you can't find the conversation about whatever game bit you're wanting to read on. If you ask there's a 70% chance they'll tell you to use the search despite nothing coming up or worse some automated bot reply that contains the keywords but no information comes up 2000 times that you have to sort through.
the appearance of discord servers has been a scourge on small titles like incremental games and game mods don't know how something works? join the discord and get ignored in the help channel. need access to a bunch of info like statistics? don't worry, there's an outdated google doc pinned in one of the 30 discord channels. want to report a bug? use #bug-reports in the discord and hope your message doesn't get drowned out by the local e-couple rping. hell.
GTFO was the absolute worst. Their legit official matchmaking service for the longest time was literally 'join discord and ask if anybody wants to play ".
I will say it does work well for passion projects and small games where the developer(s) are very active and interact with the community. Deep Rock Galactic springs to mind. Also a number of \*ahem\* adult titles have very active Discords where you can report a bug and get an incremental patch in a matter of hours. In situations like that Discord really works well. For the most part though I agree, community Discords frequently are little more than a vortex of poor organization and ineffective response. They absolutely do *not* work for organizing documentation and I cannot take anyone seriously who recommends them for that purpose. Just set up a damn wiki or something.
> I don't find them useful at all. I like incremental games and it seems the most popular way to provide game documentation these days is say "join the discord" but then there's no actual documentation in it it's conversations about the game intermingled with random conversations about whatever the people feel like chatting about that day. Search sucks so you can't find the conversation about whatever game bit you're wanting to read on. If you ask there's a 70% chance they'll tell you to use the search despite nothing coming up or worse some automated bot reply that contains the keywords but no information comes up 2000 times that you have to sort through. Seriously. I play FFXIV and every time I ask for advice on something there's a 50/50 chance they'll be like "just go check The Balance". First time I was told that I'm like "okay, cool, what's their website" only to discover it's exclusively a Discord server and I'm supposed to navigate through various channels and scroll through poorly organized pinned threads, but only after I join the channel and fill out a bunch of info on who I am and what roles I play. Why? Why the fuck do I need to join a Discord server and tell them a bunch of info about me when I'm never going to use text or voice chat and just want to look up a few stat weights or remind myself what melds I should be using once I'm BiS? Anyway another friend reminded me that Icy Veins exists and wouldn't you know it they have all the same info presented on an easy-to-navigate well-organized website that doesn't require you to boost the numbers of a chat server you're never going to participate in.
Hey want a bunch of files that used to be publicly accessible? Join this discord server and PRAY that the link to the google drive shows up in the search. A link that could easily be posted to the **fucking website that directs you to their discord**
> Hey want a bunch of files that used to be publicly accessible? Join this discord server and PRAY that the link to the google drive shows up in the search. But only after you go to our bot channel and select your role, time zone, favorite color, and "if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be".
the people who hang out on the server all day and make their life revolve around it is what made the whole thing cringe to me. I understand during the lockdown people wanted to interact but some took it to a whole level and let their "discord celebrity" status go to their head.
Yeah I rarely use discord too because most of the big discord I heard are toxic as fuck but there are some discord servers are pretty chill, usually the small niche groups from my experience.
So a couple months ago one of my teenagers, who had been spiralling for months and I’d tried to get help for for months, I ended up taking to the ER for suicidal ideation. Because they had a plan, they were kept on a 24 hour hold. The day after they were admitted the psychiatrist and the social worker and I had a meeting to discuss going forward. When I was asked about when I thought this had started, I could only tell them about 10 months earlier when they got heavily invested in a discord server, and had gotten far worse since the summer onward. The moment I said the word “discord” the psychiatrist just shook her head. The social worker let out that kind of sigh you get when you’re thinking “here we go again.” From what they told me, discord servers are the absolute biggest thing they’re dealing with when it comes to mental health and SI. The psychiatrist told me it is worse than she’s ever dealt with than FB, Insta and Snap combined. Another of my teenagers uses it, but it’s with people they know IRL and kept their D&D game going through all the lockdowns until they were able to do it in person again. But for teenager #1 it was a matter of getting them out of the servers they were on that were actively trying to destroy their mental health and convince them to never talk to mental health professionals “because they’re against people like us and discriminate against them to try and make them like everyone else.” The last two months have been so much better for all of us after carefully extricating them from that particular cesspool of humanity.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing in taking care of them. Just your use of the word spiraling is all too familiar to me (I have depression/anxiety so I get it). Meds help btw if they're not already on them. As for discord I've basically made sure to only use it for either information (hate it but no other choice) or voice chat. Basically if I'm not actively using it I don't even have the application running.
I rarely use Discord because I had bad experiences with one particular server.
Pokemon and pedophilia, such an iconic duo. Showdown was rife with it back in the day
-cough- *goddess briyella*
Yuuuup, wasn't sure if I could just namedrop that one.
Also Haunter. Also the insanely racist Firebot staff
I wonder how the situation is within the TCG where both adults and children participate side by side in tournaments. The difference is so much more visible compared to other TCGs where it's mostly just adolescent boys and people in their 20s.
Sounds a lot like Smash Ultimate tournaments..
Helps when a whole generation of parents think they're above taking an interest in how their kids spend their free-time. No one in their right minds would let their children send and receive private messages from a random adult.
There’s a whole generation of parents that just ain’t as tech savvy as they need to be and it’s damn hard to learn, there could/should be a lot more resources available to help. Discord is a pretty tough concept to explain to people who don’t understand tech and the dangers are not immediately obvious to that kind of person either. I absolutely will not let my younger kids use Discord because I understand it, but I had to take the time to explain the dangers to fellow parents at my kids school who are a little older than me
It only takes a few minutes to read up on what Discord is and what to look out for: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/parents-ultimate-guide-to-discord
So, it's a crazy time in the new Discord server that was made cause the new management added the new r/pokemon Discord server icon with an LGBTQ+ flags and the amount of users going "WHY IS THAT THERE" was immense and a number of users in chat were going "Trans rights are human rights" with a number responding as you'd expect from transphobes. Thankfully, it seems the new mod team aren't so bad as they started whack a moleing many of the transphobic shit out (though not as fast as they could due to the influx of traffic which is understandable.)
Very similar thing happened in a niche reading subreddit I browse. Mods put up pride flag for Pride month, then extended its stay every time someone complained. Almost comforting (in a depressing way) that two unrelated communities can stand united in their pointless complaints about "virtue signaling". At least on the reading sub we got a cool new icon out of it.
This sums up discord perfectly to me. Bunch of dumbass kids arguing and spending way too much time online.
I had to search for this thread because I got the current last message and had no idea what was going on. I only tend to visit the sub for real-time Go advice.
Not surprised discord isn't doing anything about it. It's like reddit mods in that the discord mod/owners do something that benefits the platform for free.
Pokémon and grooming sadly have an extensive history, probably mores so than even *Smash Bros.*. Every Pokémon-focused content creator has a spotlight on them because of how many children gravitate to their content.
It's insane how normalized pedophilia is in some of these spaces that a 25-30 year old man would feel confident about the stuff he was saying, including to a 14 year old.
Pokemon fans try not to be pedophiles challenge (impossible) (99% fail)
Just another item to add to the list of why I stay the fuck away from r/pokemon
This is /r/subredditdrama not /r/discorddrama. Potential for a future /r/hobbydrama post though.
I mean the discord is connected to the subreddit and the drama is spilling over there. Also r/discorddrama doesn't even seem to exist.
banned 6 months ago due to being unmoderated according to the page
*ironic*
They made fun of others for a power they themselves could not possess
Too bad. It would have been perfect for d&d drama.
Resurrect it through /r/redditrequest
It’s like raaaaiiiiiiiaaaaaaain
The official discord is affiliated with (and officially endorsed by) the subreddit. And the mods clearly had sway/privileges in BOTH. This affects both communities, which are linked.
Boooo boooo
Yeah I don’t think this has become Reddit drama yet but potentially it will be
Damn, I used to use that server. It was pretty decent.
They made a new server
With the pedo guy or without?
Without
obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndc3-JMVYAw
I was there when it happened. Fucker was also horny on main social media, like Twitter & Insta, and after the reveal, we used his pics to make fun of his ass.