"It's Great Because It's Ran By Us": Empowering Teen Volunteer Discord Moderators to Design Healthy and Engaging Youth-Led Online Communities

TL;DR

This study explores how teen moderators run youth-led Discord communities, highlighting their motivations, benefits, risks, and the role of external support to foster safe and engaging online spaces for youth.

Contribution

It provides one of the first empirical insights into teen-led online community moderation, emphasizing the importance of supporting youth in creating safe digital environments.

Findings

Teen moderators value community engagement and peer support.

External stakeholders play a crucial role in safety and moderation.

Risks include exposure to harmful content and online safety concerns.

Abstract

Online communities can offer many benefits for youth including peer learning, cultural expression, and skill development. However, most HCI research on youth-focused online communities has centered communities developed by adults for youth rather than by the youth themselves. In this work, we interviewed 11 teenagers (ages 13-17) who moderate online Discord communities created by youth, for youth. Participants were identified by Discord platform staff as leaders of well-moderated servers through an intensive exam and application-based process. We also interviewed 2 young adults who volunteered as mentors of some of our teen participants. We present our findings about the benefits, motivations, and risks of teen-led online communities, as well as the role of external stakeholders of these youth spaces. We contextualize our work within the broader teen online safety landscape to provide recommendations to better support, encourage, and protect teen moderators and their online communities. This empirical work contributes one of the first studies to date with teen Discord moderators and aims to empower safe youth-led online communities.