6 ms·

Discord just killed anonymity

167 points by f0r3st 8mo ago

herpdyderp 8mo ago
> mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month I thought age verification was only required to access "adult" content?
- jsheard 8mo ago
  It covers more than that, but it's not strictly mandatory. > Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. > Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. > Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users. > Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know. > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
  - cced 8mo ago
    > > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers. Does this mean that in panel-like settings where 100s of users are listening to a speaker, in order to ask or contribute in voice you need to be verified?
    - jsheard 8mo ago
      I guess so, since the same role is used for anyone with permission to speak up in a stage channel. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005513722-Stage-Channels-FAQ#h_01F22AKYY4AFEK1JDWG2THSVY7 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005513722-... Hell if I know why unverified users are allowed to speak in normal voice channels but not in stage channels.
- girvo 8mo ago
  What gets deemed “adult” is incredibly random as far as I can tell, some of our servers/messages have triggered it, but no porn or anything is shared in them.
  - roxolotl 8mo ago
    This is great post about this from Soatok back when visa and Mastercard pulled support from itch and steam in July. https://soatok.blog/2025/07/24/against-the-censorship-of-adult-content-by-payment-processors/ https://soatok.blog/2025/07/24/against-the-censorship-of-adu...
    - subscribed 8mo ago
      Year at the time X was OPENLY posting and later selling (feature hid behind paid subscription) CSAM(1) and non consensual nudity payment processors were still okay with it. (1) https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/26/eu-also-investigating-as-grok-generated-23000-csam-images-in-11-days/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/26/eu-also-investigating-as-grok... > "Put another way, Grok generated an estimated 190 sexualized images per minute during that 11-day period. Among those, it made a sexualized image of children once every 41 seconds."
int32_64 8mo ago
Whatever happened to TorChat? Hopefully we are entering another golden age of "dissident" tech that seems to have culturally stagnated for at least a decade now.
- modernpacifist 8mo ago
  In reality, we are likely about to get yet another data point on where the lines for the average person really lie in the dimensions of functionality, friction, network effect and privacy. There are those that will stay on Discord because the benefits of the first three outweigh the degradation of privacy. Then there are those that will leave because the first three aren't important enough to outweigh the privacy loss. There will be all sorts of people in between. HN has a rather amplified showing of folks who won't trust anything unless it's completely decentralized using E2EE clients verifiably compiled from source that they'be personally audited running on hardware made from self-mined rare metals. The reality is that there is a spectrum of folks out there all with different preferences and while some folks will leave (in this case) Discord, others will remain because thats where the folks they want to chat/game/voice with.
  - int32_64 8mo ago
    The imprecision of this mandatory KYC tech will shatter network effects and cause entire groups to switch apps. Back when I played games one friend in our group was banned from LoL arbitrarily so the whole group switched to Dota 2.
- tokioyoyo 8mo ago
  During the haydays of WhatsApp updating their privacy terms, there was a month long battle where people kept saying how everyone will quit. The reality is, most people just don’t care about these things if their network is highly entrenched in one app. What happens is, some communities “partially move” the sensitive stuff to like Signal and others. Honestly, all of these are documented probabilities at this point. SNS owners can do very decent predictions on what will happen if they introduce certain kind of friction. Also, it’s not 2005 anymore, people are used to upload their IDs everywhere. I mentioned it before as well, if you’ve used any large app, the chances are you’ve uploaded your ID (AirBnB, Tinder, and etc.)
digiown 8mo ago
Discord has always had dark patterns which basically ban anonymity. If you aren't fingerprintable enough (using VPN, etc) they will force you to enter a phone number. They also encourage guild admins to require it, although it is technically a choice.
- nerdsniper 8mo ago
  Yeah any level of "anonymity" on Discord died long ago, if it ever existed in the first place. For me, any platform which doesn't enforce Tor is considered very NOT anonymous - even if its accessible through Tor, I don't trust it that much if I'm one of the only people actually using Tor to access the platform. SimpleX seems trustworthy enough, with thoughtful design decisions, even if it fails my "forced tor" requirement. I haven't spent the time to dive into Session's architecture, but it's on my to-do list, currently the marketing copy makes it look like the best choice.
- SapporoChris 8mo ago
  I have used Discord for a number of years always via VPN and I've never given away my phone number.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - subscribed 8mo ago
    I've been using two separate accounts, also always via VPN. My account was immediately blocked until I provided a phone number (doable but a chore to have a private number). Same with the other account. An attempt to remove an "optional" and totally not mandatory phone number results in immediate account block "for my own security" and a request for the number. You might be an outlier.
  - stubish 8mo ago
    There are servers that require a phone number to have been provided, I think in an attempt to stop harassment and sock puppets.
- 8mo ago
movedx 8mo ago
I’m going to do a video on this soon, but I was able to get Ergo IRCd and TheLounge up and running pretty quickly; https://chat.crilly.au/ https://chat.crilly.au/ I’ll be building a new platform on these two technologies and using Zoom or something else like Jitsi on the side for video/audio sharing. It’s time accept the loss of “features” and go back to something simpler but also something that can still be here in 38 years — like IRC has been.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > It’s time accept the loss of “features” and go back to something simpler I guess I have a hard time understanding these calls to switch to a platform that has even fewer features than the unverified Discord accounts. The blog post is incorrect in claiming that verification will be mandatory. It will only be necessary to access certain features and content. For simple IRC-style chats or even for voice chats with gaming friends, no verification is required. The average Discord user, or even the 98th percentile user, isn’t going to be looking to switch to a platform that isn’t a replacement for the features they use. They’re just going to not verify their accounts and move on.
  - taurath 8mo ago
    Yet people are en-mass switching from discord. Anonymity on the internet is important for a lot of reasons and is part of why it’s good. If hacker news required an ID to access who’s hiring and ask HN threads, people would move off. Communities aren’t about the “platform features” they’re about the environment. As for profit CEO after CEO fail to recognize time after time
    - Aurornis 8mo ago
      > Yet people are en-mass switching from discord. Some people are, but I would bet money on it being a very small number of people who switch platforms. The HN bubble is not representative of the average user. This is similar to when HN thought Reddit's userbase was going to shrink after the API changes (it didn't) or when the internet thought Netflix was going to lose subscribers when they cracked down on account sharing (they grew, not shrank). A few blog posts about people switching to IRC or setting up their own Matrix servers in protest isn't representative of a mass movement.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Discord dropped the hammer: mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month. The era of anonymous gaming chats is officially over. This isn't really accurate. Age verification is not mandatory for all accounts. You will be able to join a Discord with your friends, chat, and do voice without age verification. Here's the exact list of what's restricted if you don't verify: > Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. > Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. > Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users. > Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know. > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers. Taken from the announcement https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-... So the claim that Discord is making ID verification "mandatory" or that you need it for gaming chats is untrue.
- orbital-decay 8mo ago
  A ton of very niche communities are age-restricted and there's no way users in them would doxx themselves, so this is the end of those communities.
- hidden80 8mo ago
  This. We've gotten really bad at headline bangin.
- rockskon 8mo ago
  Discord says they'll use some AI garbage tool. Those are prone to mistakes over a large enough userbase. It will not be a rare occurrence for an adult to be labelled a child until they debase themselves with a scan of their face or a copy of their government ID. For children - this mandate also still makes the decision on behalf of the parents that a child must submit a scan of their face to a third party. Moving to Persona for age verification involves verification data being sent outside of the user's phone - in direct contradiction to Discord's initial promise of keeping facial scan data solely on the phone. Third parties that we've been given no reason to trust will delete the data without using it for an improper purpose such as creating derivative info from the ID or facial scan itself unrelated to the sole purpose of verifying that an individual is an adult. While we're at it - is there any legitimate reason why Discord is associating a person's actual or estimated age with their account as opposed to storing a value that states if they are or are not an adult? That sort of granularity seems unrelated to the stated purpose.
rvz 8mo ago
This is a speed-run pre-IPO enshitification phase for Discord and needs to be ready for Wall Street and this also happened with Reddit. Image what will happen post-IPO.
- Supermancho 8mo ago
  It may be related to legislation, which is not specifically tied to an IPO plan.
dancemethis 8mo ago
..."just"? Did they forget it's proprietary, and from the same person that made OpenFeint, which also had a privacy lawsuit?
rib3ye 8mo ago
After they were roasted by the 2022–2023 Pentagon doc leaks, it was pretty obvious they were going to take action. And not just that event: Parents are roasting Roblox for kids getting groomed, but after the relationship is initiated, the groomers always immediately the convo to Discord.
ai_critic 8mo ago
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. What's really more distressing is that it got this far before people figured out the game--maybe we should be reflecting on that part, the gullibility and the enabling of those people by those who knew better.
bashington 8mo ago
To access age-gated parts of Discord, you need to verify your age. This sounds reasonable. It's not much different to having your id card checked when purchasing alcohol. Actually it's better as you only have to do it once, not on each visit.
- lambdas 8mo ago
  Only if the shop assistant took your ID, photocopied it and stored it in a box marked “do not touch” under the counter, alongside transcriptions of everything you ever say inside the store.
- nnx 8mo ago
  Hmm no, because in the case of purchasing alcohol the ID check is 1:1, in time and in space, it's ephemeral (unless the clerk has extreme photographic memory). In the case of an online-based ID check, even with nice looking privacy terms, there is no guarantee that your ID won't be stored forever and/or re-analyzed many times cross-checking with other services, and worse leaked.
2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
Why do we care so much about closed platform Discord around here?
- bossyTeacher 8mo ago
  Default platform for general gaming related real-time chatting. Steam is only for PCs and is not real-time.
- SalariedSlave 8mo ago
  many development communities are active on Discord. if you want to follow or contribute to OSS, you'll need to join their Discords. this is a big problem - if individuals switch to something else, they will lose access to popular Discord communities. not sure what solution there is for this, as it's unrealistic that all communities would switch to the same alternative (if at all)
ilovefrog 8mo ago
[dead]
legitster 8mo ago
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-... > For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have. We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult. This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check. > Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it. IDs are used to get your age only and then deleted. Discord only receives your age — that’s it. Your identity is never associated with your account. > We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model. I work with corporate privacy all of the time, and there is actually something really interesting going on here. We're basically never allowed to claim legal compliance using heuristics or predictive models. Like, never ever. They demand a paper trail on everything, and telling our legal team that we are going to leave it to an algorithm on a user device would make them foam at the mouth. They are basically trusting a piece of software to look at your face or ID in the same way that, like, a server at a restaurant would check before serving you alcohol. I am curious to see if this kind of software compliance in the long run is even allowable by regulators.
- duskwuff 8mo ago
  Even wilder - they're claiming to look at a user's activity on the platform - like what servers they're on, what games they play, and what hours they're active - and infer adulthood from that. No way that'd pass legal muster.
  - philipov 8mo ago
    I'm curious just how wrong they're going to be about the ages of people who work from home or use a mobile device at work.
  - 8mo ago
biosubterranean 8mo ago
Discord has always felt more personal than just voice comms over a game. The way you can see more and more about what your friends are doing - like what song on spotify or how long you're playing fortnite, and how many days in a row you're playing these games. I feel like it has always been on this path to capture more and more of your data and personally link it to who you are.
486sx33 8mo ago
[dead]
agnishom 8mo ago
Does anyone have a list of good Matrix boards to join?
jonstaab 8mo ago
If you're looking for an alternative, I'm building flotilla.social, a self-hostable chat app built on nostr, which uses cryptographic identities to prevent identity capture.
- Kye 8mo ago
  Which specific use cases does this provide an alternative for? Chat is a tiny part of what people do with Discord and there are plenty of options already.
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Nice, nostr is a way better setup than bluesky imo. The way you just roll your identity like you roll a bitcoin wallet. Love it. I'll keep an eye on your app. Edit: it does look a little too corporate for me though with the 'book a demo' and the focus on my 'mission'. Doesn't really give hanging out with friends vibes. Just saying.
arjie 8mo ago
The section of people who care about anonymity has always been fairly small, even on niche communities like Hacker News. As an example, the most popular comment on the Australian social network ban for teens is in favour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 Watching as things play out, I understand why people try to target discord et al. with their complaints about the loss of anonymity. Being a tiny minority they have no hope to influence their governments because the opposite position is widely popular. Therefore, they try to convince commercial entities to disregard these laws as much as possible. This is particularly useful for that niche since fighting legislation cannot in itself be done anonymously. Therefore, they attempt to transform a very nonymous (haha) entity to do the fighting on their behalf. If the attempt fails, no harm befalls them. I think it's a doomed endeavour. To get users on discord, it has to be portrayed to parents as a safe and legal service. The days of underground BBSes are gone. Now, if your brand gets associated with anything negative you're toast. And realistically the anonymous users are kind of useless as a whole. They won't pay, so they're practically just a drag on your platform. Losing them risks not very much. Overall, a fight with a bygone conclusion. If you want anonymity you have to use other tools and be aware that simply using those tools marks you out as someone who desires anonymity.
- sixsevenrot 8mo ago
  There are two distinct issues: 1) Addictive design of many social networks (doom scrolling et al.) 2) Privacy & age verification On 1) most parents would support a legal limit on digital media use by age. But it's not a realistic requirement. Next best thing is to outlaw social media that results in addictive scrolling behaviour. Treating it the same way as smoking is not ideal, but no better solutions have been proposed. Many people on HN wouldn't mind if FB, TikTok and Insta were treated the same way as cocaine. I.e. only available for a lot of money to people who are happy to break the law. On 2) there are ways to implement technical solutions, that would allow the government to provide a privacy conscious service that would allow businesses to check if someone is 16+ or 18+ without collecting any other information. These services can be gamed. But that's not the point. A 14 year old could become addicted to cocaine and we wouldn't usually blame the policy for it. The problem is the government tries to solve problem 1) now, while the solution for 2) is being discussed. Again, a law that limits social media use for under 16 year olds is necessary. But so is a toolset that would enable a plausible age check, and limit the desire of FANG (and their Chinese competitors) to target minors.
phendrenad2 8mo ago
Lawyers killed anonymity, Discord's finger just pulled the trigger.
dgxyz 8mo ago
No it didn’t. Discord killed itself.
analog8374 8mo ago
Discord is so utterly horrible. Let it burn.
carefree-bob 8mo ago
I used to use discord for games a long time ago, but then I noticed it was being used for more serious stuff. For example, LLVM moved their chats from mailinglists to discord, as did a lot of open source projects. These are big, important projects, and now their chats are not discoverable and will soon be behind ID checks. It really bothered me that so many important projects were relying on a proprietary chat technology instead of using mailinglists or IRC which were more decentralized and under the control of the local admin. I would like to get back to a situation in which you can participate in group chats for open source projects without these being hosted on closed platforms, but if this results in major open source projects shifting from discord to telegram or whatsapp, then nothing will have been learned.
- renato_shira 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - em-bee 8mo ago
    don't vouch for comments by this user. it's a bot. see the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432
rozab 8mo ago
>mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month. This is a lie, this only affects you if you want to view porn/nsfw channels on discord. I'm in the UK happily using it without age verification.
zitterbewegung 8mo ago
Discord didn’t kill anonymity you did .
josefritzishere 8mo ago
The CEO of Discord Humam Sakhnini, is a former partner at McKinsey. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
- multisport 8mo ago
  if that doesnt tell me everything I need to know, what is everything I need to know
stevefan1999 8mo ago
Now the problem becomes would you rather trade convenience with privacy. Many people rather trade away privacy nowadays because they thought they got nothing up their sleeves.
nipperkinfeet 8mo ago
I hope this horrible, bloated service finally dies.
- dark-star 8mo ago
  It seems to work fine for thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. I mean not even twitter died like everyone claimed it would. Discord will just lose all people who have any reason to not verify their ID, which is probably mostly spammers and scammers, seeing how they invaded almost all servers in the last months
orbital-decay 8mo ago
Anonymity and Discord sounds funny when used in the same sentence. They've always been pretty greedy about user data and had hard to avoid phone verification for a very long time.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
2001zhaozhao 8mo ago
These articles feel like an overreaction. I use Discord daily and I don't think there is any reason for me to verify at all. The new restrictions are reasonable and don't affect the way I use the app.
DANmode 8mo ago
https://age-verifier.kibty.town https://age-verifier.kibty.town
cortesoft 8mo ago
> If you're staying on Discord, enjoy the surveillance. For the rest of us: it's time to learn how to self-host. Hmmm. I feel like self-hosting is the FASTEST way to lose your anonymity. Your self hosted service is MUCH more easily tied to your identity than some third party like discord. Just imagine you set up a self-hosted forum where you want to discuss something you want to keep private, but the government is very interested and wants to know who you are talking to. Well, now they know any IP address connecting to your forum is a person of interest. They don't need to decrypt anything to know you are talking to each other. By using something unique, you are going to make yourself uniquely identifiable.
- mid-kid 8mo ago
  Control over your data is part of anonymity. Sure, everyone will know the service belongs to you, but you'll be in total control over who knows what exactly. To most people not in the eye of the law, that is most of the anonymity they require. Also, services like TOR exist. Both on the hosting and user side.
  - jajuuka 8mo ago
    If you think TOR is anonymous then I have a bridge to sell you. It's far more likely a fed is going to record your activity on TOR than on a standard open web connection.
    - mid-kid 8mo ago
      The point of TOR is that while it can be detected, at the entry nobody knows what you're sending to whom, and at the exit nobody knows who is sending what. The fed sniffing my TOR connection can't really do anything with it.
hnthrowaway6323 8mo ago
Discord doesn't care about user privacy nor user security and actively retaliates against people. Their DPO ignored a PII leak I discovered and reported last year. Their dpo mail address just creates a zendesk ticket, I was able to view the ticket was locked and marked "solved" with no response a few days later. So, I brought it to the Dutch DPA, who were very responsive, and on the same day as their "final update" email, my nearly-decade old Discord account was suddenly "suspended" hours later. The PII leak, which had been ongoing for over a year before my discovery at that point was suddenly stopped the same day. Funny how that works. It took 5+ months for Discord's DPO and informal disputes team to finally get back to me after informing them of the retaliation, with irrelevant copy & paste templates giving me walk through guides on how to file a "trust and safety" ticket. When filing a ticket with "trust and safety" under appeal categories I get an automated "please appeal your ban through the app! I am now closing this ticket" response and my ticket's locked once again. And of course, appealing through the app gives me a generic system error.
opengrass 8mo ago
Cool! docker run --name ircd -p 6667:6667 inspircd/inspircd-docker
dark-star 8mo ago
I guess this is a good thing. It will reduce spammers and scammers that are invading every server like locusts these days. It will reduce attacks on and abuse of people, because those are usually founded on anonymity (no fear for repercussions etc.) I don't mind having a platform where everyone is at least somehow verified. yes, sure, you can bypass it and it is not 100% foolproof but what ever is? It raises the barrier for abuse and that's a good thing IMHO
endo_dev_null 8mo ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Related: Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/ https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995046)
1317 8mo ago
he finished the introduction paragraph and then the article ended
t0bia_s 8mo ago
Discord was never about anonymity. There is no e2e. There is IP loging, emails for registering... Author switching anonymity with privacy. Which will end soon on Discord.
unkoman 8mo ago
What is the easiest way to setup a discord alternative based on Matrix these days?
laerus 8mo ago
my gaming group is moving to steam, one less application to care about
pjmlp 8mo ago
We played networked games and had discussion forums before Discord ever came to be, no need to submitt to their wishes.
zoobab 8mo ago
Just use IRC.
mawadev 8mo ago
I just hope they accelerate this with a complete ID requirement everywhere, so I can finally forcibly kick my addiction to such time sinks and interact with my friends in more direct ways.
nottorp 8mo ago
I wonder what's their idea of adult content? For example, will I still be able to ask a friend over Discord when/where we meet for drinks?
anarticle 8mo ago
Sad bit is that it’s basically a paywall for spicy memes/content. (You’re paying with privacy) Anon tier you have to keep it PG.
burnt-resistor 8mo ago
Technofeudal empires are never on your side. Building anything on them is building sandcastles in the surf.

167 points by f0r3st 8mo ago

> mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month I thought age verification was only required to access "adult" content?

jsheard 8mo ago
It covers more than that, but it's not strictly mandatory. > Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. > Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. > Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users. > Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know. > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
- cced 8mo ago
  > > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers. Does this mean that in panel-like settings where 100s of users are listening to a speaker, in order to ask or contribute in voice you need to be verified?
  - jsheard 8mo ago
    I guess so, since the same role is used for anyone with permission to speak up in a stage channel. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005513722-Stage-Channels-FAQ#h_01F22AKYY4AFEK1JDWG2THSVY7 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005513722-... Hell if I know why unverified users are allowed to speak in normal voice channels but not in stage channels.
girvo 8mo ago
What gets deemed “adult” is incredibly random as far as I can tell, some of our servers/messages have triggered it, but no porn or anything is shared in them.
- roxolotl 8mo ago
  This is great post about this from Soatok back when visa and Mastercard pulled support from itch and steam in July. https://soatok.blog/2025/07/24/against-the-censorship-of-adult-content-by-payment-processors/ https://soatok.blog/2025/07/24/against-the-censorship-of-adu...
  - subscribed 8mo ago
    Year at the time X was OPENLY posting and later selling (feature hid behind paid subscription) CSAM(1) and non consensual nudity payment processors were still okay with it. (1) https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/26/eu-also-investigating-as-grok-generated-23000-csam-images-in-11-days/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/26/eu-also-investigating-as-grok... > "Put another way, Grok generated an estimated 190 sexualized images per minute during that 11-day period. Among those, it made a sexualized image of children once every 41 seconds."

int32_64 8mo ago

Whatever happened to TorChat? Hopefully we are entering another golden age of "dissident" tech that seems to have culturally stagnated for at least a decade now.

modernpacifist 8mo ago
In reality, we are likely about to get yet another data point on where the lines for the average person really lie in the dimensions of functionality, friction, network effect and privacy. There are those that will stay on Discord because the benefits of the first three outweigh the degradation of privacy. Then there are those that will leave because the first three aren't important enough to outweigh the privacy loss. There will be all sorts of people in between. HN has a rather amplified showing of folks who won't trust anything unless it's completely decentralized using E2EE clients verifiably compiled from source that they'be personally audited running on hardware made from self-mined rare metals. The reality is that there is a spectrum of folks out there all with different preferences and while some folks will leave (in this case) Discord, others will remain because thats where the folks they want to chat/game/voice with.
- int32_64 8mo ago
  The imprecision of this mandatory KYC tech will shatter network effects and cause entire groups to switch apps. Back when I played games one friend in our group was banned from LoL arbitrarily so the whole group switched to Dota 2.
tokioyoyo 8mo ago
During the haydays of WhatsApp updating their privacy terms, there was a month long battle where people kept saying how everyone will quit. The reality is, most people just don’t care about these things if their network is highly entrenched in one app. What happens is, some communities “partially move” the sensitive stuff to like Signal and others. Honestly, all of these are documented probabilities at this point. SNS owners can do very decent predictions on what will happen if they introduce certain kind of friction. Also, it’s not 2005 anymore, people are used to upload their IDs everywhere. I mentioned it before as well, if you’ve used any large app, the chances are you’ve uploaded your ID (AirBnB, Tinder, and etc.)

digiown 8mo ago

Discord has always had dark patterns which basically ban anonymity. If you aren't fingerprintable enough (using VPN, etc) they will force you to enter a phone number. They also encourage guild admins to require it, although it is technically a choice.

nerdsniper 8mo ago
Yeah any level of "anonymity" on Discord died long ago, if it ever existed in the first place. For me, any platform which doesn't enforce Tor is considered very NOT anonymous - even if its accessible through Tor, I don't trust it that much if I'm one of the only people actually using Tor to access the platform. SimpleX seems trustworthy enough, with thoughtful design decisions, even if it fails my "forced tor" requirement. I haven't spent the time to dive into Session's architecture, but it's on my to-do list, currently the marketing copy makes it look like the best choice.
SapporoChris 8mo ago
I have used Discord for a number of years always via VPN and I've never given away my phone number.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- subscribed 8mo ago
  I've been using two separate accounts, also always via VPN. My account was immediately blocked until I provided a phone number (doable but a chore to have a private number). Same with the other account. An attempt to remove an "optional" and totally not mandatory phone number results in immediate account block "for my own security" and a request for the number. You might be an outlier.
- stubish 8mo ago
  There are servers that require a phone number to have been provided, I think in an attempt to stop harassment and sock puppets.
8mo ago

movedx 8mo ago

I’m going to do a video on this soon, but I was able to get Ergo IRCd and TheLounge up and running pretty quickly; https://chat.crilly.au/ https://chat.crilly.au/ I’ll be building a new platform on these two technologies and using Zoom or something else like Jitsi on the side for video/audio sharing. It’s time accept the loss of “features” and go back to something simpler but also something that can still be here in 38 years — like IRC has been.

Aurornis 8mo ago
> It’s time accept the loss of “features” and go back to something simpler I guess I have a hard time understanding these calls to switch to a platform that has even fewer features than the unverified Discord accounts. The blog post is incorrect in claiming that verification will be mandatory. It will only be necessary to access certain features and content. For simple IRC-style chats or even for voice chats with gaming friends, no verification is required. The average Discord user, or even the 98th percentile user, isn’t going to be looking to switch to a platform that isn’t a replacement for the features they use. They’re just going to not verify their accounts and move on.
- taurath 8mo ago
  Yet people are en-mass switching from discord. Anonymity on the internet is important for a lot of reasons and is part of why it’s good. If hacker news required an ID to access who’s hiring and ask HN threads, people would move off. Communities aren’t about the “platform features” they’re about the environment. As for profit CEO after CEO fail to recognize time after time
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    > Yet people are en-mass switching from discord. Some people are, but I would bet money on it being a very small number of people who switch platforms. The HN bubble is not representative of the average user. This is similar to when HN thought Reddit's userbase was going to shrink after the API changes (it didn't) or when the internet thought Netflix was going to lose subscribers when they cracked down on account sharing (they grew, not shrank). A few blog posts about people switching to IRC or setting up their own Matrix servers in protest isn't representative of a mass movement.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> Discord dropped the hammer: mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month. The era of anonymous gaming chats is officially over. This isn't really accurate. Age verification is not mandatory for all accounts. You will be able to join a Discord with your friends, chat, and do voice without age verification. Here's the exact list of what's restricted if you don't verify: > Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. > Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. > Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users. > Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know. > Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers. Taken from the announcement https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-... So the claim that Discord is making ID verification "mandatory" or that you need it for gaming chats is untrue.

orbital-decay 8mo ago
A ton of very niche communities are age-restricted and there's no way users in them would doxx themselves, so this is the end of those communities.
hidden80 8mo ago
This. We've gotten really bad at headline bangin.
rockskon 8mo ago
Discord says they'll use some AI garbage tool. Those are prone to mistakes over a large enough userbase. It will not be a rare occurrence for an adult to be labelled a child until they debase themselves with a scan of their face or a copy of their government ID. For children - this mandate also still makes the decision on behalf of the parents that a child must submit a scan of their face to a third party. Moving to Persona for age verification involves verification data being sent outside of the user's phone - in direct contradiction to Discord's initial promise of keeping facial scan data solely on the phone. Third parties that we've been given no reason to trust will delete the data without using it for an improper purpose such as creating derivative info from the ID or facial scan itself unrelated to the sole purpose of verifying that an individual is an adult. While we're at it - is there any legitimate reason why Discord is associating a person's actual or estimated age with their account as opposed to storing a value that states if they are or are not an adult? That sort of granularity seems unrelated to the stated purpose.

rvz 8mo ago

This is a speed-run pre-IPO enshitification phase for Discord and needs to be ready for Wall Street and this also happened with Reddit. Image what will happen post-IPO.

Supermancho 8mo ago
It may be related to legislation, which is not specifically tied to an IPO plan.

dancemethis 8mo ago

..."just"? Did they forget it's proprietary, and from the same person that made OpenFeint, which also had a privacy lawsuit?

rib3ye 8mo ago

After they were roasted by the 2022–2023 Pentagon doc leaks, it was pretty obvious they were going to take action. And not just that event: Parents are roasting Roblox for kids getting groomed, but after the relationship is initiated, the groomers always immediately the convo to Discord.

ai_critic 8mo ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. What's really more distressing is that it got this far before people figured out the game--maybe we should be reflecting on that part, the gullibility and the enabling of those people by those who knew better.

bashington 8mo ago

To access age-gated parts of Discord, you need to verify your age. This sounds reasonable. It's not much different to having your id card checked when purchasing alcohol. Actually it's better as you only have to do it once, not on each visit.

lambdas 8mo ago
Only if the shop assistant took your ID, photocopied it and stored it in a box marked “do not touch” under the counter, alongside transcriptions of everything you ever say inside the store.
nnx 8mo ago
Hmm no, because in the case of purchasing alcohol the ID check is 1:1, in time and in space, it's ephemeral (unless the clerk has extreme photographic memory). In the case of an online-based ID check, even with nice looking privacy terms, there is no guarantee that your ID won't be stored forever and/or re-analyzed many times cross-checking with other services, and worse leaked.

2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago

Why do we care so much about closed platform Discord around here?

bossyTeacher 8mo ago
Default platform for general gaming related real-time chatting. Steam is only for PCs and is not real-time.
SalariedSlave 8mo ago
many development communities are active on Discord. if you want to follow or contribute to OSS, you'll need to join their Discords. this is a big problem - if individuals switch to something else, they will lose access to popular Discord communities. not sure what solution there is for this, as it's unrealistic that all communities would switch to the same alternative (if at all)

ilovefrog 8mo ago

[dead]

legitster 8mo ago

https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-... > For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have. We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult. This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check. > Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it. IDs are used to get your age only and then deleted. Discord only receives your age — that’s it. Your identity is never associated with your account. > We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model. I work with corporate privacy all of the time, and there is actually something really interesting going on here. We're basically never allowed to claim legal compliance using heuristics or predictive models. Like, never ever. They demand a paper trail on everything, and telling our legal team that we are going to leave it to an algorithm on a user device would make them foam at the mouth. They are basically trusting a piece of software to look at your face or ID in the same way that, like, a server at a restaurant would check before serving you alcohol. I am curious to see if this kind of software compliance in the long run is even allowable by regulators.

duskwuff 8mo ago
Even wilder - they're claiming to look at a user's activity on the platform - like what servers they're on, what games they play, and what hours they're active - and infer adulthood from that. No way that'd pass legal muster.
- philipov 8mo ago
  I'm curious just how wrong they're going to be about the ages of people who work from home or use a mobile device at work.
- 8mo ago

biosubterranean 8mo ago

Discord has always felt more personal than just voice comms over a game. The way you can see more and more about what your friends are doing - like what song on spotify or how long you're playing fortnite, and how many days in a row you're playing these games. I feel like it has always been on this path to capture more and more of your data and personally link it to who you are.

486sx33 8mo ago

[dead]

agnishom 8mo ago

Does anyone have a list of good Matrix boards to join?

jonstaab 8mo ago

If you're looking for an alternative, I'm building flotilla.social, a self-hostable chat app built on nostr, which uses cryptographic identities to prevent identity capture.

Kye 8mo ago
Which specific use cases does this provide an alternative for? Chat is a tiny part of what people do with Discord and there are plenty of options already.
wolvoleo 8mo ago
Nice, nostr is a way better setup than bluesky imo. The way you just roll your identity like you roll a bitcoin wallet. Love it. I'll keep an eye on your app. Edit: it does look a little too corporate for me though with the 'book a demo' and the focus on my 'mission'. Doesn't really give hanging out with friends vibes. Just saying.

arjie 8mo ago

The section of people who care about anonymity has always been fairly small, even on niche communities like Hacker News. As an example, the most popular comment on the Australian social network ban for teens is in favour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 Watching as things play out, I understand why people try to target discord et al. with their complaints about the loss of anonymity. Being a tiny minority they have no hope to influence their governments because the opposite position is widely popular. Therefore, they try to convince commercial entities to disregard these laws as much as possible. This is particularly useful for that niche since fighting legislation cannot in itself be done anonymously. Therefore, they attempt to transform a very nonymous (haha) entity to do the fighting on their behalf. If the attempt fails, no harm befalls them. I think it's a doomed endeavour. To get users on discord, it has to be portrayed to parents as a safe and legal service. The days of underground BBSes are gone. Now, if your brand gets associated with anything negative you're toast. And realistically the anonymous users are kind of useless as a whole. They won't pay, so they're practically just a drag on your platform. Losing them risks not very much. Overall, a fight with a bygone conclusion. If you want anonymity you have to use other tools and be aware that simply using those tools marks you out as someone who desires anonymity.

sixsevenrot 8mo ago
There are two distinct issues: 1) Addictive design of many social networks (doom scrolling et al.) 2) Privacy & age verification On 1) most parents would support a legal limit on digital media use by age. But it's not a realistic requirement. Next best thing is to outlaw social media that results in addictive scrolling behaviour. Treating it the same way as smoking is not ideal, but no better solutions have been proposed. Many people on HN wouldn't mind if FB, TikTok and Insta were treated the same way as cocaine. I.e. only available for a lot of money to people who are happy to break the law. On 2) there are ways to implement technical solutions, that would allow the government to provide a privacy conscious service that would allow businesses to check if someone is 16+ or 18+ without collecting any other information. These services can be gamed. But that's not the point. A 14 year old could become addicted to cocaine and we wouldn't usually blame the policy for it. The problem is the government tries to solve problem 1) now, while the solution for 2) is being discussed. Again, a law that limits social media use for under 16 year olds is necessary. But so is a toolset that would enable a plausible age check, and limit the desire of FANG (and their Chinese competitors) to target minors.

phendrenad2 8mo ago

Lawyers killed anonymity, Discord's finger just pulled the trigger.

dgxyz 8mo ago

No it didn’t. Discord killed itself.

analog8374 8mo ago

Discord is so utterly horrible. Let it burn.

carefree-bob 8mo ago

I used to use discord for games a long time ago, but then I noticed it was being used for more serious stuff. For example, LLVM moved their chats from mailinglists to discord, as did a lot of open source projects. These are big, important projects, and now their chats are not discoverable and will soon be behind ID checks. It really bothered me that so many important projects were relying on a proprietary chat technology instead of using mailinglists or IRC which were more decentralized and under the control of the local admin. I would like to get back to a situation in which you can participate in group chats for open source projects without these being hosted on closed platforms, but if this results in major open source projects shifting from discord to telegram or whatsapp, then nothing will have been learned.

renato_shira 8mo ago
[flagged]
- em-bee 8mo ago
  don't vouch for comments by this user. it's a bot. see the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432

rozab 8mo ago

>mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month. This is a lie, this only affects you if you want to view porn/nsfw channels on discord. I'm in the UK happily using it without age verification.

zitterbewegung 8mo ago

Discord didn’t kill anonymity you did .

josefritzishere 8mo ago

The CEO of Discord Humam Sakhnini, is a former partner at McKinsey. I think that tells you everything you need to know.

multisport 8mo ago
if that doesnt tell me everything I need to know, what is everything I need to know

stevefan1999 8mo ago

Now the problem becomes would you rather trade convenience with privacy. Many people rather trade away privacy nowadays because they thought they got nothing up their sleeves.

nipperkinfeet 8mo ago

I hope this horrible, bloated service finally dies.

dark-star 8mo ago
It seems to work fine for thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. I mean not even twitter died like everyone claimed it would. Discord will just lose all people who have any reason to not verify their ID, which is probably mostly spammers and scammers, seeing how they invaded almost all servers in the last months

orbital-decay 8mo ago

Anonymity and Discord sounds funny when used in the same sentence. They've always been pretty greedy about user data and had hard to avoid phone verification for a very long time.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

2001zhaozhao 8mo ago

These articles feel like an overreaction. I use Discord daily and I don't think there is any reason for me to verify at all. The new restrictions are reasonable and don't affect the way I use the app.

DANmode 8mo ago

https://age-verifier.kibty.town https://age-verifier.kibty.town

cortesoft 8mo ago

> If you're staying on Discord, enjoy the surveillance. For the rest of us: it's time to learn how to self-host. Hmmm. I feel like self-hosting is the FASTEST way to lose your anonymity. Your self hosted service is MUCH more easily tied to your identity than some third party like discord. Just imagine you set up a self-hosted forum where you want to discuss something you want to keep private, but the government is very interested and wants to know who you are talking to. Well, now they know any IP address connecting to your forum is a person of interest. They don't need to decrypt anything to know you are talking to each other. By using something unique, you are going to make yourself uniquely identifiable.

mid-kid 8mo ago
Control over your data is part of anonymity. Sure, everyone will know the service belongs to you, but you'll be in total control over who knows what exactly. To most people not in the eye of the law, that is most of the anonymity they require. Also, services like TOR exist. Both on the hosting and user side.
- jajuuka 8mo ago
  If you think TOR is anonymous then I have a bridge to sell you. It's far more likely a fed is going to record your activity on TOR than on a standard open web connection.
  - mid-kid 8mo ago
    The point of TOR is that while it can be detected, at the entry nobody knows what you're sending to whom, and at the exit nobody knows who is sending what. The fed sniffing my TOR connection can't really do anything with it.

hnthrowaway6323 8mo ago

Discord doesn't care about user privacy nor user security and actively retaliates against people. Their DPO ignored a PII leak I discovered and reported last year. Their dpo mail address just creates a zendesk ticket, I was able to view the ticket was locked and marked "solved" with no response a few days later. So, I brought it to the Dutch DPA, who were very responsive, and on the same day as their "final update" email, my nearly-decade old Discord account was suddenly "suspended" hours later. The PII leak, which had been ongoing for over a year before my discovery at that point was suddenly stopped the same day. Funny how that works. It took 5+ months for Discord's DPO and informal disputes team to finally get back to me after informing them of the retaliation, with irrelevant copy & paste templates giving me walk through guides on how to file a "trust and safety" ticket. When filing a ticket with "trust and safety" under appeal categories I get an automated "please appeal your ban through the app! I am now closing this ticket" response and my ticket's locked once again. And of course, appealing through the app gives me a generic system error.

opengrass 8mo ago

Cool! docker run --name ircd -p 6667:6667 inspircd/inspircd-docker

dark-star 8mo ago

I guess this is a good thing. It will reduce spammers and scammers that are invading every server like locusts these days. It will reduce attacks on and abuse of people, because those are usually founded on anonymity (no fear for repercussions etc.) I don't mind having a platform where everyone is at least somehow verified. yes, sure, you can bypass it and it is not 100% foolproof but what ever is? It raises the barrier for abuse and that's a good thing IMHO

endo_dev_null 8mo ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Related: Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/ https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995046)

1317 8mo ago

he finished the introduction paragraph and then the article ended

t0bia_s 8mo ago

Discord was never about anonymity. There is no e2e. There is IP loging, emails for registering... Author switching anonymity with privacy. Which will end soon on Discord.

unkoman 8mo ago

What is the easiest way to setup a discord alternative based on Matrix these days?

laerus 8mo ago

my gaming group is moving to steam, one less application to care about

pjmlp 8mo ago

We played networked games and had discussion forums before Discord ever came to be, no need to submitt to their wishes.

zoobab 8mo ago

Just use IRC.

mawadev 8mo ago

I just hope they accelerate this with a complete ID requirement everywhere, so I can finally forcibly kick my addiction to such time sinks and interact with my friends in more direct ways.

nottorp 8mo ago

I wonder what's their idea of adult content? For example, will I still be able to ask a friend over Discord when/where we meet for drinks?

anarticle 8mo ago

Sad bit is that it’s basically a paywall for spicy memes/content. (You’re paying with privacy) Anon tier you have to keep it PG.

burnt-resistor 8mo ago

Technofeudal empires are never on your side. Building anything on them is building sandcastles in the surf.