Challenges in Studying Social Networks on Discord, and Possible Ways to Approach this Challenge
In recent years, the platform Discord has become a highly prevalent way for teenagers, adults, and other online communities to communicate effectively and to disseminate information efficiently. Especially because of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, online platforms like Discord have taken off because of their features and ease of use for new users.
What sets Discord apart from other social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook is the feature of anonymization of user’s identities. Users can use an alias in lieu of their real names, and be able to interact with other communities under a guise.
Discord appeals to more people due to its more hands-off approach towards policing and moderating its platform. Instead, it lets users self-moderate their own “servers” through self-enforced rules. As a result, there is a lot of leeway for a diversity of communities to spring up, including controversial ones.
Discord deliberately leaves communities not algorithmically curated, letting users curate their own servers through self-discovery, word of mouth, or using Discord’s simple search feature. This makes finding servers easy and yet hard, because certain servers may not have as much of a presence as other servers due to a lack of presence on the Internet.
Thus, communities, or servers on Discord become highly specialized to a specific topic, interest, or mission. This results in networks with a few strong ties and many weak ties. The setup on Discord is akin to talking in a large room while others are talking. There may be many threads of conversations that eventually split off into other channels, or large scale discussions over a specific topic.
Thus, it is easy to observe that most ties in Discord are weak ties, while the few that are strong ties are usually with users that people know in real life. These can be differentiated by how often a user may DM, or text another user, which is indicative of how connected they are. Another way to differentiate between strong and weak ties on Discord is the number of interactions one may have with another particular user, through chatting, voice calling, or other indirect interactions facilitated by other APIs on Discord.
Against the context just provided, Heslep and Berge analyze Discord through another lense: the presence of hate groups on Discord, especially white supremist groups and fringe groups. The anatogization brought about by these servers resulted in very active and strong communities, with hostile ties towards other servers/outside communities.
Because these servers openly advertised their affiliation with these motivations, it was easy for Heslep and Berge to study them. However, the challenge of studying social networks on Discord lies in the closed and anonymous nature of Discord.
It is important to draw up theoretical models as to how users/communities might interact with one another. And because Discord is a relatively new platform, new theories may have to be drawn up to study and categorize near anonymous users so it is easier to glean data about the interactions on Discord.
However, it is still possible to analyze individual users through the lens of strong and weak ties, due to the records and interactions kept by Discord, and that is a starting point for future studies that may discuss Discord.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448211062548