> There's going to be a newsworthy incident, soon, I'm sure of it.

(1) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/discord-child-safe...

What's interesting to me is that in twenty years we've gone from "use the internet with parental supervision, don't use your real name, and don't talk to strangers online" to making platforms pick up the slack of parents and law enforcement to prevent predators talking to kids.

Now I'm not saying that platforms like Discord shouldn't be doing a better job policing things, but it's also shocking to me how much the expectations of these platforms has changed in twenty years. AIM was way worse than Discord is today. Predators used to hang out on Runescape and Neopets. I feel like we're taking too much onus off of parents to monitor their kids online access.

I learned to not use my name online the hard way. I'm 15 now and I had poor opsec when people started getting mad at me on games or whatever else, and I use online personas on almost everything.

Old School Runescape is more alive than ever! Huge amount of predators there. Got my god sword scammed just yesterday!

Oh absolutely. When I was growing up, people looked back 20-30 years at the hornet's nest of predators at "nudist camps" and other such things that masqueraded under the umbrella of "peace love and mung beans".

Now we look back at the world of AIM and ICQ and IRC as being just as bad.

This will change nothing. Since 2020 and their efforts to get more than gamers on Discord it has been a cesspool of minging, predators and other nefarious activities. I've gotten like 4 or 5 Discord accounts banned for trolling, raiding, false reports or other harmless crap like that and they have no systems in place to prevent people from just making another account other than phone verification, and I have used the same phone number to verify 8 accounts before. The things going on already are newsworthy, but in my opinion TikTok/Instagram algorithms encouraging teenage girls to starve themselves is probably as serious if not more.