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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends.

The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

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Are you using the word tweens in some sense other than its usual definition of pre-teen? My understanding is that discord, like most online services, requires registered users to be 13 years old.

Nope, that's exactly what I meant. That requirement just means that they have to check a box which says that they're 13 or older. Surely no child would ever break the rules, right?

Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.

I guess that depends on the University and whether or not you get to keep your email address after you graduate. From what I understand from my college-aged kids, most people get kicked out of the hub after they graduate.

It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.

I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.

That is actually something I quite like about Discord. Whatever I write and post, while not "private" is not indexed or searchable by anyone other tgan those people that have been vetted (invited) by the respective community. Not that I'm mostly on small friendgroup Discords with 10 - 100 members.

Right, and they're blending two things together -- group chats and public forums. I'm sad about losing the public forums.

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