Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
As a parent: 100% agree
Oh right, another account to delete.
If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn’t be happening.
For someone that used discord only for video chat and the chat sidebar for D&D since we have players in person and a couple in other states, what would you all recommend?
Should we just switch to Zoom or something?
Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren’t even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.
What did reddit do? I heard about for in the Uk and aussielands, because they are leading the way in subjugating the internet to ai, to id every account and associate it with id and likeness and every word, every page view, to run ai threat detection, and create secret social scores, to then without attribution filter down to banks and search engines and isp’s, to digital price tags on cctv facial recognition systems, to law enforcement information networks, the courts, etc., to decide your treatment. If you get the loan, pass the background check, get the job, what search results your internet shows you, what prices you are offered for individualized ai pricing. How much police scrutiny you get, your treatment in court. Your treatement in the business community.
This is surrendering their citizens to big tech, for a cut of the information and control of the all encompassing social scores. There will be ways for the authorities to slip bad scores on individual people, and groups, they don’t like as there always are. How else are they going to stamp out anit salmonism or whatever? Or the criticism to their corrupt rule down the road.
Age controls, and chatcontrol, are trojan horses, redesigned as trojan sheep, to bring big tech and ai behind the walls of liberal democracy. It’s a betrayal of your citizens to the most powerful people in the world, the peter thiels, with the most malign worldview and plans imaginable being put in charge of ranking citizens from winners to losers.
So reddit just did the age checks for the aussies and uk peoples so far right? They didn’t do anything to mine in that regard, their moderation is dishonest site wide, violating people for false pretenses, for other reasons, so you can’t actually challenge or even be sure what you are being violated for, whether it’s Israel, or triggering some group of snowflakes like conservatives. But I was able to create new accounts without any such scrutiny just an email that returns a message to activate the account, as of half a year ago anyway.
It’s all about abuse.
Companies get too big for their britches and are accustomed to doing whatever they want with their sheep just going along.
I’m sure they’re very surprised to see any kind of significant backlash.
Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their “support forums” on Discord.
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody’s surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn’t interact with users.
Yes, thank you.
I hate all age verification checks, I even hate Steam’s when they present me that dumb number drop list before I see a game’s store page based on its content. If you know my age, you don’t need to ever fucking ask me. If I’ve told you, with a straight face and no malicious intent that “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” then STOP ASKING ME FOR MY AGE!!
Now something I don’t see some people talk about is that, there are people out there who have lied about their age. It’s nothing new. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. We’ve collectively been building a platform for this to eventually be coming and we’re paying some of that price.
With Discord going Public in March and this rolling out in March, it goes hand and hand.
Steam asking you Everytime means they ACTUALLY are deleting private details you give them, and only store them locally so you have full control over how long they know.
This is literally the fucking exact ideal way this should be handled. Why the fuck would you be upset over literally the most consumer way possible to handle age verification.
No one sane is going to pretend we don’t need some form of verification. Even if it is just lip service for legal purposes. 10 year olds should a have at least a check to be like hay this isn’t for you ask Mom and dad first. So parents can also be aware there IS something for them to be aware of.
You can’t expect parents to be omniscient after all.
So having companies actually respect data privacy and control, and give appropriate warnings is literally exactly what we want.
Because it’s like asking you for an ID to purchase alcohol. And you’re standing there with a full beard, some wrinkles in your skin and having an aged look. It’s insulting.
But I guess you wouldn’t know that because OMGVALVE!!
so… you do want face verification for online interactions?
edit: In-person, for a “regulated” substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There’s no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I’ve seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.
Online, the rule has been “trust me, bro” forever. There’s no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.
This is hardly OMGVALVE.
Tangential, but if it is enforced (alchohol has good reason to do so) it should be enforced impartially regardless of how you look, otherwise it’s discrimination. My comment is based on my Asian looking experience.
What bothers me that people are outraged as if Discord would lock everyone out until they prove their age. As far as I can see, age verification is not mandatory unless you want to engage in 18+ channels. No major changes besides some friend invites warnings, blurred age restricted content and some other things.
I like your point about that nobody talks about children lying they are 18+. So far there are no way to restrict them from engaging in adult chatrooms. Discord has a insane reputation for being a cesspool of pedophilia and exposure to adult content to children. Shit ton of people talked about it. And now, when Discord decided to actually do something about it - major buzz against it.
Noting will change to any user if they use Discord to chat and play with friends. What will change is a mandatory verification for people who visit explicit groups and channels marked as 18+ content. No more, no less.
As you have mentioned, they are protecting themselves before going public.
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don’t want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public. It will also filter images in dms.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s ineffective at tackling the actual problem, if anything adds appeal by making content “forbidden”. I’m certainly cancelling my cheap nitro I’ve had for a while because I’m not giving any company arbitrarily implementing identity verification any of my money.
I’ll also probably look into setting up my own matrix server later…
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don’t want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public
That is the difficult part for people to accept. Your friend chat might be full of adults and you have nothing to worry about when posting this content. But, say we got a major channel with hundreds of people that might or might not be adults. If there are NSFW channels, these children can access them. How to prevent this?
ID verification does not fix the issue, of course. But at the very least it minimizes the damage. As many state, children will find explicit content somewhere else - so why bother? I would argue that letting things stay as they are doesn’t solve the issue at all. Doesn’t even try to regulate it.
Discord has been known to be a gateway for children to explicit content. It also has been known as a place where many children diddlers been hanging around. This always has been an chat/call/video call app. People who miss their friend NSFW chats, can move them outside of the app and keep on using Discord as before without needing to prove their age. Maybe inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
“I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data,” wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. “What a great way to kill your community,” added another longtime user, while some predicted “that’s game over for Discord” and remarked ruefully that “privacy on the internet is truly dead”.
LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.
These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It’s pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord’s user base than they do.
The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.
I dunno about netflix, but at least the reddit debacle diverted a lot of users to the fediverse.
If we get a similar exodus from discord to matrix, that would work wonders for spreading the fediverse to others. Most of them still haven’t even heard of it.
Thats not my point though.
At the time reddit closed their API to third parties loads of idiots were saying it was the end of reddit.
In reality reddit just sanitised their user base.
In reality, reddit gave a userbase to a platform that previously had none.
… and yet, that’s not what im talking about.
A blip of users
Man 100%. Every now and then you hear that Facebook is “hemorrhaging users” or “it’s all over” but most normal people just don’t give a fuck and use it because they’re already there and their friends are too. This’ll be no different.
Not only that, verification is not mandatory. So, unless you frequent some questionable 2 furry goatse 1 cup channels, there is literally nothing to worry about. The rest will gladly verify their age and jerk off to their favorite AI generated porn.
The real problem is, that the majority of users won’t change, and it’s the users that make Discord. There could be a much better alternative but if users are too lazy to change, it is worth nothing.
This is the case with Facebook messenger too. There are great alternatives, but it’s messenger that has the userbase
For people that don’t like Discord, this change does probably nothing. I only start it when I need it. I do basic communication,I don’t buy anything and I don’t follow 18+ content.
For all purposes this change just decreases the likelihood of accidentally seeing pr0n.
And compounding the issue is that there isn’t a better alternative to discord in terms of feature set and accessibility. Matrix is the closest, but its just… not there yet. There’s no option for people who care about privacy that isn’t a steep downgrade, and that just sucks.
The reality is that there never will be, because the feature set offered by Discord is functionally impossible to provide to the public without charging a subscription fee most users would be unwilling to pay. It’s a doomed business model, where enshittification and being acquired is inevitable.
hunting for alternatives
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
I’ve been forwarded this pretty neat summary of the current alternatives (Mastodon thread) :
Slightly related. Does anyone know of any decent Matrix clients (apps) on Android and/or Linux? Because, and I don’t mean to be rude when I say this but…Element is very, very bad.
Im using SchildiChat on Android
It’s definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.
The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can’t define a set order to group things by function.
The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
Yeah, I have no idea why the matrix developers decided to have stuff called “spaces and rooms” instead of servers and channels.
Calling them servers in discord always annoyed me. Spaces and rooms isn’t much better. Room is fine, but space is incredibly nondescript.
Like the other replies you’ve gotten, I never really liked “server”. It implies something very different from what it is.
Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It’s a lot less immediately clear, but there’s something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I’m just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.
Coming from IRC it always baffled me why people on Discord would talk about servers and channels too. Especially servers. It still irks me when someone says “Join my Discord server”.
And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
Pretty sure discord has the same.
Discord has E2EE?
QR based sign in
Oh, it does? I’ve always logged in with username and password.
It has QR based sign in. Shit, Steam has QR based sign in so it shouldn’t be weird for people at this point.
So do “Smart TV” apps. Or messenger like Signal. That is really a common thing nowadays.
I’ve seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL…or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it’s not typically mandatory, and I don’t think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren’t likely to be especially comfortable with it.
No audio calls
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I think the video call rooms (always open channels) remember your preference but im not sure rn
I tried starting an audio call (had a telephone icon) yesterday but it turned on my webcam without prompting. Didn’t see a setting for it not to do that, and that’s a wild default.
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I don’t see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.
I run a Matrix server and it’s deffo YMMV based on the server admin and how good they are at maintaining things.
Getting the federation to work can also be a chore and a half. Otherwise it works super well. The clients often implement features on top of the protocol (looking at Element and their weird jitsi integration for instance).
I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.
We also use Element desktop and Element X for Android. I think I read that the old Element might have supported audio calls? But these days, it’s video only, with the very weird UX of having two different options for video calls (one being, as you say, Jitsi). I assume there’s a historical reason for that, but it doesn’t make much sense as a design today, to me.
Having Discord-style audio rooms built around the idea that people are not broadcasting all the time (as opposed to the more chat-like design of today) would be one of the most impactful comparatively low effort (considering they already have video calls working) things they could do, IMO.
I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.
Absolutely a strong way to go.
Yea, there are some historical reasons for the integrations, but they could do a better job evolving the UI to match the current state of things for sure.
I never really thought if matrix as a discord alternative.
They’re both messaging apps but directed at different markets / uses.
I would have said Matrix is a kind of hybrid. Obviously Matrix has 1 on 1 chats and individual IRC-like rooms, which are not at all like Discord.
But the addition of Spaces is very much positioning itself as an open Discord alternative.
Stoat.chat seems to be a more likely alternative. I love matrix, but I don’t think it can replace Discord. Not yet.
This seems to be like Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
I see a lot of morons shilling one over the other, so I expect it to be the stupid-platform.
It’s terrible. They’ve had years and years to get their shit together and they still can’t. It’s just horrendously bad.
they
Your server, not mine, homie. Shop around for a better admin who actually knows how to install the thing.
I use it all the time. There are many mature clients, and matrix is a protocol, so I don’t know what you mean. Since the sliding sync implementations, I have found it really nice to use.
Agreed, Matrix works fine as a toy, but it breaks down after a year or two with even a moderate amount of chat.
I’ve been floating the idea of running Matrix on my NAS anyway, so thanks to Discord for finally pissing me off enough to prioritise getting off of the shitty platform.
I highly recommend looking into Matrix Ansible Deploy, has an amazing documentation and actually works robustly. It will make the whole process of hosting it way easier, I only needed to change like 5 config values, give Ansible the SSH key for my server, and then basically run “just setup-all” from a Ansible docker.
Oh that’s interesting, I’ll look into it. Cheers!
Well, I hope that Revolt/Stoat picks up most people.
did you tried it, what is the experience like?
Honestly, it’s almost a drop-in replacement as far as UX is concerned. The challenge is the lack of existing communities, which could be overcome if a whole community joined.
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
True, but it made it easy to chat with others without having to enter in an IP address.
It’s basically IRC, with 2 good features (voice, video) and a whole helluva lotta bullshit features that only exist to be monetized (Nitro, stickers, etc).
All of that extra bullshit actively detracts from discord and I hope Matrix never follows suit.
The only viable alternatives are Stoat or Steam Chat. Teamspeak is still dragging their feet when it comes to modern feature support.
I’ve read that Stoat is bad for self-hosting, something about calls/video broadcasting not being part of the docker image, and needing to compile from source with every update?
I spent most of my day searching, spinning up containers, and discussing with friends and users on my discord ‘server’ about what to do. I burned out after a few hours of frustration. I had Mumble up and running a year ago but that was a bit too techy for new users, and it’s not really the ‘community’ feature set that I’d want…
Man if steam made a shitty version of discord I’d happily use it. I really like the boy integration.
I am going to bet noone in their team wants to do that, they are most likely pressured into it legally.
I hope they find a way to fight this
The thing is they aren’t (yet). It looks like the EU might be thinking about introducing some sort of requirement for age verification, but it’s nowhere near decided enough for Discord to demand it globally. There are also methods of age verification that are much better and more secure than what they will use, like the German AusweisApp.
The eID can do this EU wide already but it’s usage is regulated and that’s not something a company wants to accept. The EU Digital Identity Wallet would hit the spot even more, since it’s very privacy friendly: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/930450954/The+Age+Verification+Manual
That’s still in testing though and even less in the interest of a company that wants to extract as much user data as possible.
