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Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...
- chickensong 8mo agoThere's discord in gas town tonight.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoThis is not OK.
- onetokeoverthe 8mo agoanother one bites the dust.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoF** that, guess I'm leaving that platform too now...
- boca_honey 8mo agoI think this will be the kneejerk reaction of many, but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce. I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them. Now I don't even think about it.
- sneak 8mo agoI don’t sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile number every 90 days.
- titaniumtown 8mo agoEvery 90 days? Wow. Can you elaborate on how that logically works? Like what about for doctors offices having your number on file and other similar situations.
- boca_honey 8mo ago[flagged]
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoPeople in my country are being shot on the streets by the government. Let's not pretend that there are not in fact malicious actors out there who want you hurt for their amusement. You're free to make your own choices on life, but I don't like you chastising others' lived experiences as if everyone has a cushy safe life with a government working for them.
- boca_honey 8mo agoPeople in my country are being beheaded for not paying extorsion fees from the narcos. What does that have to do? And believe me, guys over here don't use or care for your face ID. You are cherry picking a political cause and overreacting for social currency. And even if you're not and I'm wrong... You don't get to talk about cushy lifes, amigo.
- sneak 8mo agoI have a lot of medical records, in three different countries. All in the same name, which is the name on my passport and birth certificate and TSA precheck. I’m not exactly sure where you went off the rails here. Phone numbers and email addresses are used by data brokers and apps to track you across different accounts, services, and devices.
- sneak 8mo agoMy doctor’s office has my email and knows to use it. Half of the time I’m not even in the country where that phone number works. I just buy 90 day prepaid SIM cards. At the end of the 90 days I’m usually in another country. My Google Voice number is sufficient for authing to Signal, but I don’t give it out to vendors/services or use it for phone calls. I never receive any voice calls to my SIM card itself. Anyone who would want to call me knows to reach me on Signal. Anyone else, I don’t need to speak to them. Most of the time my voice conversations are in Google Meet calls, anyway. It’s almost always for clients who don’t like to type and would prefer to be synchronous instead of using their device’s built in dictation software.
- jesse_dot_id 8mo agoYour solution is subservience.
- boca_honey 8mo agoRead again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't care.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoAcquiescence is your solution whether you care or not. Your feelings are irrelevant to the matter. It's a binary decision in the end, you either play ball or walk out.
- boca_honey 8mo agoA solution implies a problem. I don't have a problem with this.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoLike I said your opinion doesn't matter in this, it's your actions which matter. Whether see the actual problem or not is immaterial.
- boca_honey 8mo agoYou clearly don't understand how this works. Social problems are not objective, like math problems. A lack of family support, for example, is something that many people label as a problem... but a lot of people just build strong social networks outside of their family and really don't care when someone says "family first!". That's what I think about the cries around a lack of privacy. I know I somehow ended up in a forum full of IT people and that might my problem, but: People are not software. You don't get to flag something as "problematic" on other people. Deal with it and move on.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoThen you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't assume others will falter in the same fashion.
- boca_honey 8mo ago[flagged]
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>Too many hacker movies, dude. Too much fascism. They've used these relinquishes to build a database of people to go after based om race or political affiliation. Maybe they still will get me. But I'm not making it that easy for them.
- kyboren 8mo ago"I used to resist the boot, too. Then I was successfully conditioned by the environment that's been engineered around me. Now I just lick it subconsciously."
- boca_honey 8mo agoI also thought like you when I was in my 20's. However... the addolescent need to "rise up" is the first thing to go when you actually start a family and develop a well balanced social network. If you play your cards right, soon enough, you won't care about all this.
- ahhhhnoooo 8mo agoI'm 45. My friend, I still resist licking the boot. Stop believing that your experience is somehow more universal. I have a rich social network, I have a family, and now more than any time in my life do I think it's important to resist. Stop saying you'll get less radical as you age, it's just not the axiom you think it is.
- seanw444 8mo agoI have a spouse and kids. I still stick to my guns. Both literally and figuratively. Speak for yourself.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoI sincerely hope you are merely goading folks on and don't actually believe the words you speak.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoIf anything I'm more 'radical' pushing 50 than I was at 20. That "everyone gets more conservative as you age" adage is not universal. For me I was 'radicalized' by raising children to adulthood and seeing the broken world we're leaving to them. Living in the US, my eldest daughter has less rights than her mother did growing up. Capitulating to the demands of fascists is not the way to a better future. Complacency has a high cost, regardless of whether it affects you personally.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce. Nah I'm used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows how few truly deep friendships you have. You get used to it. >I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them. Even when I gave Facebook my number, that wasn't enough. I drew a line at some point. If everyone else wants to sacrifice privacy for the sake of pseudo-community, so be it.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoThen you and I are not the same. If a platform asks for more than I'm willing to give it, it's time to leave. I've done this enough times that it's simply routine. If it means I suffer "defacto social isolation", whatever that is, so beit. I'm old and I've cultivated a group of close nit friends that live nearby most of the year, we'll manage just fine without discord.
- boca_honey 8mo agoI don't socialize on Discord, I use it for work. That's why I don't care. I said that from the perspective of the people that are crying about Discord's move. The weird thing is that you give your personal info, including your biometrics, to your government and your bank. You probably weren't thrilled when they asked you for your finger prints but eventually you gave them anyway because the alternative was not having a bank account. Everybody folds in the end. What makes you think "corporations bad" but it's OK if governments and bankers do it? They're just as malicious and incompetent. This is like being afraid to fly when you drive every day which is 200 times more dangerous.
- barrenko 8mo agoHappily deleted it, just as I would for most % of the online rot I am a part of.
- hoistbypetard 8mo agoIn case anyone else can’t read it: https://archive.is/PvpAx https://archive.is/PvpAx
- deanc 8mo agoOn all my devices and all my connections (residential and mobile) here in the EU I end up in a captcha loop for this site nowadays. Is it just me? EDIT: seems like I'm not the only one [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you_also_get_infinite_captchas_on_archivetoday/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you...
- hoistbypetard 8mo agoBleh. I still get through for now. I'll be sorry when I need to go find an alternative, because I don't know of another that works as reliably as archive[.ph|.is|.today] for me currently
- Rooster61 8mo agoThe sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I'm not sure if enough people will refuse to actually force Discord to back off this decision (unless their idea is to grab as much data as possible at once with the understanding that they are going to back off either way).
- accrual 8mo agoEspecially if it's presented as a pop-up upon launching the app that suggests the user won't be able to talk to their friends/servers without showing ID. Carefully worded language would could spur some % of users to panic at losing years of history and immediately show ID. Folks with less privacy discernment hear "jump" and reply "how high".
- joquarky 8mo ago> panic at losing years of history I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoYeah. You male new friends and find new experiences. Or maybe you don't. That's the cost of freedom, I suppose.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoI have done that for stripchat which was also requiring it. Not happy with it but I'd rather use a selfie than a whole ID document which includes an image anyway. The thing is, what other option do I have?
- pavel_lishin 8mo agoI'll continue using Discord in teen mode, I guess. I'd rather not lose the current connections & servers I have on there, and I'm not optimistic about people migrating away, especially non-tech people.
- Simulacra 8mo agoNo thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.
- verdverm 8mo agoHow many people are doing age restricted stuff on Discord (besides the specifically there for adult content and gooning crowd) All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns
- sigio 8mo agoGaming certainly has age-concerns, many games are rated 13/15/16+ or 18+ But yeah, leaving discord... they are not getting my ID/Photo
- verdverm 8mo agoAt least Google is pushing on zero-knowledge solutions Maybe they can force everyone's hand like they did for https https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
- reorder9695 8mo agoRatings aren't legally binding though are they? I bought games older rated than I was, and it's totally up to people's parents what they're allowed to play. Are you suggesting a 15 year old should be allowed to play the 16 rated game but not discuss it?
- verdverm 8mo agoCan their parents also approve their discord usage? Are you saying they need parents to buy the game, but shouldn't to join chats about the same game?
- efreak 8mo ago> The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device. I'm wondering if this will work with a YouTube video...
- stuffn 8mo ago
- nananana9 8mo agoHonestly they're probably big enough to get away with it. If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed. They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.
- foobarian 8mo agoLooks like it might be opt-in by server.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoAny age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.
- RupertSalt 8mo agoHow does anyone know whether a family is engaging in that time-honored tradition of passing down accounts from grandfather, to father, to son, to child, and their posterity, in perpetuity? Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today. Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really hard up.
- Quillbert182 8mo agoBut under that argument, you would have to prove your age on a regular basis, the plan right now appears to be that each account would only need to do so once.
- pixl97 8mo agoJust remember that the Terms of Service you agreed to are about as firm as explosive diarrhea.
- RupertSalt 8mo agoYou agree not to license, sell, lend, or transfer your account, Discord username, vanity URL, or other unique identifier without our prior written approval. We also reserve the right to delete, change, or reclaim your username, URL, or other identifier. If transfer of accounts is a policy violation, then Discord has legal cover to confidently assert that, once ID is verified, the ID'd person is the owner and controller of the account thereafter. Account selling, stealing, and sharing will certainly still happen, but that's grounds for banning, and not Discord's legal liability anymore.
- jszymborski 8mo agoSo my friend group has been looking for alternatives for a while now that feel like discord, works on mobile and desktop, and has voice chat. I use Signal but the UI is very different from Discord. I've had very mixed experiences with Element + Matrix, Element keeps crashing on mobile, and while voice chat kinda exists in Element it's not been great imho. I looked into hosting Rocket.chat, Zullip, and Mattermost but from what I recall voice + mobile were either missing or paywalled at a per-user price. Any recommendations?
- tmtvl 8mo agoI seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.
- jszymborski 8mo agoJitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I'll have to revisit it.
- trashb 8mo agohave you looked at mumble or teamspeak, seems they where the default for a bit before discord. Atleast for gaming.
- kmnc 8mo ago“We will find ways to bring people back” yeah because that usually works. I imagine this gets rolled back or siloed to only adult specific channels.
- haritha-j 8mo ago> and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.
- jsheard 8mo agoPretty much every non-E2EE platform is scanning every uploaded image for CSAM at least, that's a baseline ass-covering measure.
- mapt 8mo agoAnd E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some platforms specifically because they're E2EE, and so the name itself must be treated as CSAM. As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on Facebook are finding out.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- RegnisGnaw 8mo agoThey have to at least for CSAM.
- pixl97 8mo agoReally I've come to the conclusion that anything I send out of my LAN is probably kept on a server forever and ingested by LLMs, and indexed to be used against me in perpetuity at this point, regardless of what any terms or conditions of the site I'm using actually says.
- palata 8mo agoTo be fair, the terms and conditions probably say that they can do whatever they want with that data :-).
- 8mo ago
- accrual 8mo agoHere's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo > Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack. However, their senior director states in this Verge article: > The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information. Why they didn't do that the first time?
- wolvoleo 8mo agoAnd do they really actually delete it this time?
- fruitworks 8mo agoI have it on good authority that they really truly delete it this time, super duper pinky promise
- ekianjo 8mo agoOnce it's out there the only assumption that holds is no trust, and therefore all bets are off.
- Hikikomori 8mo ago>Why they didn't do that the first time? The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.
- palata 8mo ago> Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels... Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.
- pteraspidomorph 8mo agoHere's how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels) or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode. After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default, content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you cannot configure. The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content. This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices: - Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public; - Require ID checks from all your users (per channel); - Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).
- palata 8mo agoAre you saying that you can "mark" the channel as "NSFW", and Discord will stop scanning your content, possibly allowing you to share very illegal content through their servers? Sounds weird to me. Pretty sure that they legally have to make sure that they don't host illegal content. Or does "NSFW" enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?
- pteraspidomorph 8mo agoThat has always been the case, yes, though I'm not sure what you mean by "illegal" content. There is only a small overlap between NSFW and illegal content, and the NSFW filter has never been concerned with, uh, violating photograph copyright or something. You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago. The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter." EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?
- bramhaag 8mo agoWhat realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group: - Matrix - Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/ https://stoat.chat/) - IRC + Mumble - Signal
- Schlagbohrer 8mo agoI have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS
- rsynnott 8mo agoElement’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.
- drzaiusx11 8mo agoDoes matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch parties", video and tabletop gaming...
- tourmalinetaco 8mo agoMiroTalk can be made into a widget on Element, is open source, and is P2P after the initial connection.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lostmsu 8mo agoRevolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.
- rickstanley 8mo agoIt's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well... I like this comment though: Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into trademark issues because people have more money than you to register in more classes than your project. And then even though your project existed first, they still come after you anyway. And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as well. from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .
- seneca 8mo agoHard no. Reality is that this push is everywhere. Authoritarian governments are cracking down hard on dissent, they're not going to leave huge platforms for communication untouched. We'll need open source decentralized alternatives.
- accrual 8mo agoIndeed, the article basically says as much in more pacifying terms: > driven by an international legal push for age checks and stronger child safety measures
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoI’m always amazed that despite decades of evidence… there are people that not only don’t know that you can do anything if you say “it’s for the children” but they’ll actively support it.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoHN: Social media is terrible and ruining kids' mental health. Also HN: Any attempt to limit access to verified adults is an "authoritarian crackdown" and totally unacceptable.
- z0r 8mo agoChildren generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoRight, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I forgot.
- hiccup_socks 8mo agoyou may be surprised to learn that you can be a parent and have rules without being a "helicopter parent". given your other bad faith comments in this thread, though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be contrarian for... fun? is it fun?
- ravenstine 8mo agoHaven't cared about Discord in a long time. In fact I'm glad they're continuing to shoot themselves in the foot. During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time. One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone's emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant. I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.
- gjsman-1000 8mo agoDiscord has 150 million monthly active users. They’ll be fine. To them, this is just another internet boycott, with all that entails. Reddit survived a worse one and grew afterward.
- ravenstine 8mo agoThe difference with Reddit is it has way more persistent value. Everything on Discord is throwaway, but valuable posts on Reddit from years past are easily retrievable. The two aren't so comparable. One of the unspoken reasons many people have for using Discord is they don't want what they say to easily be associated with them in perpetuity. Requiring ID really chips away at that, in spite of what Discord has to say about privacy around ID. By no means am I saying that Discord will go extinct. I just haven't observed anything about it that's irreplaceable. Reddit, on the other hand, has a wealth of discussion dating back to the mid-to-late 00's.
- encom 8mo ago>valuable posts on Reddit [removed] [removed] [removed] [removed] [removed]
- palata 8mo agoI wonder if Discord is legally forced to do that, or if they would rather do it themselves (and collect the data $$$) rather than wait to be imposed a solution they don't own. I feel like age verification will come, there is no way around it (unlike ChatControl and the likes, age verification seems reasonably feasible and has a lot of political traction right now). But I would rather have a privacy-preserving solution for that, e.g. from the government (which already knows my age).
- anonymousab 8mo agoThere are probably enough regions where it is required or will be required soon, that it makes sense to just get it over with. The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just sensible future-proofing. This also lets them more safely target older users with ads, purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and other high ROI systems.
- selfhoster11 8mo agoGeoIP this nonsense. Legal liability is solved as a "good-faith effort" and those living in jurisdictions where this doesn't apply (or use a VPN) don't need to be stripped of privacy.
- plagiarist 8mo agoPrivacy preserving between you and the third party, but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using.
- palata 8mo ago> but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using. No. The whole point of privacy preserving technology is that they don't. The idea is that the government checks your identity (they know who you are) and give you an anonymous cryptographic proof that you are above, say, 18. They don't know what you do with it. You give this cryptographic proof to Discord, and they know that if you have access to that proof, then you have access to someone who is above 18. They don't know who you are. Sure, you could ask an adult to give you a token. But you can also ask an adult to buy you alcohol or to do the age verification scan for you.
- elephanlemon 8mo agoGreat news, there’s finally going to be sufficient motivation for people to both build out and use open source alternatives.
- cynicalsecurity 8mo agoAlternative: run your own self-hosted messaging server for you, your family and friends. No company should ever get such sensitive data as private conversations. Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.
- brushfoot 8mo ago> Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. [1] That presumably includes selfies? That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents. That seems dystopian. 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
- gjsman-1000 8mo agoHow do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25? You’re never going to convince a parent or a lawmaker or even me that this is dystopian. Seems like a perfectly reasonable safeguard.
- brushfoot 8mo ago> How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25? You don't. That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives. CSAM is the easy excuse, anyway. That's the one lawmakers use, and most people are against CSAM, myself included, so the excuse goes down easy. But the impetus they don't talk about is monitoring and control. The answer isn't to destroy privacy for everyone. The government and these corporations don't need to know what you're doing every second of the day.
- gjsman-1000 8mo ago> That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives. Can't, aren't, look at iPad kids, won't. This is about as logical as saying people should just drive safely, so we don't need guardrails and seat belts. Or saying parents should always watch their children, so we don't need age verification at the alcohol store. Besides, it's not like the school library or the friends of friends don't have devices themselves you as a parent can't see. Parents should not need to be tech experts or helicopters to feel their kids are safe online. That's fundamentally unreasonable. In which case, privacy and child safety need to come to an unhappy compromise, just like any other conflicting interest. For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it everywhere else.
- eur0pa 8mo agoNo thank you, get fucked
- rdudek 8mo agoGenuine question, what is stopping users from using AI to generate a fake face or ID to bypass this restriction?
- anonymousab 8mo agoThere is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai generated images vs. AI generated image detection. In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer. Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.
- akersten 8mo ago> prior fakes But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!
- hiprob 8mo agoAre they going to leak IDs of minors again like they did last time? Who does this protect exactly?
- malfist 8mo agoIt protects the investors so they can IPO
- Insanity 8mo agoTo be honest it kinda sounds like a benefit for my use-case. I don’t engage with adult content on there and use it for one server with friends. And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it remains usable without uploading my Id.
- uf00lme 8mo agoI think having kids asking if they can scan the face of their parents/older sibling will probably give rise to some good conversations.
- ethin 8mo agoYou have got to be kidding me. What is it with these lawmakers and websites demanding people do all of this stuff using services that nobody has ever heard of? I myself (as someone who is blind) have never been able to do the face scanning thing because the information they provide (for, you know, getting my face focused) is just massively insufficient. And a lot of the ones I've seen also require me to (as an alternative) do some weird ID scanning with my camera instead of, you know, just allowing me to upload my ID or something? (Then again, I really wouldn't want to give my ID to some service nobody has ever heard of either, so there.) I also am concerned when tfa says "a photo of an identity document" what does this mean? If I have to scan my ID with my camera, that's not exactly going to be simple for me to pull off. I get that we need to protect kids, but this is not the way. Not when it is discrimination by another name for individuals with disabilities (as just one example).
- sheikhnbake 8mo agoI foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents from the likes of Ben Dover
- ncr100 8mo agoDingle Dongle Hot Ta Tas
- BoredPositron 8mo agoCan't wait to send my id to the cheapest identification provider they could find.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoSource: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
- MiddleEndian 8mo agoI talk to three people on Discord. If I have to choose between A) giving Discord my ID, B) giving Discord a fraudulent ID, or C) just chatting with them on some other program, I'll just go with C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I'd figure out B. May get started with C ahead of time anyway.
- rozab 8mo agoWhat am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can't send you images flagged as porn? How does this impact you in any way?
- MiddleEndian 8mo agoI'm generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs, content filtering for direct messages from my contacts, unwanted popups (it's already annoying when my friends send me a link to a site I haven't visited from discord before and it "warns" me and you cannot disable this entirely useless popups), and things generally becoming worse. A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized. Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoThey're saying there's a very good chance that, in your use case, you still won't be asked to provide ID.
- dave7 8mo agoThis is correct. I'm a UK Discord user, so I've been subject to these requirements for ~6 months now. It's basically nothing - I'm in near 50 "servers", of them all I only really can think of one channel in one of them that is flagged "nsfw" and thus blocked to me as I never ID'd myself. If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.
- dangus 8mo ago[flagged]
- rdm_blackhole 8mo ago> When big tech tosses money at Republicans and the Trump inauguration, they get what they paid for. This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data. Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them. Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children". Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.
- shantara 8mo agoMany EU countries provide digital frameworks for privacy preserving age verification. Yet, Discord made an active choice to avoid using them and is asking the users to upload their photos and ids.
- rdm_blackhole 8mo agoThose same methods of identification are created by the same people who just a few months ago were arguing if it was legal to read all your private messages in case you are criminal of some sort without warrant , without due process. You'll understand if I don't trust them.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- superkuh 8mo agoIt's a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting down and getting rid of it's users. It was inevitable but dragged out far too long with all the VC money to burn. Hopefully everyone can figure out how to use XMPP and/or get back on IRC. It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be lost inside their walled garden though.
- ROllerozxa 8mo agoI'm afraid the thing that would be replacing Discord will be even worse
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- joks 8mo agoXMPP and IRC are great and all but a massive part of what people use Discord for is group voice calls with screen-sharing. I'm not sure what the alternative is for that. TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it's not a 1:1 replacement for a number of reasons.
- crtasm 8mo agoWe use Jitsi for voice/video calls + screen sharing (but I realise you may be talking about all-in-one alternatives)
- em-bee 8mo agoit's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the chat client interface such that it can track who is in which jitsi room, etc... of course this has yet to be built.
- jabroni_salad 8mo agoI think it is more likely that the next best platform will end up gaining three principled civil libertarians and about seven zillion witches.
- malfist 8mo agoThis is just the latest in a long trend of increasing spying on users. Why bother having to guess who your user is, or fingerprint a browser if you can just force them to show you their national ID? This is transparently about spying on people, not "protecting children". The real world doesn't require you to show your ID to every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by. Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone within ear shot has to show ID.
- 0x_rs 8mo agoI predict out-of-the-box deepfake live-camera software will get a bump in popularity, there's already plenty solutions available that need minimal tinkering. It should be trivial to set up for the purpose of verification and I don't see those identity verification providers being able to do anything about it. Of course, that'll only mean stricter verification through ID only later on, much to the present-and-future surveillance state's benefit. https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam
- ahhhhnoooo 8mo agoSo where we all jumping to?
- q3k 8mo agoRunning phpBB on some crappy shared hosting. Well, these days on some crappy VPS.
- mbirth 8mo agoAt least this would make FAQs and other important bits of information available to non-users and search engines.
- sekh60 8mo agoI'm being completely serious, but what is the current fav open source forum software these days? I'd love to host a forum for a small community I'm involved in. Not a stranger to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I'm not particular about technology used.
- tingling168 8mo agoYou could take a look at https://nodebb.org/ https://nodebb.org/
- sekh60 8mo agoThanks, I'll check it out :)
- __jonas 8mo agoEvery single forum I see now is using this: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.
- jedberg 8mo agoOh yay, the company that told me to "just use your wife's phone" when I couldn't verify my own phone number, instead of even trying to fix the problem, now wants a copy of my face? Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- soared 8mo ago> After completing a chosen method, users will receive confirmation via a direct message from Discord’s official account. Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing
- Daedren 8mo ago> Facial age estimation This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.
- Ajedi32 8mo agoWhen you try to use the law (or the threat of legal action) to force people to "do something" about anonymous, unsupervised kids on the public internet using their free platform, this is the type of solution you're going to get: the cheapest, most scalable one they can get away with. Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.
- WorldMaker 8mo agoWhich goes to show that lawmakers probably should be working more hand-in-hand with technical experts before making such laws. A regulation that provides a good technical solution would be more useful, especially if lawmakers could have helped work on ways to prove a person's age cohort estimation without say checking an entire physical ID (and all of the identity theft that can enable), or yes relying on "AI detection" that is quite game-able (literally so as reports are Death Stranding's Photo Mode is a reliable workaround for Discord's primary AI scanning vendor k-ID).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- seneca 8mo agoWe're going to need decentralized open source alternatives with E2EE for any major communication services, unfortunately. It's just too temping of a target for Governments. They're never going to give up trying to destroy anonymity online.
- rdm_blackhole 8mo agoThey already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly. Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM
- anon_anon12 8mo agoAnother company jumping on the bandwagon to data-farm in the pretext of safeguarding children. I really wonder if there's an actual method to actually safeguard children while also not holding on to data. Because, genuinely, you can't question this.. Companies would just say "we are trying to protect kids" and that'd be the end of the argument.
- itsmorgantime 8mo agoI really wonder if when this is fully implemented if they will have any safe guards against selling "adult verified" accounts. With AI being a possible work around for those who don't want to share an ID, selling accounts would be another big issue unless they check for IP addresses and block based on locations and logins. EDIT: I see in another comment that its against TOS to sell accounts, I doubt that has stopped anyone before though.
- throwatdem12311 8mo agoYou’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna upload ID to use a “shitposting about video games with friends” service.
- canada_dry 8mo agoTo protect my privacy, I have a photoshopped drivers license with a photo of my dog that I've successfully used for verification (e.g. AirBnB) in the past. Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.
- chimpanzee2 8mo agowdym, how did your dog driver license even pass before AI ?!
- vikkymelani 8mo ago[dead]
- zdragnar 8mo agoThe tech used some variant of OCR, presumably
- canada_dry 8mo agoHe's a handsome boy. Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.
- HaZeust 8mo agoWell then what was the point? If you gave them an ID that matches your name and DOB, they still got an identity vector that can conclusively match to your physical, government-acknowledged identity. Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.
- sph 8mo agoGood riddance Discord. Any alternative for the masses? They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.
- apopapo 8mo agoWhy would Slack not be affected by the same stupid laws?
- tavavex 8mo agoIf you're a Slack user, I don't think they need your ID to tell that you're an adult More seriously, it will become a problem on there is a significant user migration to there and a repeat of the mass hysteria. Due to being more niche, these smaller platforms are probably not in danger right now.
- AlienRobot 8mo agoBy Discord's own ToS you can't use Discord if you are under 13, so this change is just to make sure users that are 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 years old are appropriately labelled. Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the service?
- ForHackernews 8mo agohttps://use-their-id.com/ https://use-their-id.com/
- plingbang 8mo ago> Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this? > use facial age estimation Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable? > submit a form of identification If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that. > On-device processing Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.
- titaniumtown 8mo ago> Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this? Yes, it's global
- kevinrineer 8mo ago> If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable? Not until a court case on the topic gives us precedent.
- zb3 8mo agoOn-device doesn't have to mean on "your" device - they might refer to smartphones with remote attestation (like AVF pKVM) which of course are not really controlled by you..
- xg15 8mo ago[flagged]
- sunaookami 8mo agoYeah yeah it's to protect the kids and everyone's a pedophile, do you have anything new to add?
- xg15 8mo agoOnly that I don't understand why everyone here is talking as if they had just been forced at gun point to age verify. Just... don't verify until you need it? Also pedophiles do exist (see Epstein and friends) and bad neighborhoods on the internet do exist. This is currently a problem on the internet that needs to be solved. No one here is giving any suggestions how to solve it, but we sure are quick to shot down any solutions that people are trying.
- sunaookami 8mo agoThe solution is law enforcement, not banning everything and wanting the ID of every citizen.
- EmbarrassedHelp 8mo agoThis will be expanded to cover everything on the service soon enough. The time to cancel Nitro and move to other platforms that respect user privacy is now.
- xg15 8mo agoI don't see why it would. If Discord sees its primary audience as teens (i.e. the people who by design can't verify) why would it extend the verify-only parts of the service?
- hurfdurf 8mo agoon a messaging service primarily branded for teens If that was the case, they wouldn't need the age-verification for "adult" features, because there would be no "adult" features. Right?
- josefritzishere 8mo agoThe CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini. He's from McKinsey. So that tracks.
- postsantum 8mo agoHow else would you fight growing antisemitism on Discord?
- IhateAI 8mo ago[dead]
- altairprime 8mo agohttps://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/ https://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/ The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority. Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there. Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.
- superkuh 8mo agoThe endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie, Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as they are private companies. This really should be a service that the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future we're speeding towards.
- bdangubic 8mo agoI do not understand this at all. How is ID verification settling on banks????! And which of these banks are private?
- superkuh 8mo agoSorry if I was inexact in my wording. It's settling on the existence of your bank account proving who you are. The ID services require you to give them your bank login credentials (ie, Plaid). So there are two levels of denial, at Plaid (and related ID services) themselves and the banks deciding weather or not they want to allow it (work with Plaid, or Plaid with them, etc) and if they want to give you a bank account.
- phoenixy1 8mo agoI work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of age verification in Australia, so TIL.)
- superkuh 8mo agoI almost swore here but I think that'd not get my message across. So I'll be calm. You're a liar (edit: or ignorant). I tried with Plaid. Plaid explicitly required my bank login credentials. I went in physically and talked face to face to my US bank's employee that handled Plaid.
- rsynnott 8mo agoIt's kind of surprising that no-one has really come out with a proper privacy-preserving approach to this yet. It is clearly _possible_; there are reasonable-looking designs for this. But no-one's doing it; they're just collecting photos and IDs, and then leaking them all over the place.
- Etheryte 8mo agoNo privacy is simpler and the simpler solution is cheaper. If there's no real incentive to go with another option, companies will go with the cheaper option.
- jeltz 8mo agoThey do not want to solve the problem, they want to collect our IDs. If they would have wanted to actually solve it they would not have done this on legislations where it is not a requirement.
- AJ007 8mo agoIt is only a matter of time before ID verification means the camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at the screen.
- octoberfranklin 8mo agoThat's why I put black tape over my front-facing camera.
- gentleman11 8mo agoExpect a visit feom ho.eland security 10 years from now
- squeegmeister 8mo agohttps://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-to-help-parents-protect-kids-and-teens-online/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-t... What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only ever shares your age range with other companies that request it, not your birthdate.
- diogenes_atx 8mo agoTo add context to the discussion, it is important to recall that Discord was reported to have recently filed paperwork with the SEC for an IPO [1]. Thus it seems likely that the real reason for the age verification (i.e., user identification) policy is to boost its perceived earnings potential among Wall Street investors. According to this theory, Discord is the new Facebook. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-in-march/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...
- sbinnee 8mo agoThanks for the context
- instagib 8mo agoCredit card verification not an option. Facial video estimates or submit an id card. Option 3: if we analyze all of your data we have and see you are not going to bed at 8pm for middle school, you get adult status.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bovermyer 8mo agoIgnoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?
- noosphr 8mo agoShake your head and move on. It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoIt seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't. You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other. The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.
- altruios 8mo agoWe start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated. Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security. Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.
- debo_ 8mo agoRevolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/ https://itsfoss.com/revolt/
- ThePowerOfFuet 8mo agohttps://stoat.chat/ https://stoat.chat/
- IhateAI_3 8mo ago[dead]
- alex1138 8mo agoYou can, of course, not do this (you meaning the company, Discord) You can choose to be respectful of people who have valid reasons for not providing ID But you want that sweet IPO money (as stated elsewhere in this thread). You don't actually care about the internet and how anonymity is a cool thing for certain vulnerable groups All these tech CEOs should face prison time and I'm not joking. They've displayed a complete laissez faire attitude to all of these concerns
- cbold 8mo agoWhen the openclaw/moltbook fad dies, those Mac mini's could be repurposed for a p2p forum network.
- stuffn 8mo agoFinally I feel validated complaining for the last decade about the move away from IRC/teamspeak to centralized services. I've been called all kinds of names. Now those same people are complaining they're gonna have to submit their faces to discord. Which will eventually be used to prosecute or commit fraud. I'm left wondering if "tech enthusiasts" are ever actually correct.
- anthk 8mo agoHeh, that happened with phony nostalgic gen-z kids trying to recreate 'old times' with Discord and turd themning for Windows AKA called 'Frutiger Aero' while bitching against XMPP calling it 'malware'. They wil learn by brute force. As we had to do.
- bitbytebane 8mo agoDiscord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying. Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.
- vkou 8mo agoIf you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this enough.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jusgu 8mo agoit’s not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be where everyone already is, even if there’s less privacy
- AuthAuth 8mo agoIRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make discord enjoyable.
- JoshTriplett 8mo agoIf you have any hope of replacing Discord, you need to actually understand Discord. Among many other things, people use Discord because it has persistent history, integrated images and videos, video and audio calls, and screen sharing.
- keithnz 8mo agolot of people complaining, but, seems like they rolled it out already in UK and Australia... no real complaints I know of, and I'm in NZ and are on NZ/Aussie discords. Also teen mode doesn't actually seem that restrictive. Seems an ok move to me. But for whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes to discord on here.
- rwmj 8mo agoI have a discord account that I use very rarely, and just tried it (from the UK) and it didn't ask me for any ID or face scan. If they do start doing that, I'll simply stop using the service.
- trashb 8mo agoUk, Effective from July 25, 2025, regulated platforms must use "highly effective" methods, such as facial age estimation, credit card checks, or ID verification to prevent children from accessing harmful material, with potential fines or bans for non-compliance. (extents to any platform with user uploaded content) Australia, as of 10 December 2025 Australia requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent users under 16 from accessing accounts. No wonder there where "no real complaints" those countries are already under heavy age verification law. > Also teen mode doesn't actually seem that restrictive. Doesn't mean it can't get more restrictive in a few months. Ease people into it would actually be the smart move since there will be less complaints. > But for whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes to discord on here. Because Discord has not handled their data well in recent memory (actually ever). Also it is a global rollout not mandated by the countries law. This indicates that it is a business decisions and therefore probably they stand to gain from it financially.
- keithnz 8mo agoor.... for simplicities sake, everywhere operates the same way. More countries are going to require this, this makes it pretty simple for them I'm guessing, just roll it out everywhere. they had a breach last year...they didn't leak their core data, the 3rd party they used leaked data to do with age verification. Which was bad. What other data problems you see? Nearly everything else is unconfirmed/scraping public data. They could make it more restrictive? sure.... but why? a core demographic for them is teens playing games and joining servers related to their games, why would they make it worse for one of their biggest target audiences? Any company who are targeting kids (Roblox did something similar) really do have to show they are doing at least something to protect that demographic. The consequence of not doing that is governments coming after you. That's their financial incentive, not to be shutdown, fined, sued etc.
- pibaker 8mo agoIt is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker. Rules for thee, free love for me.
- nickpinkston 8mo agoI'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really keep it to adults and be safe.
- RIMR 8mo agoI'm just going to go ahead and say that "free love" is a terribly inappropriate way to refer to sex trafficking, regardless of the age of the victims, unless you're being facetious (e.g., The Onion's "Penis Goofin'" allegations against Epstein).
- cgriswald 8mo agoI’m going to suggest re-reading the top level comment and the GP’s response. I don’t see anyone suggesting non-facetiously that free love and sex trafficking are synonymous nor that sex trafficking of adults is acceptable. I think the top level poster is being facetious; such a view is how these creeps might think. I think the respondent is, intentionally or mistakenly, ignoring that context and using the term at face value.
- gertarrsr 8mo ago[dead]
- handedness 8mo ago'I'm fine with extreme indulgence, but just really keep it restrained and be safe.' By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms. There's also an argument to be made that normalizing debauchery invites scope creep.
- 8mo ago
- dchi04 8mo agoA lot of whining here about how this is an imperfect response to the issue of children being exploited on Discord / using the platform to engage with inappropriate content. Until someone offers up something better, I take these types of initiatives from social media platforms as huge wins. Ignoring the problem will not make it better. We've been ignoring it for about 20 years now, and it's only gotten worse.
- pwndByDeath 8mo agoBe responsible for your spawn and don't be a weenie about asserting boundaries for them.
- peterlk 8mo agoThe solution is parents! Stop making your bad parenting my problem!
- dchi04 8mo agoIf you believe that all parents are intelligent, informed, and put their children's well-being before everything, you are unfortunately wrong about society. Kids don't deserve to suffer just because they have neglectful parents. Discord, on the other hand, should be at least somewhat responsible for the interactions of children (which they profit off of) on their platform. And finally, you, a sentient adult with free will, can use another platform. Not your problem unless you want to make it yours, which is the response of choice on this thread.
- otterley 8mo agoHow has it become your "problem"? Do you believe everyone should be able to get into any location anywhere worldwide without screening?
- OkayPhysicist 8mo agoThe thing stopping kids from getting "exploited on Discord" ought to be the same thing that stops them from stabbing each other with pencils. Raise your kids better, and stop expecting everyone else to tolerate your failure to do so.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- asveikau 8mo agoI think she is a polarizing figure to some, but journalist Taylor Lorenz has been complaining about this sort of thing for a long time. She has been increasingly warning about a future in which we need to scan IDs for all of our online services, in the name of protecting kids. (With the obvious implications about that data leaking, governments using it to track dissidents, etc.)
- AuthAuth 8mo ago[flagged]
- digiown 8mo agoFuture? Just look at China. They do all this already.
- heavyset_go 8mo agoShe's great but also damned to be a Cassandra, unfortunately.
- stemlord 8mo agoCurious how this will affect midjourney's earnings
- dvngnt_ 8mo agowhat is the relation?
- codergautam 8mo agoMidjourney is primarily a Discord bot that generates images from text prompts within the Discord app. Now many paying Midjourney users could be forced to verify themselves.
- cheschire 8mo agoI deleted my Facebook account in 2011. After finding out how much critical neighborhood information I have been missing, I finally registered a new Facebook account fifteen years later to follow my neighborhood groups. A month later, the account was suspended for supposedly breaking guidelines. I never posted a single message, never reacted to any posts. They then required me to upload a video scan of my face to prove I was a person. We aren’t quite at the end of the internet, but man I can really see the end of this journey coming sometime soon.
- prophesi 8mo agoHad a similar experience after rejoining a few years ago. My account wasn't suspended for breaking guidelines AFAIK, but rather flagged as a suspicious account that required an upload of my face and driver's license. I think the account still exists in this limbo state because I'd rather not upload all of that to Facebook, and yet still not able to login to request for the account to be deleted.
- monksy 8mo agoThat won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many times it's used to permaban you later.
- octoberfranklin 8mo agoThis is the big problem. We used to have a balance of power between the huge megaplatforms: they were the gatekeepers, but the worst punishment they could impose was forcing you to make a new account. Because they couldn't reliably tell us apart. This got nuked by the combination of two things: 1. Really good facial recognition 2. Everybody owning a bootloader-locked device with a front-facing camera (so you can't splice in FaceFusion to defeat #1). This is what made permabans possible. And it has upset the delicate balance that made things tolerable previously.
- jacobsenscott 8mo agoFB/Discord/etc were never the internet. They were walled gardens you could enter via the internet. This could be a revitalization of the internet - pushing people back to decentralized ways of communications.
- Venn1 8mo agoI set up a forum when I started my site for Linux content creation. Discord had become a black hole for technical know-how on a scale IRC could never dream of, and finding answers to common questions was nigh impossible since the technology has changed and the modern way to solve problem X was never asked in a forum and never indexed by a search engine. Granted, Reddit provided a bit of a stopgap over the last decade, but the solutions in the comments these days are more often than not a confidently incorrect copy-pasta from GPT. I use Discord for chat and voice calls since that is what I expect from a chat app, but the amount of companies that have built their community / knowledge base / support system around Discord is worrying. You know they can just delete that, right? I'll continue to use Discord for chat until prompted to put my face in the hole :)
- nickstinemates 8mo agoKey changes are - ID verification to see porn on Discord. - Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers. Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure who this serves.
- WorldMaker 8mo agoIt serves UK, EU, and various US States' regulations to "protect the kids". Discord is only the next biggest canary in the coal mine. These regulations are going to force a lot more websites and apps to do this, too. I wish these sorts of regulations had been written hand-in-hand with a more directly technically-minded approach. The world needs a better technical way to try to verify a person's estimated age cohort without a full ID check and/or AI-analyzed video face scan before we start regulating "every" website that may post "adult content" (however you choose to define that) starts to require such checks.
- reddalo 8mo agoI just wish parents would do what parents used to do: parenting. Then we wouldn't need any of this bullshit.
- anon_cow1111 8mo agoIt should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.
- pipo234 8mo agoNot a subscriber, but I understand your call for retribution. I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...
- hahn-kev 8mo agoYeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature
- anon_cow1111 8mo agoI'll reply for both you and GPP, I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device" ...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoI pay for nitro as of now (not for much longer). If absolutely nothing else, I'm not going to give them monthly payments (which generally required a CC. Aka "I'm an adult") and still not be trusted to be an adult. And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused. - M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure. - Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios. - LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.
- gloosx 8mo agocan't wait to beat it with a face-swap or some random driving license found on the internet
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- gigel82 8mo agoIt's clear "age verification" is not something we'll get rid of, so I think instead we should push for a publicly verifiable double-blind (zero-knowledge proof) solution that can ensure it only gives the websites a boolean and doesn't allow correlation from either side. The alternative is having to give your ID to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the other bad actors...
- areoform 8mo agoThere's a special phenomenon that happens as startups grow large. They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product, their users and how it's used. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-drift https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri... As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7b2b https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7... Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions. Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc. Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.
- tyleo 8mo agoI don’t think this is a phenomenon. At the best places I’ve worked, I’ve seen success correlated with actual user value. You do find climbers at certain places but I tend to think it’s a large reason they fail. Also, I don’t think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A pretty effective one.
- tyre 8mo agoDo you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a huge gamble. You’re basically inviting competitors and pissing off your supply (content creators.) If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.
- tyleo 8mo ago
- m132 8mo agoThere's a bright side to this. With people getting used to every website casually requiring a face scan and ID pic, setting up phishing campaigns and opening rogue bank accounts is going to become easier than ever.
- montacir_AL 8mo agono more discord GenZ
- hxegon 8mo agoHonestly I think this is necessary. I'm not sure how heavy handed their exact implementation of stuff like content filtering would be, but I've seen way too much sketchy stuff on discord servers. Predators, blackmail, harassment campaigns, it's not great and a lot of the servers I'm in already require ID verification by mods to even chat in general. It'd be great if this was opt-in on a server by server basis but I could see that being a problem too. I've seen way too many governments / companies use "protect the children" as a way to try and push overreaching garbage policy, however I think this one actually might help. That said, depends on exact details of how they want to do this. We'll see how it goes.
- sneak 8mo agoShowing ID doesn’t stop crime or criminals, or stop fake accounts. I’m simply going to scan someone else’s ID to keep my account.
- ballooney 8mo agoWhat are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?
- serf 8mo agoto everyone that tried to persuade me to move my projects from forums to discord : phpBB never made me scan my face.
- _zagj 8mo agoThanks to all the OSS projects that adopted this in preference to mailing lists to better appeal to zoomers. (And note that while these projects often do still have mailing lists, most of the actual discussion now takes place on Discord, behind an authwall.)
- psychoslave 8mo agoI'm so glad I always refused to accept this one. I don't know what people need as lesson. We already have so many FLOW options, and yet they are so many running after the last shiny ready for enshitification ready to go platform. Expect them to sell your whole life to whatever party with enough money to throw at their face.
- sneak 8mo agoReminder: “age verification” is just another way of spelling “every single user of the service must provide a government ID to use it”.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jesse_dot_id 8mo agoNo thanks
- AbraKdabra 8mo agoYeah good fucking luck with that. Time for the "discord alternatives" search on Google.
- dgxyz 8mo agoMy social group are moving to a private IRC server already. This is probably the best outcome really. I don't think any of us are under 50. But we have relatives who remember when this would have resulted in some of us being killed. I wish I was sensationalising but I'm not.
- Bender 8mo agoFor the happy-clicky-emoji types one can put TheLounge [1] or Convos [2] or other web front-ends [3] in front of IRC. They don't scale as well but it would allow for those that don't care for the underlying IRC network. If it does not exist yet there is probably a way to write in a voice chat link handler for Mumble. It's a separate app but very low CPU/memory footprint and maybe that could weed out some low quality members. [1] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [2] - https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/ [3] - https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients
- AndroidKitKat 8mo agoI set up this exact combo (thelounge + mumble) for my friends last night after this news. It's not a complete 1:1, but I think it'll meet our needs. I'm going on a road trip and as a fun experiment I'm going to try to get Claude to churn on integrating Mumble into thelounge, somehow, to mimic the Discord client. I'd really prefer something other than Jitsi for screen sharing, since I'm a weirdo and don't like the UX of making a 'call' and much rather prefer the 'hop in' style VC like Discord or Mumble.
- Bender 8mo agoNice. If you do happen to integrate Mumble into one of the web front-ends please consider sharing it with them upstream so others may benefit from your work or perhaps just share a git repo with your patches. I am certain others would appreciate that.
- dgxyz 8mo agoThanks - will look into these. IRC is a bit jarring after using something a little more convenient!
- eshack94 8mo agoIs this the final straw that kills their platform?
- jonstaab 8mo agoFOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/ https://flotilla.social/
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- hollow-moe 8mo agoGlad I left months ago
- toephu2 8mo agoGlad I never signed up to begin with
- mlsu 8mo agoThis is coming for all web-based services soon. Don't think for a second it's just Discord. It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.
- Kim_Bruning 8mo agoIIRC EU was going for a zero-knowledge-proof of age system, but I guess discord isn't going to be using that then. (I don't think the ZKP system is available yet) (here's part of it: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-releases-enhanced-second-version-age-verification-blueprint https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )
- mac-monet 8mo agoThis is the true solution that gets the best of all worlds. The tech is just too immature still but this will change soon I hope. For those curious, check out zkPassport (https://zkpassport.id/ https://zkpassport.id/)
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoIt was nice while it lasted. Account removed. I understand the rationale and I don't care anyway. It is a shame, because one of the niche forums I was occasionally visiting there does not offer other locations.. but I would like to think this may change people's mind. Yay to further fragmentation:D
- poidos 8mo agoBeen meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!
- smcleod 8mo agoI truly do hope this sinks Discord. It's a dreadful platform and an information black hole.
- moi2388 8mo agoCalling it right now. There will be a data breach and we’ll find out they in fact did not delete the ID data.
- SirensOfTitan 8mo agoI miss the era of Internet forums. They didn’t need to be federated, just simple deployments of MyBB, vBulletin, PHP, Xenforo and so on. I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together. And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today. Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.
- duncanscomments 8mo ago>And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today. Could not relate to this more. Spent my formative years in those forums and they genuinely helped mold many of the tastes and interests that have stuck with me into adulthood. Not to over-romanticize, at the end of the day it was just a forum on a music tracker - but the sense of community and sheer diversity of thread topics made it such an interesting place to peruse. Discord certainly has its applications. But since it became the defacato community tool, I find it essentially useless. Discussions are ephemeral (from a UX standpoint at least), and much more constrained. Its difficult to lurk and only chime in now and then unless you're regularly online.
- ryanmcbride 8mo agoFinally the kids will be safe. We did it everyone! /s
- hinata08 8mo agoI hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience when they open source their IDs again. Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names. A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still on Discord) For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing economy The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask but don't keep this time, which isn't enough. Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS after an account is created.
- lanyard-textile 8mo ago+1. It's a push out. That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.
- prussia 8mo agoDiscord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...
- direwolf20 8mo agoDiscord is focused on large groups. E2EE doesn't work in this case. Group management overhead traffic is too high and too unreliable, and a bad actor could just join the group under a pseudonym to log messages. Discord isn't E2EE for the same reason Hacker News isn't.
- prussia 8mo agoFor large public servers it would be pointless. But for DMs and small private servers, it would be meaningful. Most people in DMs and small private servers would not appreciate their messages being publicly accessible like HN comments are.
- storus 8mo agoI use Discord to talk to university students (top 10 in CS) and it only works with university email. I am wondering if I am going to be treated as <13 from now on as well or if they waive it in our case.
- jcranmer 8mo agoIt is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.
- reactordev 8mo agoSo glad I never put my eggs in the discord basket
- lacoolj 8mo agoSo how do we know (other than obvious, NSFW servers) if we are in a server that is not "teen appropriate"? I don't feel the need to prove I'm old af, so if I'm in a server for sports betting, is that not teen appropriate? What about a pokemon server with a lot of swearing? Or just a custom server made by a friend for web dev, but has lots of random politics thrown around? I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.
- unixhero 8mo agoGood to reduce fraud, isn't this zero trust in practice.
- bilekas 8mo agoSo a good EU OpenSource alternative : https://stoat.chat/ https://stoat.chat/ formerly known as Revolt.
- 8xeh 8mo agoThey'll have to "partner" with some company that's in the business of building a database of IDs and biometrics to do AI things with. Other companies in this space (Jumio) have a bad habit of ignoring privacy laws and will keep your information for years. I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts (Plaid) too. (It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in the US.) Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be breaking the law.
- rasz 8mo ago>They'll have to "partner" with some company that's in the business of building a database of IDs and biometrics to do AI things with. Palantir? /s
- bilekas 8mo agoWhen will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules. https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-threat-to-democracy/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-... What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?
- EduardoBautista 8mo agoSaying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.
- AlexandrB 8mo agoParents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.
- ethin 8mo ago> Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged. This is not at all what section 230 does. All section 230 does is get rid of lawsuits that wouldn't be able to satisfy standing of a first amendment lawsuit or similar. Section 230 has to be one of the most misunderstood and confused laws known in the modern day. Absolutely nowhere in the text of the law does it say or imply that an interactive computer service, or the operator of such service, gets total immunity for anything and everything they do. Yet this myth is constantly perpetuated.
- bilekas 8mo agoAs soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- nottorp 8mo agoAnd how much does Discord commit to paying in damages if my face scan or ID scan leaks from their servers? Via security vulnerabilities or employees making some money on the side?
- bigbuppo 8mo agoPeople have dropped platforms en masse over lesser things. This is not going to go well. Are they even going to make it to their IPO?
- delegate 8mo agoOne thing that could happen is that someone might decide to vibe code a Discord clone, without all the extra crap. I'm sure there are people out there doing this already. There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes. Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|... Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history. AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands. At least I hope this will be the case.
- oth001 8mo agoAnd I'll be uninstalling and looking for an alternative
- sejje 8mo agoWow. On one hand, I'm not surprised. But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal, such an important bit of information to protect from hacks. I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified they won't. The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.
- tonymet 8mo agoI know Discord is popular, but I've tried about 3 dozen servers on a ton of hobby topics (linux , raspberry pi, golang, various games, politics) and I've found the caliber of conversation to be very poor. Nothing like forums, stack exchange or even reddit (especially pre-2012) in terms of topic focus, support quality, creativity, technicality. Convos tend to be banal, cliche, monoculture. I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?
- chickensong 8mo agoIt excels for small communities, groups of friends and the like. My IRC channel migrated because it's user friendly, embeds images, and voice chat is a breeze.
- tonymet 8mo agoI agree for private servers it’s good. We used it for backup ops when our internal chat server went down. The feature set is very good
- oth001 8mo agoAlso curious how people like Epstein and James Alefantis are just casually using Gmail and Instagram to post CSAM and suggestive torturing of kids. Seems like the onus should be on the companies, not the users..
- apazzolini 8mo agoBased on the (lack of) people I see refusing the optional facial recognition check at the TSA checkpoint for flying, I can't imagine this will be anything other than an overwhelming success for Discord and the surveillance state.
- nunez 8mo agoDiscord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.
- tabbott 8mo agoI'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity. Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. - Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :) - Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc. - It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business. - We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/ https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all. - Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE). I'm happy to answer any questions.
- goalieca 8mo ago> Given current events in the USA, This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.
- easterncalculus 8mo agoWhat is the video calling and screen share experience like?
- crabmusket 8mo agoZulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jsrcout 8mo agoENOPE.
- janalsncm 8mo agoMedium term, moving to another platform is the best solution. In the short term, I think using some other platform for the locked features is best? For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have better alternatives.
- jm4 8mo agoIt took all of 2 minutes to delete my account and block Discord from my network. Credit to Discord for making the process very easy using the mobile app. I'm not going to put up with this crap just to occasionally use this app to play games with friends. My kids sure as hell aren't going to comply with this policy either.
- docmars 8mo agoThis is such a huge mistake, Discord. Hopefully enough people put a lot of pressure on them to reverse this.
- inquirerGeneral 8mo ago[dead]
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoit's like there's an inherent user-hostility in every platform that is expressed in a less-than-ideal user experience in it's usage or in the ways that the host will harvest all of your personally identifying information for various purposes (which it will also inevitably fail to properly secure, resulting in a near guaranteed leak at some point in the future). I personally don't find ease-of-use to be worth the price of my privacy but most people are more than happy to sell themselves out piecemeal in the form of data until there's nothing left but a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to attest to their ever having existed.
- sleepybrett 8mo agoright now someone is vibecoding a locally hostable discord clone.
- btown 8mo ago> The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead. Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-side...
- digiown 8mo agoCan't you just modify the client to send the resulting signal then? I'd anticipate a ton of tutorials like: Just paste this script into the console to get past the age gate!
- IhateAI 8mo ago[dead]
- qrobit 8mo agoIt will be easy to check with devtools when the update is released
- zb3 8mo agoThey could use AVF pKVM for this (which'd require a partnership with Google) but that of course requires locked bootloader + remote attestation.. So actually, I hope they're just lying..
- utf_8x 8mo agoIf you're looking for an alternative to Discord, check out Stoat (formerly Revolt). [1] Especially if you're an iOS dev with some free time as the iOS client could really use some love... [2] (not affiliated with the project, just really want to see it succeed) [1] https://stoat.chat/ https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios
- Atlas667 8mo agoJust another instance of companies participating in the creation of the police state. These companies do not do this under external pressure from the state, they do this because it benefits and consolidates their power as well. It's bricks for their castle wall. Corporations should not be considered a separate entity from the state. Corporations form state power. This doesn't mean they are always in-line with the state, but that they lead the state as a block, as a class, defending their common interests. Policing is one of them.
- rcarmo 8mo agoGood. Maybe then we'll stop having Open Source projects using it as their only store of knowledge :)
- gverrilla 8mo agoGood, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".
- expedition32 8mo agoBased. Kids should start gamefaqs again!
- andreagrandi 8mo agoJump here, you can see Lucca (as we say in Italy, more or less..)
- dismalaf 8mo agoI'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.
- Eji1700 8mo agoOkay, i'm not very good at coding, especially web. It seems to me that the "logical" solution to this is some sort of local key like "sudo" that the user enters/has access to. This key is on a cookie or request or something that says "This request is being done by a verified adult" and then the website goes "cool here's your data". If the request does not have it, then the website says "Sorry you need one of these keys/permissions to access". I see this as elegant because like modern IDs, YES THEY COULD GET AROUND IT, but at least it gives parents and users who want to abide and try the ability. Kids get fake id's, they get stuff they shouldn't. So long as audits show that the businesses are trying to catch this and punishing those who ignore procedures properly, things are "fine". How infeasible is this from a coding perspective? I get that we're fucking with standards here, but I figured it would make most sane users and companies happy. Companies don't have to keep PII, just a log of "yes this access from this IP was approved, but we discovered is was used falsely and banned that key", and users have a tool that's setup once locally (or refreshed when you want a new key). I guess you'd need some way to authenticate these as if it's too easy to spoof whats the point, but it strikes me as leagues better of "store everyone's colonic map" How off base am I here? Is the theory somewhat sound or is this just dead from the ground up?
- calmworm 8mo agoWhy does the idea of collecting millions of images of minors not sit right? Roblox, Character.ai, Discord…
- danparsonson 8mo agoWhy would minors need to provide photos? The point of this is to verify adult users.
- calmworm 8mo agoI was speaking of the “face scan” option listed as #1 option on Discord’s “How To Complete Age Assurance”. It’s well known minors are using and/or gaming the face scanning on other platforms. Some adults are even having their accounts downgraded to a minor-level restricted account based on their face scan. All around it’s a terrible implementation for age verification.
- b_brief 8mo agoI can see the moderation and age-verification motivations here, but I am wary of how this changes expectations around identity on social platforms. Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully reckoned with yet.
- abalone 8mo agoTaylor Lorenz has done excellent reporting on this. It's a right wing censorial moral panic that's forced some Democrats to go along with it by positioning it as "protecting kids". This legislation is moving at a fast clip and we have to fight back. * SCREEN Act age verification with huge implications for all online privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJrrjFyF0hHNi7lVFYssn35zog&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJr... * Abolishing Section 230, the law that protects platforms like this from being sued for user content (just published today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJrrjFyF0hHNi7lVFYssn35zog&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJr... * UK online safety act (it's not just the U.S.) - interview with the lawyer defending 4chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJrrjFyF0hHNi7lVFYssn35zog&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
- winddude 8mo agoDelete!
- thephotonsphere 8mo agoOkay, that's the end of #Discord (at least for me) because I will never upload 'selfies' or a copy of my id to a social media site, or something.
- cantalopes 8mo agoI guesa i dont need to use discord anymore
- gsich 8mo agoGood bye. Discord is not trustworthy with this kind of data. As proven recently.
- rockskon 8mo agoThis is categorically unacceptable. People's livelihoods and safety are threatened when there's people's personally identifying information associated with their Discord chats - even if linked by "anonymous" identifiers. Imagine your photo ID next to the horniest thing you've stated next to some random asshole on the Internet. Discord has no moral right to make such a dramatically consequential decision about the personal privacy of its users in jurisdictions where such age verification tech is not mandatory.
- LightBug1 8mo agoActively withdrawing from all US proprietary software and subscriptions ...
- burnte 8mo agoGoodbye Discord.
- h4kunamata 8mo agoThe usual "to protect the kids" bs. Only people who does not understand the implications of this, will provide personal information. Watch: A) Discord relaxing its rule because of mass exodus B) People moving elsewhere where no personal information is required
- dmix 8mo agoThis won't stop at Discord. Banning websites/apps and ID gating is going to be everywhere in a decade. Protect the kids puritanism is on max level right now, throw in some future terrorist attack or political issues that scare people enough like they fear TikTok and the internet will be fully controlled.
- pmdr 8mo agoI'll hardly miss using Discord, but if this isn't going to be a wake-up call to ALL (mainly) open-source projects using it, then we're all doomed. We should seriously go back to mailing lists and IRC as a standard for OSS. Everything else should be viewed as disposable.
- skydhash 8mo agoAnd websites that are not SPAs in disguise.
- abraxas 8mo agoI really don't understand the demise of usenet as a way to have a public message board. It worked perfectly well for decades and then died off all at once when the bigtechs did everything in their power to squelch it and instead replace with their walled gardens.
- starkparker 8mo agoReally really surprised there isn't more discussion about the background inference service that's mentioned in passing here. If you thought Electron/wrapped web apps were a performance problem, I can't imagine the weight of _also_ running a local AI model that's constantly playing Guess My Age.
- monksy 8mo agoPlease do not fall of the deceptive language that is used here. They're calling this "teen experience". This is not about "i see gentila we ban". They're very vague about what is obscene, sticking to that level of a consistent definition, and they're very heavy handed in punishing. They're introducing a highly restricted experience unless you hand over your details to either a "technology" (which that's very unclear about how honest they're being) or a company that has been caught for leaking sensitive details.
- Seattle3503 8mo agoYeah the LGBTQ folks I know are highly suspicious of how this will roll out.
- templar_snow 8mo agoAs an ethical conundrum, this one is clear. The safety of women and children online (human trafficking, r*pe and child abuse networks openly coordinate at industrial scale on Discord, Roblox and Telegram) trumps the concerns of a relatively small group of Richard Stallman-level purity obsessives. Good move on Discord's part; hopefully Roblox and Telegram shape up and follow suit. If you don't understand the severity of the current situation in 2026, Google the group "764."
- imadierich 8mo ago[dead]
- seanw444 8mo agoI've needed a nudge to cancel my 5 year Nitro streak. This was it. I guess if they reverse course before March when the billing cycle is over, I'll renew. Hope I'm not alone in this. The only way they'll decide to not move forward with this is if enough people do the same.
- boca_honey 8mo agoSo you'll still use Discord, just not Nitro? If cancelling your premium sub is all you're willing to do, it means you're not being militant enough.
- seanw444 8mo agoI am attempting to revive my once fairly large Minecraft server, and not being present there means suicide. What I can do is signal to them that not only am I not giving them my ID, I am no longer giving them my monthly payments ever again. Which is the metric investors want to see increase, not decrease. I have given them hundreds of dollars in monthly payments. That will now cease as a result of this decision. You don't have to go pedal to the metal to signal disapproval in a way that hurts.
- amniarix 8mo agohttps://keet.io https://keet.io is this industry's best kept secret. Encypted p2p chat with audio and video, no signups, it just works. My kids and their friends switched from Discord to Keet to avoid all the signup / authentication friction.
- tacker2000 8mo agoSo now all the open source projects that use this walled off closed platform (even though scores of people complained and warned about it) can go back to hopefully using something open and searchable.
- dollylambda 8mo agoIRC is still a thing
- CMay 8mo agoThis age verification thing is being overblown if you understand how they're implementing it. You still shouldn't use Discord, but this isn't why.
- r2vcap 8mo agoSorry, the era of free communication is fading. Across middle powers, developed countries, and increasingly North America, governments are tightening the rules around online speech—and often jawboning platforms into going further than the law strictly requires. The list of examples is so long I can’t even begin to type them all.
- popcornricecake 8mo agoInstead of "free communication" I would say "free large public social media", because without going all DPRK, there's no stopping people from using the internet, a means of free communication.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoI like this a lot. That being said my response to this whole biometric/ID push is going to be to leave every space that asks for it. I don’t think I’m going to miss these all that much.
- sumeeta 8mo agomeh, discord hasn't done anything interesting in years. i'm mostly on Sup these days https://sup.net/i/rgc-fnqc43h https://sup.net/i/rgc-fnqc43h
- chickensong 8mo agoWhat interesting things does Sup offer?
- tristor 8mo agoThank you to Discord for making it easy to cancel my Nitro subscription from the mobile app. I've had Discord Nitro since it started being offered, buh-bye.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoI don't think there is anything anyone can do about this trend, other than come up with viable age-verification schemes that preserve privacy, and don't require things like scanning your face or sending random companies your ID. There are plenty of approaches to this, and I won't spam this comment with all the thoughts I have on the subject. But my frustration is people want things like "cancel your nitro subscription" well I don't have one. What else? It's just small things that will not impact anything. Every service out there will require this sort of verification soon. Being angry doesn't stop it. Even voting doesn't seem effective to me. But better solutions might. If they could verify your age as accurately as a store attendant a physical store could, what else could they want? And if that could be done without giving random websites any identifying information about yourself, wouldn't that be better than this mess? Two things can be done, you can resist this nonsense while supporting alternatives to it.
- jajuuka 8mo agoIt's bad enough that Discord seems to be vulnerable to attack. But now they want to hold on face scans and ID's that directly tie to their accounts? It's already not smart, but especially dangerous for public figures like streamers and vtubers. Not only can it dox their appearance (if they are hiding it) but also give the insane stalkers direct ways to harass them or assault them at home. However I think Discord is far too embedded for communities. Whether that be social or development. So I don't think we'll see a big exodus. Having teen mode be the default will just mean that NSFW flags on channels or content will be a death sentence for that board or community. Similar to how Reddits big push to shove NSFW into a corner has gone. There are obvious examples like adult content that are NSFW intentionally. But things like art or cosplay can easily be twisted as NSFW and it just shuts down the reach of these kinds of artists. Unfortunately most people are dug in now and it takes absolute extreme actions to get people to move. The fact that X is still around should be clear evidence of that. It's draining over time but that kind of universal community has not be replicated. Just a couple different echo chambers.
- akst 8mo agoThey’ve been rolling out a bunch of stuff like this in Australia and the UK. As an Australian I’m fairly certain I was made to do some sort of facial recognition some time ago. I kind of hate it, but honestly it’s had minimal impact on me and my usage of these services if I’m being real.
- cedws 8mo agoI understand the frustration towards Discord, especially because this is a global rollout of a policy they're only required to enforce in specific countries, but it's IMO misdirected. They're likely trying to get ahead of the legislation. The way the winds are blowing indicates the Western governments that haven't already passed legislation mandating ID verification soon will. You can move to $ALT_PLATFORM but unless it's self hosted they'll eventually have to enforce the same policy. Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first. You only have to watch the TikTok CEO's hearing in Congress to see how American politicians don't understand technology.
- Lermatroid 8mo agoThis. Still canning my nitro sub for now as I do think they should hold off until necessary, but people ignore that the root of this trend of ID verification is governments who are willfully ignorant to having staff who can accurately assess the technological landscape and enforce smart regulation.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dmitrygr 8mo agoWho implements these idiotic policies? We do! Politicians could not code their way out of a paper bag! Giving up is not the solution. Refuse to do it. Make ID pass for a full-white jpeg.
- heavyset_go 8mo agoPlatforms want this, they're happily implementing it because they'll get a mountain of data to train on and sell, and they'll finally get to sell their userbase as real monetizable humans to their partners.
- nondrool 8mo agoThe more precise the profile the more money is fetched for you at market.
- kryogen1c 8mo agoWell, deleted my discord. It was the only social media I had, if it can be considered as such. Shouldn't have been using a free product anyway. Committed the crime of convenience and paid with my telemetry. At least I stopped. HN, you my only fren.
- ralferoo 8mo agohttps://archive.is/E0kQ8 https://archive.is/E0kQ8
- bombashell 8mo agoWhy is this such a big thing? Who cares about the face scan?
- dakolli 8mo agoIt'll basically create a unique hash of your face, to be tied to all your comms. I can think of a dozen ways this could be misused by a nation-state.
- bombashell 8mo agoOh wow that’s something else…
- doublerabbit 8mo agoTake a picture of your debit/credit card back and front for me. I won't use it to buy stuff, but I wouldn't mind a picture of it for safe keeping.
- blurbleblurble 8mo agoI thought we didn't talk about political issues around here?
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoHow many times do we need to praise the simple XMPP server? It does everything you need it to do, has done so since the 90s, and doesn't require any PII, ever. I remember 20 years ago MS trying to cram Lync down our throats. That pile of crap was inferior in every way, yet it still succeeded. Does anyone remember it? No. So don't jump to another platform. Stick with the original solution and hold onto it for the rest of your life. https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/
- siliconc0w 8mo agoSad to see we're going with a "child by default" internet. It'd be so easy for device and OS makers to align on an API that could tell the browser/app whether the user is under 18 or not.
- leprechaunne 8mo agoHey our small company is making a privacy focused alternative to discord, it launches on Sunday and if you’re interested you can join the waitlist here Even if you don't want to use the beta, your support to show it's a valuable use of our time would be great https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL0ZVwWu8K-hJWrloqE8MYPuUf722x3q-Jm_dyVle39bLlEg/viewform?usp=header https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL0ZVwWu8K-hJWrloq...
- bagels 8mo agoDiscord doesn't need my identity and I don't need discord. Bye bye.
- unit149 8mo ago[dead]
- Peacefulz 8mo agoThe writing has been on the wall for a while. I moved off of Discord about a year and a half ago, after they started gating long-time free features behind Nitro. Then later, I find out that nothing is encrypted in transit on their application. I haven't had much luck moving friends off of the platform and on to things like Matrix, or Signal yet... but I'm trying all the time.
- wswin 8mo agoFinally, but done wrong. This should be done by 3rd party app (probably owned by government) with access token without sharing one's identity.
- polski-g 8mo agoIs there an AI service that can generate fake IDs?
- aussieguy1234 8mo agoI'm based in Australia and had to do this early shortly before the teen social media ban came into place here. I chose the face scan option as I simply don't trust most providers when it comes to uploading my ID. Countless data breaches have happened over the years where driver's license and passport details have been stolen from databases. For those unaware, a driver's license is often referred to as the "golden ticket" for identity thieves. A single license usually contains all the information needed to open credit in that person's name. Yes, they will claim their process is super secure, and they take security seriously. But then again, they all say that.
- chmod775 8mo ago> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device. If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed. > Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation. However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
- altairprime 8mo agoThis would, most likely, go hand in hand with “Discord is no longer allowed on rooted devices” and “Discord desktop is disallowed from client-side effort”, given the necessity of attestation to make it viable on mobile and the near-total absence of third parties taking advantage of the necessary protections on desktop.
- digiown 8mo agosigh I doubt it'd work here though. You know you can just print out a fake ID and show it to the camera. I doubt the app will be able to tell. Attestation doesn't really change this. If it truly never leaves your device, you'd also be able to use the same fake ID for your entire friend group. The cynical and best-case take is they don't actually care, and it's just a gesture to show to authorities to prevent further regulation. In which case they wouldn't try especially hard, which is a good thing.
- altairprime 8mo agoThe authorities would need to provide the framework for more intensive regulation, which would end up being expensive and also duplicating the work of the post office’s ID verification service, at which point you’re verging on “federal identity verification service”. Which, yes, really ought to exist — we defer that to banks and cell companies today?! — but I somehow doubt it likely to occur under the current structure.
- dave_sid 8mo agoGlad I don’t use it.
- mcv 8mo agoI'm not necessarily opposed to age restrictions, but letting each website figure out its own age verification system is a terrible idea. Uploading your ID to lots of websites opens you up to identity theft. Any government that demands age verification from websites, should offer an eID system where each site can redirect you for the age verification. That way random sites don't have to worry about handling sensitive data.
- Seattle3503 8mo agoYes, a good digital ID system would enable age verification in a way that protects privacy.
- sneak 8mo agoSomewhat related: I created an HN users Signal group, following the massive success and utility of creating a friends-and-associates Signal groupchat (that ends up discussing privacy/security/AI/etc). HN User Chat: https://signal.group/#CjQKICCPlygJ6YXA0jqqOcE0K3AHovCOX4WKENp7vnV1FPKMEhDQDgeDZ5jithRHNN9BnXTB https://signal.group/#CjQKICCPlygJ6YXA0jqqOcE0K3AHovCOX4WKEN... If you follow me and want to join my friends-and-associates one, I’m @sneak.07 on Signal.
- frankcort 8mo agoWhen I first read the headline, I assumed it meant they were requiring face scans to protect against AI Agents/Bots, not to "protect" kids.
- cromka 8mo agoI am not one for conspiracy theories but I notice a pattern... Did you know Chrome now offers to save your passport and other ID data in their keychain? Why, after so many years, do they now offer to save this information that, if leaked or backdoored, will easily bind login information with their owners?
- ajdude 8mo agoFYI they're sending the data to K-ID, a Malaysian AI company to "detect" the age.
- firecall 8mo agoI wonder if this is compliant with EU laws around data sovereignty and similar? If that’s the right question? :-) Not my area!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- skeptrune 8mo agoWow
- deaux 8mo agoAny business or community that keeps using Discord as their main channel after this is complicit in helping build another ICE database.
- the_stocker 8mo agoYou can be running this in 10 minutes https://github.com/Merkoba/Hue https://github.com/Merkoba/Hue
- claiir 8mo agoThis part is interesting: > [verify to] Speak in a stage channel. My understanding is non-stage voice channels are E2E encrypted, and Discord retains no recordings, whereas stage channels are not. Is this a liability thing—Discord not wanting to have voice recordings of non-adults?
- rambojohnson 8mo agobye Discord.
- BloodyIron 8mo agowelp glad I set up my own replacement for my own business/events https://hub.lanified.com https://hub.lanified.com
- zorkian 8mo ago(( This is a repost of what I shared on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment/o4j5nl1/?context=9 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment... but I think the context will be helpful for this group, too. This article title is very misleading. )) Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults. Hey folks – I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news. I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults. And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.) Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence. Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details. And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!
- chickensong 8mo ago
- doublerabbit 8mo agoThey sold the kids' souls to the algorithm. They caused the Mental health crisis. They caused Dysphoria. The Depression. The "Ghost" we fight against—they fed it. Now that the governments are scared to deal with it, the Governments are scrambling. They are slapping a "Band-Aid" on a gunshot wound and it's all bullshit. Kids lie. They fake the age. They use VPNs. The Corporate Reality is that Meta, X, TikTok want them to.
- carshodev 8mo agoBoth social media and chats need a truly open decentralized protocol that is accessible and usable by the general public. It feels like with clawbot becoming popular that people are open to the idea of self hosting something if it has an easy enough interface. The same thing could be done for social media and messaging. People should hold control over their own content and the application layer should just be content organizers and consumers.
- ZetsuBouKyo 8mo agoto take control of your own content while preventing it from being harvested for ai training, there’s a straightforward method. - use a browser extension to encrypt comments sent to any social media platform. - by sharing your public key with intended recipients via a third-party channel, the platform only sees gibberish. this makes ai training impossible, keeps corporations in the dark about your conversations, and ensures that any government surveillance only yields encrypted strings. however, the platform might ban you as a bot, since this effectively prevents both the company and the government from snooping on your data.
- carshodev 8mo agoThis makes it non social media, the reason I post on social media is to ALLOW the world to view what I speak about. I don't mind if my data is harvested or trained off of. Posting with encrypted data makes no sense as you are disrupting the social network with worthless garbage for 99.999% instead it would just be better to have an RSS type feed that your consumers (friends) can subscribe to and it shows the comment you made and the link to what you commented on. Or if you just want to say something about it to 1 friend just send it to them. You could still have pub/priv keys and an autodecrypt system though or use traditional authentication for allowing content pulls.
- tempuser377373 8mo agoSo many comments but i dont see anyone mentioning llm to replicate Discord, or others Twitter, Facebook. If claude can create a C compiler this would be trivial. And demonstrate the actual real world benefits of AI.
- ddtaylor 8mo agoThat's a solid no from me. Looks like I'll be moving my gaming friends back to Steam and the others to a secure messaging platform or one I can host myself. Before Discord I was running a Mumble server that everyone could connect to and everyone liked it a lot.
- catgirlinspace 8mo agoGuess I’ll have to try convincing all my friends to move to Matrix.
- zeroq 8mo agoI'm really torn on this one. I remember the internet from '99. Before facebook, before messangers. People were communicating via usenet mailing groups - think online forum but via email - and it was quite common that they were not only signing their mails with full name, but often with a home address so others could send them postcards - think patreon for caveman. IRC users had frequent local meetups and regulars could easily put a face behind an username. I understand it was different time at different place, but oh boy, it was so much better.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoYou didn’t have the hoi polloi on the internet back then.
- zeroq 8mo agoWell, yes, you could argue the internet was like "harvard", a proper secret society club, where only wealthy and approved were invited, but still, even in '99 the internet was freely available at unis and I remember we had a whole plethora of weirdos. The other weird artifact of that era were "gaming caffes" - much like internet caffes, but before the internet was widely available and people were often bringing their own PCs to play starcraft or quake on LAN. I play competitive games online to this day and I really miss these days. Today's online scene is extremely toxic. I still remember my den which was often frequented by local gopniks, outmost disgusting creatures, but when we played the game there was a strong sense of chivalry and sportsmanship that's nowhere to be find in today's online games.
- yegortk 8mo agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42054-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42054-9
- thrownaway561 8mo agoWhat I don't get is out this is to protect teens, but what person that is 13 has an ID?
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo agoIs IRC illegal yet?
- raincole 8mo agoFrench lawmakers vote to ban social media use by under-15s ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-media-ban-under-15s https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-...) Online age verification in the United Kingdom ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...) Blaming Discord and switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'
- StrLght 8mo agoDiscord isn't under pressure to implement these measures globally. I fully agree that they shouldn't be blamed for kick-starting age verification, because governments are pushing for this all around the world. But it's simply ignorant to pretend that Discord isn't helping these governments to normalise this process with their actions. They're also signalling that businesses are willing to comply and that they have all means necessary to do this.
- throw10920 8mo agoForget cancelling my Nitro - what's the best way to convince my friends to cancel theirs?
- hiccuphippo 8mo agoNot being there. Tell them you'll be at ____ when they need you. What ____ is, that's the problem. There's no self-hostable option that has easy audio/video like Discord does.
- trashb 8mo agomumble or teamspeak is pretty easy IMHO.
- delfugal 8mo agoWell, that ends DISCORD. Add to hosts file with 0.0.0.0 DNS Why would any sane person allow this tracking and cross tracking and selling of our private info? Ridiculous for a commenting service.
- FreePalestine1 8mo agoI will go against the grain and say that I am happy that Discord is doing something about the NSFW content that is being fed to children on its platform. I don't use Discord that much personally but I heard from friends that it is a goto for NSFW content, similar to reddit. Every time the topic of ID for 18+ content comes up, the entire internet melts down over "big brother" and "privacy", yet no one flinches at presenting ID for alcohol at the store. And further more, nobody offers an alternative solution the problem. Status quo isn't acceptable. "Kids will always find a way to bypass measures/access their porn", is also not an acceptable answer. We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing. I will say I am usually the first person to oppose any sort of government overreach, I am very pro privacy. I believe the energy put into the criticism and boycott of Discord should be put into finding solutions for verifying ID in a secure and private manner online. Something like Apple Pay for IDs?
- kennywinker 8mo agoI think the issue here is that companies (and govs) are choosing the worst possible solitions to a real problem because it benefits them. Gov wants it for control, companies want it to sell ads and mine data. They team up, and screw everyone over while overlooking other viable solitions
- trashb 8mo ago> We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing. I agree, however show your ID is just a "Enter your date of birth" prompt with obfuscation. Buying alcohol is physical and therefore has some advantages, for example you can be sure that your ID is not copied/sold as you are there and get it back. In another comment the idea was presented to make a "I am adult" card you can buy (physical like the alcohol). I think that would work a lot better than upload your government id and face to random app/website. Maybe I'm old school but I was always told "don't make a copy of your ID" by the government, a photo was included in that definition.
- sMarsIntruder 8mo agoGoodbye Discord. It was good to have you.
- Ms-J 8mo agoThis growing trend of accounts for everything enables the collection of all your data and attacks such as this gating your access behind sending in more personal info. Your IDs and biometric data for most services is sent to multiple companies, governments, and who ever else comes asking, armed only with a piece of paper. It is never deleted. It is used to create a profile of you and your activities. Never use an account if possible.
- edg5000 8mo agoWe need something vendor agnostic that still allows having a community. Something thats essentially a protocol like bitcoin, email, text, torrents. Probably some of this exists. Then there will be providers offering this a commodity, just like how email and hosting can be rented from any company with simmilar quality (kinda).
- niutech 8mo agoThere are already: Matrix, Jabber, Mumble, Zulip - all open source.
- shevy-java 8mo agoHow convenient how "age restriction" leads to mass surveillance. Also makes me wonder how people used to promote discord in the past. Big Brother is watching you.
- josfredo 8mo agoThat’s why you never promote anything, or if you do, you do it with full awareness that you are being irresponsible, because you don’t know what the future holds, and acting like things won’t change is incredibly shallow.
- Madmallard 8mo agoHow do they green-light this? No one wants this. It doesn't make any sense.
- medbar 8mo agoWhat’s with this recent push for ID verification from every site and service?
- haizhung 8mo agoCowering to autocrats all over the world.
- spragl 8mo agoI have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find quite a bit of information. My introduction to hash chains is for for age verification specifically: https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/ https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
- nicman23 8mo agothis is just a think of the children attack
- stingraycharles 8mo agoHow would that mechanism work in practice, though? If every parent needs to become a trusted authority, wouldn’t that just move the goalpost? Who would be the trusted authority, and who would implement that? I agree that the mechanism is elegant, but figuring out which entity should be trusted in a way that scales globally is somewhat difficult.
- IshKebab 8mo agoThe use of the parent is an example. In reality it would be some official age checking provider (maybe the government).
- spragl 8mo agoYes. I think that wahtever organization that issues your passport, would be a natural choice for setting this up. But nothing prevents it from being a private company, although I cannot see a sound business model for it. Also it would need to project great credibility for customers to trust them with their information.
- lrem 8mo agoRealistically this would be another service attached to the government ID. Something like this does function in some European countries, doesn’t it?
- your_friend 8mo agoHope they use zero knowledge proofs like ZKPassport app
- simianparrot 8mo agoNitro cancelled, all boosts for my servers cancelled, have recommended my communities all do the same. It'll be a lot less smooth but we can go back to IRC + Mumble. Enshittification and profit-maxing strikes down yet another decent piece of software. Rest in piss.
- therealidiot 8mo agoYeah, no. Account gone in advance.
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoTechnofascism. Do not comply.
- pxeger1 8mo agoI've had a Discord account for 10 years. They seem to assume all discord users are at least teenagers, so surely they can't think I was 8 when I created the account. So can't I have the "full" experience automatically?
- vibedev 8mo agobecause they want your data, and to be fair there's no safe way to determine your age, account could get stolen or transferred to other person.
- ArchieScrivener 8mo agoDiscord does not care about you old coders, they want the faces of the young. Moses traveled the deserts until the idol worshiping generation died out. Big Tech sees you as the problem and knows the young will fall in line.
- nusl 8mo agoI hope that this causes enough outrage that Discord starts to lose its effective-monopoly for gamers and other folks. The platform has been getting more and more shitty over time and it isn't healthy for one product to have this much power.
- grub5000 8mo agoI would guess that there needs to be a clear, cheap, easy to use alternative to discord in order for a large numbers of communities to move over. It probably has to be a single clear alternative as well – multiple will exacerbate the decision cost
- nusl 8mo agoGilded used to exist but it's seemingly gone now. The power Discord has is quite insane, to the point where people haven't even seriously tried to compete it seems.
- Madmallard 8mo agoWell I've spent the better part of 7 years building a community on my own discord server with dozens of friends, many of whom I interact with daily in voice. So... what now? I just have my life literally turned upside down because of a greedy surveillance state?
- popcorncowboy 8mo ago> "On my OWN discord server" [Emphasis added]. You are confused about ownership, and now sadly are suffering the consequence. The answer to your question is simply yes.
- trashb 8mo agoMove the community over to a platform where you actually own the server. There are self hosted alternatives. (or pay a hosting provider to run it)
- rzerowan 8mo agoGenreally this is the part of the slope when most everyone perks up and realizes what game is being played. Combined with recent AUS,UK laws mandating the same across most online services - im sceptical that even opensource offering could evade te dragnet. We already knew that any ID verification for kids would inevitable mean everyone gets carded then sorted. With this AI profiling essentailly piggybacking on the likes of Facebooks decades long shadow profile shenanigans , and the recent Ring revalation that theyare essentially doing the same via their cameras. Its a bleak panopticaon that has all the essential building blocks in place.
- singularfutur 8mo agoDiscord says immediate deletion. They already leaked 70k IDs. Your biometric enters the permanent record somewhere. Discord, their vendor, or Utah. Someone keeps it.
- Dansvidania 8mo agoI really hope this triggers a mass exodus
- coopykins 8mo agoI think discord has been terrible for the internet. A lot of open information has become gated. And now it's gated behind a platform that many of us are not willing to use anymore. Let's hope this pushes out people and communities back to forums and such, but in reality other platform will take over.
- pixel_popping 8mo agoNot required by law, what could then be the reason, I wonder?
- puzzlingcaptcha 8mo agoThanks, I'll just keep using XMPP MUCs like a caveman I am.
- coderatlarge 8mo agoi can live without discord but I’m required by law to interact with irs and therefore idme and their mess…
- johnisgood 8mo ago> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device. What stops kids (or anyone) from using "AI" (which they are already using to a great extent)? I bet you could bypass it without any video, too, while we are at it.
- uwagar 8mo agoevery website will ask or phone someone to verify your id in the future. what a horrible day thatd be.
- jonplackett 8mo agoI think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are. And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
- Iulioh 8mo agoAt this point might as well... There is a news story every 12 minutes for a company that leaked IDs
- jonplackett 8mo agoI really think on device verification is the way to go - and I don’t even see why we need to use ID. Parents are always in control of a kids device. Just mandate devices have a child mode that parents can activate and have it send a ‘this is a child’ flag to all websites and apps. But this assumes this isn’t all about ID checking everyone online, which is what it’s really about.
- Arkanosis 8mo agoThat would either mean you can tell the device to lie (which makes it useless), or that you don't own the device you use (which makes it unacceptable).
- sebtron 8mo ago> or that you don't own the device you use (which makes it unacceptable) It's already like this, unless you go out of your way to install a custom Android rom, which 99.9% of people will never do. I agree it is unacceptable.
- jonplackett 8mo agoThe thing is though - only KIDS need to not own their device. With parents overseeing it. Why do we even need to age check adults?
- absolutevibe 8mo ago
- PrimeDirective 8mo agoIs this legal in the EU?
- trashb 8mo agoShould be yes, however the data (if any) gained is considered "personal data" and should be handled conform GDPR legislation.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- grougnax 8mo agoWell. Goodbye Discord. I'm leaving.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 8mo agoWhat are the chances this is being implemented solely as a tool of control by Trump, eg to target his paramilitary attacks?
- zecg 8mo agoLuckily, they well enshittified it prior to this move, so my account is already deleted. I wish Discord a swift irrelevance.
- domenkozar 8mo agoWe're going to see more social networks struggle and something like world.org or similar that protects privacy is needed.
- iso1631 8mo agoThere are many ways to do anonymous proof of age. E.g. go to a physical store and buy a proof of age token, the store will ID you as much as they would for buying alcohol or cigarettes. But that doesn't meet the requirements which is proof of identity. As a parent I pay for my child's phone and sim, and thus I have parental controls and I can limit access to discord, or youtube, or porn sites, both on the device level, on the sim card level, and on the home internet level. I'm all for making parental controls easier to use, if you want to pass laws, enforce minimum standards on companies, encourage or mandate pan-company cooperation (why can't I control my child's microsoft account from my apple parental control page, or an EA account from a steam control page). I'd even be happy with sites being mandated to add say a DNS record saying "this is a site for over 18s only due to $reason", and then I, as the bill payer, can choose to allow that or not.
- erelong 8mo agoThe writing was on the wall here like a decade ago And often is there for existing apps, that things like this can happen So people might take stock of existing apps like Discord that they might want to migrate from
- kamma4434 8mo agoSo Long Discord, It’s not like It’s the only forum in town
- dev1ycan 8mo agoWhy does every company work with persona? It's the shadiest company outside of Palantir, what is going on?
- Razengan 8mo ago> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners Fuck you
- tonyhart7 8mo agoafter discord then what ???? fb,twiiter,instagram etc ???? hell nah do we really need to do this EVERY FUCKING SERVICE that we would like to use ????
- HungrMn 8mo ago[dead]
- zeptonix 8mo agoAbsolute idiots, who the hell is going to do a face scan? Or share their ID with ... Discord?
- xbmcuser 8mo agoWith the current US administration all the worlds citizens should be careful about their data in the hands of US corporations. Unlike China, US has and can kidnap you from your own country if they feel like it even if not citizens of US. This was the case with previous US administration but they tried to at least follow their own laws if not international laws. This administration does not care about US laws or International laws.
- megabless123 8mo agocurrent US regime*
- ghm2199 8mo agoWhat I don't understand is why not have designated actors/ombudsman like notaries in the society that can verify your age/id without anyone knowing what it's for. One can easily implement a nationwide system like this. You can trust people in your own community. There are no central govt actors. In such a system no one has any knowledge of which service you are proving your identity/age for and the cryptographic approval can be done without any ids being exchanged. The input to the ombudsman is a hash you provide which he can sign with his key and send to a server, that can ask the ombudsman: "this thing you are signing is for age verification > 18, check persons ID and press confirm if that's the case". The ombudsman presses confirm after checking the id and you are done. Every city municipality can elect a local councilman/notaries to do this, for a small fees.
- zigman1 8mo agoEu actually plans to introduce something similar through its EUDIW initiative. It will be a digital wallet focusing on privacy preservance and user control over attributes that are shared. It will take some time tho before it is successfully implemented.
- 827a 8mo agoThis might be an unpopular opinion, but imo this is a directionally correct decision from Discord. I feel that it's important that there exist privacy preserving, anonymous communication platforms; not that every platform must have or must not have these qualities. Platforms need to adapt to how they're used (or how they want to be used). The amount of child exploitation that happens on Discord should make any civilized person working in that company uncomfortable, and its natural and good to want to do something about it, not out of external or governmental pressure, but because you yourself can see the dashboards and logs, and can see what's happening. There's a needle of difference between a government mandating identity verification, and a private organization saying this is how we want to run our company. Threading that needle is living in a free and safe society. If we can't thread it, and we fall to one side or the other, then you have to choose whether you prefer safety or freedom. Personally, I'd rather have both.
- PsycoRobot 8mo agoIt took so long to have a decision like that from Discord. I use Discord everyday and I know that a lot of teenagers use it and I think a decision like that can help to keep safe these teenagers from the internet. When last year Discord introduced that AI face scanning I thought that it was a serious problem for the security of our data but if, as they say, they remove all of the data of the ID extimation.. why not?
- nemomarx 8mo agoPeople are pretty skeptical that discord will actually delete it (because they had a data breach showing a lot of undeleted face scans and id pictures already) or that their partner organization who does the validation won't just save it instead. Also I don't really think this solves the grooming issue - it stops them from going in certain channels or getting pictures from non friends but an adult who wants to get past that to get to kids probably will. You'd really want like "teen only" servers with verification going the other way, if anything. I've never seen that proposed oddly
- f001 8mo agoIt’s hard to trust a company when when they’ve already demonstrated that they [can’t be trusted](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-faces-backlash-over-age-checks-after-data-breach-exposed-70000-ids/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-faces-ba...). And i’m sure there will be an argument of “but this will make it more likely that they’ll be safe about it to not have a repeat”, which will likely be true for a while. Then cost-cutting offloading to a third party that promises to not keep the data, or a new feature will come in that needs the photos, or a misconfiguration will happen where things that should be deleted won’t be, and we’ll be in the same boat again. The only safe data is that which does not exist.
- christkv 8mo agoWe need to being back p2p
- saos 8mo agoGood. ya'll will be surprised by how many under age kids use it...
- sam345 8mo agoSounds reasonable particularly given age of account implementation. And even if new account, if I don't have my face scanned then they won't show all the garbage. I have no problem with that.
- tsoukase 8mo agoSuch an important announcement for a platform reminds me the attempt of OnlyFans to ban sexual content. I wait the D soon retracts this decision.
- dcchambers 8mo agoAs an adult that interacts only with other adults in good faith, it's easy to look at this and feel outraged. But there is a very real and dangerous situation where children and adolescents are using Discord with zero guardrails, constantly interacting with adults - many of whom are predators. This is happening every day. Millions of children around the world "meet people" playing games online, take the conversation to Discord, and then get brought into a very dark world online that their brains are simply not ready for.[^1] I don't like the idea of blanket face scans/ID scans with that data stored in perpetuity - but age verification of some kind is a must IMO. [1]: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-not-just-a-game-anymore https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-not-just-a-game-anymore
- kcb 8mo agoDiscord has parental controls. There's a myriad of services out there that restrict and monitor phone usage for kids. Use them and lock their phone and discord accounts down to nothing. Restricting adults because parents decide to give little Timmy unrestricted access to technology is stupid.
- cboyardee 8mo ago[dead]
- SirMaster 8mo agoThis is a really misleading title. It doesn't "require" either. The majority of adults will not see any verification as the system is already able to verify they are old enough through other data/means.
- gethly 8mo agoI don't trust any government clerk with my personal data, let alone Discord. What a joke.
- greenwalls 8mo agoI think I’ll pass on a chat room face scan. Wow.
- badhorseman 8mo agoAmazing how this coordinated attack on internet privacy has been so effective, the amount of people in my country who see this as an attack on "Big Tech" or even "The Tech Bros" is astonishing. I do not even know what one can do about people who are so unaware of what behooves them especially given the recent coverage of Epstein and just how prevalent all sorts of blackmail is and how useful this would be for gather kompromat not just by their government intelligence agencies but also foreign intelligence agencies and even just scammers come blackmailer. not to mention the recent prevalence of so called sextortion on teenagers. disturbing stuff, hope the kibosh gets put on all these policies and their is a public push-back, but that is really seeming like a fantasy.
- trashb 8mo agoMaybe this time finally a lot of communities will realize that discord sucks as a Archive, Forum, FAQ or news channel.
- johannesrexx 8mo agoDiscord is in a position to demand nothing. No privacy loving person will comply with Discord on this matter. Discord is doomed to only have weak compliant users on its platform.
- rkagerer 8mo agoMy first reaction is, what a disaster. More of the web becomes gated behind sacrificing your privacy to companies who by and large don't give a damn about it. Then I remembered when I was a teen, thought about how I'd have reacted to this, and realized over the long term youth will rediscover old-school tools like IRC or migrate to new alternatives outside the claws of big corps and government. And I felt a little better about the future of human civilization.
- steve-atx-7600 8mo agothe social network no one really needs is going to require IDs. Guess I’ll go ahead and delete the app once I stumble across it some day.
- Borborygymus 8mo agoThe child predators are not stalking the adult forums. They're in the "for kids" ones. This "protect the kids" nonsense needs to be called out for what it is - a sham.
- justonceokay 8mo agoWell maybe misdirected. I remember the first few times my dad caught me looking at hardcore BDSM pornography. I was probably 13 and definitely gay. The first time he cancelled our internet for a month and the second time he started shutting off the breaker to the computer at night. I was hooked though. I can see how parents are wary, that was probably a big shock for him . Luckily he was able to process his feelings with the belt so didn’t have to go calling his senator.