This sentiment towards not just discord, but the entire internet, is becoming increasingly common for a reason. I regret my time spent on the internet more and more with each passing day, and I've heard similar sentiments pop up like a shepard's tone in the dad's group I'm in.

Every parent wants their kids lives to be better than theirs were, for our parents, that meant things like not smoking and making sure your kids go to college. For the current generation, it's making sure they don't turn into dopamine addicts chasing an endless stream of outage and temporary group acknowledgement.

From the threads I have seen, these are generally the type of people they make threads out of.

> I will not be letting my children near discord.

This seems to be a hazardous approach to me.

My young son recently installed a sketchy browser on his computer while trying to install a mod installer for a game. I check on his computer every so often to make sure he's being safe, and noticed the browser. So I asked him where he got it, because he had obviously been using it and it was set to default. He told me it came with some mod installer he installed. So I told him about the checkboxes on install wizards that sometimes install bundled adware and malware. It was a good conversation and he asked questions about what spyware looks for and what the information they collect could be used for. He is now prepared for when this inevitably happens again. He watched me uninstall the browser and click through all the dark patterns in the uninstall process, and commented on how hard they make it to remove this stuff. I also looked at the website where he got his mod loader and, while I'm never thrilled about proprietary Windows binaries, it looks reputable within the community.

Now I feel pretty confident that my son will be more careful when installing things. If I just arbitrarily put some restrictions on his usage of the computer I'm not really preparing him for anything. I'm just delaying his development of skills that he's going to need later. I could either monitor and guide him now, or he could struggle on his own later. You can shield your kids and leave their curiosity to fester and turn into resentment, or you can use their curiosity to impart your wisdom.

> I will not be letting my children near discord

That's the equivalent of saying "I will not be letting my children near the internet"

I think the general thinking is that due to the limited number of hours per day, if you can keep [bad thing] away from your child within your own house, then they will struggle to ever acquire enough of [bad thing] to do harm considering the fact that they spend:

24 hours - 8 hours sleeping - 6 hours at school - [time spent in house] = negligible time left for malfeasance

People say parents have to parent, society won't. Then when people say they'll put rules on the internet people say "damn that's crazy you're gonna do that?". Sometimes I feel as though much of society doesn't understand how parenting actually works

> I will not be letting my children near discord.

Good luck with that. Your children will seek things out on their own, against your will.

> I know one thing, I will not be letting my children near discord.

You might consider being the kind of parent who a trans kid could talk to about their identity issues instead of trying to censor their access to content which they're going to see anyway. Are you aware of the horrifying suicide numbers among this group? Please don't be that kind of parent.

There are no heroes in any story. But in many cases in this field, it's the parents that are the worst villains.

>Bathtub hormones being sold to minors in bright packaging featuring a cartoon with the speech bubble

Reading this is hilarious from someone in the know: you're referring to 'Otoko no Ko pharmaceuticals', which is a website operated in South America which asks no questions as to who they're shipping to; they just accept crypto payment and send it off. It's not part of some grooming campaign, and the characters featured are anime characters, not 'cartoon' characters in the sense you suggest targets children as consumers.

>I know one thing, I will not be letting my children near discord

Ten years later: why is my kid such a loner?

Discord is the main persistent group chat service in the west (telegram seems popular in the third world except for China). It's used for virtually everything. Socially it's almost equivalent to cutting your kids from any online chat.

Honestly, I would consider a total ban a mild form of child abuse.

Did you skip over my justification? That people are using discord to talk to kids about sex and DIY hormone therapy, and selling BATHTUB hormones to kids without their parents knowing?

Discord is just chatrooms, known as 'servers', either public or private, ranging from tiny to massive. Anyone can create a discord server and plenty do. They're used for gaming, art, animation, learning languages, programming and, most importantly, keeping in touch with friends.

I've joining a large number of public discord servers and they've all been safe and well moderated.

Only a miniscule number of people would come across the server mentioned. If your kids want to learn about sex or hormones they'll learn it from plenty of other websites, or their mates. It's also unlikely they would learn about hormones, they would have to intentionally look for it, and they're probably not trans so why would they?

Same reasoning works for banning internet in general.

Banning discord in general is of course less damaging, but the reasoning is similarly incorrect. It's an enormous platform for chats about virtually everything.

A general ban on discord is going to socially harm any kid in the west.

Anyone (anyone regardless of anything) who said they believed giving any medicine to a child without parental consent, even implying subterfuge, to me is extremely dangerous and I would pull my child out of any activity/school/club if there was someone there with those views in a responsible role of the children.

For that reason I think attitudes like this do more harm for the trans community than good. If I knew a trans person with these views I would do everything possible to avoid any contact with them and my children.

Many, many public schools in the US gave out COVID shots without parental consent. It also seems that several of them are encouraging kids to transition and hide it from their parents - a school in Alaska was recently sued for this.

In the UK vaccinations are not mandatory. However, medical professionals can force treatment (or refuse treatment) based on the medical needs of the child. I don't have a problem with this as some parents kill their child from neglect. I am also not a doctor.

I can't really comment on the US. But thank you for the insight...

Also, if you are in the UK, you should note that "public schools" in the US are government-run schools. Our equivalent of your "public schools" are called "private schools" (EDIT: they are called "private schools" in the US only).

I think the solution of having the doctor manage this kind of thing is a lot better than what happens in the US.

In the UK we would also call a public school a private school. Our free schools could be any number of things: a state school (secondary or primary), a college (usually 16-18 but a secondary (11-16) can also be a college), 6th form (16-18 only), grammar school (you have to pass exams to get into), high school (an americanism used in some places in the UK), academy (a secondary school with a different funding model from the government). All very confusing! I think the safest bet is to just call the free schools "secondary school" and the private schools private or public schools.

> I think the solution of having the doctor manage this kind of thing is a lot better than what happens in the US.

I think it is difficult as in the US medical care is mostly privatised.

You cannot sue a doctor in the UK, you would sue the trust (a collection of hospitals in a geographical area). So if a doctor needs to force treatment on a child and the parents refused it would go to a board who would approve or deny it. All children (and adults) will receive treatment for free, so there is also no gotchas about who is going to pay.

Abortion is another example where minors are allowed to make decisions by themselves. Which is particularly important when you have politically heated topics like these, where the medical literature and your average parent often hold very different views.

Yes, a medical abortion approved and administered by medical professionals.

I don't think the medical literature suggests taking homemade drugs from strangers on the internet.

When the political reality of the place where you live influences that, I definitely support gray-market solutions. Just like https://abort.lol/ exists for abortion.

You and people like you truly have no idea how much harm you are causing, do you? It is utterly irresponsible to encourage anyone, but a child more than anything, to take this type of medication without medical supervision. Consequences can be extraordinarily dire.

I will refrain from name-calling, but I have never been as angry or disgusted by anyone else on this site.

Edit: I want to make it clear that the dire consequences I'm talking about are NOT feminization/masculinization, nor even common complications of either such as infertility.

Taking uncontrolled doses of hormones, at irregular times, without any kind of tracking of the quantitative effects (blood tests to determine effective levels), especially for someone undergoing puberty, can easily lead to hormone overdoses that can seriously harm pretty much any organ in the body - including at the very least the heart, kidneys and liver. Testosterone and estrogen have many many effects in the body outside of determining sexual characteristics.

Your original post is now flagged/dead (seems hard to justify), so I'll respond here:

How do you make a judgment that some 12 yo kid is more at risk from having to wait for HRT approval due to not being able to find a sympathetic medical professional, vs the risk from being highly suggestible, unable to sensibly judge that HRT is the right solution and consequently causing permanent change to their bodies (including possible loss of fertility, and a number of other side-effects around blood clotting etc.) as they progress through puberty?

> HRT without medical/parental gatekeeping are widely supported positions in the trans community

It's a widely supported position of the trans community that minors should have access to home-made HRT without any quality control or regulation?

Because honestly, I feel like if you're taking hormone replacement therapy you want some kind of guarantee of quality.

For some trans people, the alternative is no gender-affirming care at all, which tends to lead to bad health outcomes (e.g., suicide).

To be trans is to live on the edge of the law and on the very cutting edge of biopunk medical science. A lot of shit is off-off-off-label, where there are no guarantees of quality, but something is better than nothing which is what you'd get if it were up to your parents and doctors.

The alternative is the come to terms with one's sexuality, just like everybody else. In other words, in most relevant cases here, to come out as a gay man.

"Can you just not be confusing and ignore what you want to do with your life? That would mean the world to me."

This is what you said.

This was the first time I heard about "homemade" HRT. But proper HRT can be easily bought on online pharmacies. An index of them is available for example at https://diyhrt.wiki/ or https://hrt.cafe/

Well, you're just wrong then, and the behavior you are encouraging is literally illegal in most of the world.

And beyond legality, kids self-administering HRT with neither parental nor medical supervision is a truly scary thought. It is certain to leave most with significant health issues, that no amount of good will will help them solve.

What is supported by medical literature and law/bureaucracy are not necessarily aligned. Abortion also faces this problem.

Ideally yes you would want a GP to prescribe you HRT. But if in the place where you currently live this is not possible without years of gatekeeping, or parents have veto power, gray-market solutions are the next best possible alternative.

I very much doubt you'll find any piece of medical literature supporting the idea that it is better for a child to self-medicate on complex drugs like HRT then it is to wait until they are legally able to ignore their idiotic parents and move out to a state that actually cares about their well-being and happiness. Not to mention, HRT is not at all recommended for children, puberty blockers are.

I fully support the right of children to receive puberty blockers to help them achieve a smooth transition when they are old enough to fully understand the consequences. I bemoan states and parents that seek to harm trans children by refusing them access to this type of treatment, and others. But slef-medicating as a child is in absolutely no way an acceptable replacement. Being a non-passing trans adult, as bad as it is, is likely to be much much better than the harms you expose yourself to by accidentally overdosing on hormones as a child.

What is the difference between "medical gatekeeping" and requiring a prescription? Because over-the-counter hormone therapy (regardless of the intent or reasoning behind it) seems like an all around bad idea.

Nothing bad per se in requiring a prescription. What I'm talking about is the multiple psychologist/psychiatrist sessions where they get to decide whether you are allowed to start HRT mostly based on your adherence to sex stereotypes.

I also read a lot of the kiwifarms thread after this latest news, and it seems like there are a lot of trans people on that thread, so at least a slice of the trans community disagrees. This may be a popular position among trans activists and the Twitter crowd, though.

> I will not be letting my children near discord.

Isn't this kind of a whack-a-mole approach to things? The internet is full of hazards... are you going to ban everything that comes up?

The correct answer is to be having regular discussions with your kids about what they're doing online, and occasionally log into their accounts, having access to their usernames so that you can do it, so that you know what they're up to.

Probably not as necessary once they're like 15 or so, but up that age do not let them be on there on their own. And, of course, make sure they know critical thinking and discuss everything that they see online with them instead of heavy-handedly barring them from it.

Teach them about the satanic panics of the 1970s. Teach them about social pressure, teach them about rationalism, show them some good old James randii.

I've seen some of this trend on discord. It is genuinely nasty and you should be keeping tabs on your kids.

> log into their accounts, having access to their usernames so that you can do it, so that you know what they're up to.

Wouldn't it damage the trust between you and your child? I think even monitoring internet usage in-person or outright restricting access to potentially dangerous websites would be less intrusive. If your kid discovers you can access their messages at any time, it would make them more inclined to make other accounts and not discuss about any dangerous interactions on them out of fear of being discovered.

The only way that's going to damage your trust with your kid is if you are secret about it. Show them and tell them that you're getting onto their accounts. They could even be sitting in the room with you.

Eventually you have to stop doing this, they have to grow up, but especially when they're very young it is very important that you're actually on their account because they don't know enough to see and report when something harmful is going on.

> The correct answer

I'm not a parent, so I didn't want to say that, but it is certainly what I was thinking. =)

To be fair I'm not a parent either, maybe this just won't work.

But I was also a kid, and I know that if I was barred from doing something I would 100% go behind my parents back and do it anyway, so that's not going to work.

You have to try something else.

Agreed 100%.

That said, my parents always told me that if I wanted to try drugs (like weed), let them buy it for me so that they could at least know I was getting good stuff.

Honestly, that just made it more awkward... but it did instill in me that I should at least make sure that I was not just taking random shitty drugs. It also made me wait until I could find stuff I could trust before trying it.

I agree with the point you are making, but if we do nothing (out of apathy or pragmatism) then how is OP supposed to protect their children? A complete ban on all social media and all internet connected devices?

I don't have the answer, I think OPs solution is the only practical one: constant and even-handed-as-possible vigilance and rules and hopefully a bit of curation too.

Honestly, the internet really isn't a good place for a child and their mental health. I'm in my 30s and have been an internet native for my entire conscious memory, having seen the early 4chan, gore, etc. on the unfiltered internet. Saying all that I think it is somehow even worse today. I'm not sure how I would navigate this if I were to have children.

This may not be perfect, but I have regular conversations with my kids about what they do online. With Discord in particular, we have a rule that they are only allowed to be on discord servers where they know everyone IRL.

They use Discord to figure out what other things they’re going to do either in person or in an online game. So this rule hasn’t been hard to follow for them.

Out of curiosity, I wonder if Kiwi was on that list before they were blocked entirely. I'd assume so. But again, this is just whack-a-mole... a kid could easily use a friends device that didn't have this on there.

> I didn't know about this site until yesterday.

It's interesting that your takeaway in light of this knowledge is a strategy that totally misses keeping your children away from the forum responsible for three suicides [0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...

While it is certainly possible that Near committed suicide, there is no proof of it. Even on the linked Wikipedia article, the only evidence is a Twitter thread and a few people saying that they "spoke to the police", and nothing else.

USA Today reported on a Twitter thread. They did not claim to have access to any official documents, only second hand accounts of what the police said.

There would most likely have been an official record of his death. Embassies in Japan usually publish records of expat deaths. None of the confirmed expat deaths in Japan in that time window match anything like Near's description.

The only reason information about his death would be blocked is due to an ongoing investigation by police.

It is unlikely that the police would share information about an ongoing investigation with anyone, and if they did it would only be with family.

What it boils down to is that someone on the internet heard from the Japanese police that near had killed himself because of online bullying.

Just to be clear, if I were Near, I might hoax my own suicide if it hurt Kiwifarms. But I don't think there is nearly enough evidence to justify deplatforming Kiwifarms.

Missing the point entirely. That forum was public. The discord servers, where unknown adults are advising teenagers on sexuality and DIY hormone therapy is private.

It's not really clear what your point is. Surely you aren't saying that your strategy is to allow your kids on any online site as long as it's public, but that's the only clarification you've provided here.

Have you actually read about what they where doing in that private - no parents allowed - discord server? I'd love to link you to the actual content, but I can't, because it's private. You will have to read the tweets from the owner describing it in her own words, which is in the link that is the subject of this thread.

Sure that stuff isn't good, too.

I'm just wondering what your plan is to keep your kids off of this other (public) forum that your just learned about (and ones like it), if you have one.

Why not both?

That's my question to the OP.