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9yo son wants to join Discord to talk to friends. Any advice?
Well, as the headline says my son wants to join Discord to talk to his friends while playing Roblox on the iPad. Up until now he's been using Teams to communicate while playing. Recently his friends have been switching to Discord so naturally he wants that too.
I only know Discord by name so I'm looking for insight into how it works and how safe it is for children and in general. I'm aware that the age limit is 13.
Discord does not automatically put you into any public chatrooms / groupchats / "Discord servers", so if he just signs up and opens it, it won't expose him to anyone by itself. It is popular to use for public chatrooms, but they must first be found
outside of the appand joined intentionally. Many people don't even do that and just use it to talk to friends one-on-one or in small private groupchats, and it works very well for this so it's not surprising to hear that his friends are switching to it.You could ask him to show and explain Discord to you, partly to inform you and also to get him comfortable talking about his use of it. You should ask him if he plans to only use it to talk to people he knows in real life. You could tell him he must tell you if he ever wants to be in a chatroom with people he doesn't know or if he ever gets messaged by an adult or anyone he doesn't know in real life. You want it to be that if he ever gets a surprising message, he's comfortable enough to show you and ask you about it.
It's likely that right now he just wants to talk to pre-existing friends using it, but maybe in the future he wants to join a chatroom / Discord server. Some Discord servers are small private groups with just friends or friends-of-friends; some are large public groups with hundreds or thousands of users. You could require that he shows you any servers he wants to join, and you browse the server's rules and channels together. You could make your own account and tell him he's automatically allowed to join any server that you can join with him, or he could join it alone if he shows it to you and talks about his use of it often. (This idea is intentionally setting it up to make him enthusiastic about explaining and showing a server to you himself so he could avoid the embarrassment of you following him.) Hopefully it's not common for a young kid to stumble onto, but one important thing to check for that should be absolutely off limits is any Discord server with adults with channels where people share and talk about pornographic content, regardless of how strict you are about him seeking out and viewing that content on his own in non-chatroom settings. Discord servers that allow this usually have that in channels that are marked as 18+ only, but IMO anyone much younger than that definitely shouldn't even be in a server that has channels marked like that even if they're staying to the other channels.
Not entirely true anymore. There is an "Explore Public Servers" button now which takes you to a list of a few of the biggest servers, and there is also a community search function now as well. But I do agree with all the advice you gave. IMO as long as you talk to you kid about the dangers of online public chatrooms, @elcuello, and monitor what channels they join, it should be fine. But if all they do is join a private server with their friends then that's probably for the best, since there are plenty of servers that are inappropriate for a child.
I think the public servers/community servers tend to be selected based on quality of moderation, but it's a pretty rough heuristic they're using. I wouldn't trust it since the quality/engagement of a mod team can atrophy over time and they're not great about consistently reviewing.
Great advice all around so thank you. I really want to give him the right amount of trust combined with safety measures now and in future use. I don't think he knows what Discord is exactly so my plan was to explore it together anyways. Right now he's expressed desire to basically just talk to his friends and maybe join some domestic youtubers servers that makes Roblox/gaming videos for kids around 8-14 I'd say.
We already have a similar agreement when it comes to Fortnite but still important to mention.
That's a given but worth mentioning anyways.
Make sure the account actually has a 13 y/o birthdate (the lowest allowed) to prevent NSFW guilds and channels from being displayed.
I don't know your son's personality but ideally you'd go down the whole settings section of the client with him and enable all the safety stuff/safest options for each where applicable. You can say that they're often desirable for adults too.
I think that's the best you can do with regard to the service itself.
Great points. I will definitely go through the settings with him. Thanks.
Discord has become overwhelmingly popular (something I have mixed feelings about), and it seems everyone from large FOSS communities to local makerspaces have Discord servers these days. While it does have the dangers of public chatrooms and other classic internet issues, I’m mostly just here to say that it’s unsurprising that he and his friends are using it.
So my kids aren’t at this age yet, but I know there are platforms like Messenger Kids that are designed with parental controls in mind, but if his friends are already using Discord that’s probably not going to fly.
Discord does have some information for parents on their safety page but it’s mostly directed towards parents of teens.
Interesting I've never heard of that...I like the idea but anything coming from Alphabet is just not that attractive to me.
Like ...Microsoft Teams? Is there another Teams I haven't heard of?
If it's Microsoft Teams, then it's not going to be particularly different, other than being more suited for gaming and casual conversations than an enterprise communication. Along with Slack, they all have the same design DNA.
Yes, MS Teams because they used it for school during lockdown.
I would suggest studying the privacy policy by yourself for a good while as i believe it to have one of the shadiest privacy policies to exist. It is also one of the most heavily monetized platforms that may or may not border on "cultural coersion" for the kid to spend money on it.
I will do that. How does this work? I thought is was mainly for chat?
I've been using Discord for years now and I have zero clue how this is "heavily monetized". They're making it sound like a mobile game or Fortnite when it's little more than Slack.
Their privacy policy is also pretty standard.
Ditto. Sure, they occasionally show a pop-up trying to convince you to buy Nitro, but all that gives you is access to custom emojis, and few other minor benefits. So that hardly makes it "one of the most heavily monetized platforms", especially since all core functionality is completely free.
I expressed my reasoning as a reply
You're not limited to what servers you can join at all by the application, only by the server itself.
Some things are locked behind their premium subscription, yes, but that's normal for freemium software. None of those features are necessary to using Discord as a simple communication tool. The only real limit is the file and image upload but that's to be expected from a free service. And if you're on a server where other members have contributed Nitro to its upgrade, then this is all moot since you can access all the custom emojis and large file size upload privileges by virtue of being on that server. Either way, Discord does not aggressively push these any near as much as actually heavily monetized things. It barely even rates compared to the likes of nag screens of yore.
You didn't say anything about the privacy policy still. It reads as pretty standard to me unless I'm missing something that makes it so "shady".
There actually is a maximum number of servers you can join and stay connected to; IIRC it's 100 servers. Nitro only increases it to 200 though, and not an unlimited amount, so I suspect the limitation is in place more for backend performance reasons than anything else. I have no idea why anyone would want to be on 200 servers at the same time though, let alone 100. That seems bonkers to me. I am only on ~20 servers and it's already unwieldy, and incredibly annoying.
I imagine it's to do with many communities starting to use Discord also like a closed forum. It's incredibly annoying. A lot of the info found on large discord communities should be available on the public web, indexed by search engines. Instead you have to ask a question in chat like a complete idiot, someone will summon a bot who links a 2-year old comment that tells you what you need to know.
I suppose no one would be surprised by the need to check 100 internet forums, at least over a long enough time span. Discord being misused and not being publicly searchable means the 100 internet forum visits now turn into joining 100 discord servers.
Fair point. Even I have had to join quite a few servers over the years in order to get help with various services, games, game mods, and such. It's super annoying. But thankfully you can just leave the server after you have gotten help, and rejoin it later if you need help again, so I still don't quite understand why people need to be on more than 100 servers at a time.
I had no idea that was even a limitation because, yeah, 100 is an insane amount already.
I linked a lemmy post for it, let me know if there's an issue with that. On the topic, for any chat application, atleast for dms, e2ee is an absolute standard need and desire for privacy. Everything you do on discord is unencrypted and should be deemed public, atleast from a server administrative standpoint.
So this is all a case of someone confusing what teenagers use for voice chat while playing video games with enterprise-secure HIPAA certified communication requirements. Anyone this paranoid about communication platforms should not be using anything less than Signal.
And yeah, that entire lemmy post is conjecture and based on some tired false assumptions. A lot of I recognize as the privacy-bro scaremongering. Also you've been recommending reading Discord's own privacy policy this entire time. But anyway, this line alone should have given it away:
If people really think enterprise agreements, even if between two big companies that don't care about you, would actually allow this, I have a bridge to sell.
From what i remember: They limit the communities you can join, which they call "servers", they limit a lot of sticker use, there's a lot of push on a social clout for having a premium subscription to it too, and they require money for the promotion of a community too. The file size upload and character limit is constrained and needs a subscription for expansion. These are some that i expressed from the top of my mind: There are a lot more stuff that other tilde-members might be able to help you with. Also again, please study the privacy policy of it.
Some privacy context: https://beehaw.org/post/264527