Teen Discord moderators
& youth-led online communities

Qualitative Study | 2023

The Problem

Millions of teenagers are on Discord today, with 20.6% of users under 24 years old [1, 2]. However, teens are not just participating in Discord communities—many are also moderating them. This is concerning given the many documented controversies about volunteer-based moderation as well as the platform’s current challenges regarding child safety [3, 4]. However, community-based moderation has been shown to enable many benefits for youth and marginalized populations [5, 6]. In this work, we aim to understand how to better support these teen Discord moderators and their online communities by examining the following research questions:

  1. What are the benefits of peer-led Discord communities for adolescent development, especially in comparison to other social media platforms?

  2. What are the challenges that come with allowing teens to voluntarily moderate their own Discord communities?

  3. Who are the stakeholders involved in youth Discord communities, and how can they better support teen moderators?

This project was a collaboration across three organizations: the University of Washington, Discord, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST). As the lead researcher, I planned, designed, and executed the study over a year and submitted the resulting paper as the first author.

Research Methods

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Purposive Sampling

It was not feasible to generate a representative sample of all teen moderators with our resources, so we instead chose to focus on a purposive sample of exemplary teen moderators of large, successful, and well-supported communities.

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In-Depth User Interviews

We conducted 16 in-depth qualitative user interviews. To promote participant accessibility, we allowed interviewees to choose between text (DM) interviews and voice calls. I coordinated all logistics from IRB approval, recruitment, scheduling, transcription, and compensation distribution.

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Semi-Structured Protocol

I developed an interview protocol based on past literature, current events, and our hypotheses. This included warm-up questions, prescriptive topics based on recent news on child safety, and opportunities for participants to share open-ended thoughts.

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Thematic Coding & Analysis

I analyzed all interviews using a customized spreadsheet and SQL scripting. We developed our thematic codebook after three iterations of open coding.

Key Insights

  • Teen moderators engage in many complex socioemotional tasks such as resolving conflicts between members and enforcing rules. Many developed important leadership and political skills through their activities.

  • Our research only surfaces the experiences of the most well-supported teen moderators, but even our participants described encountering harmful content at disproportionate rates. Future quantitative studies are necessary to understand the severity of these events, and longitudinal studies should examine long-term psychological effects.

  • Online youth safety is a challenge that involves a team of stakeholders. Teen moderators work closely with their teammates the most, but our purposive sample suggests that peer support and discussion as well as trusted mentorship from near-peer adults are key to success.