Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
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 disagree that this will help at all. Certainly not to a degree that justifies restricting other people’s freedom. Grooming happens in small circles and doesn’t become substantially harder if teenagers can’t access nsfw channels. Predators don’t seek out adult-dominated spaces. Kids might be exposed to slightly less porn or something but they will still go to pornhub, and now an access channel where there are at least likely normal adults around that could give context id needed is restricted. Worst case they’ll be driven to fringe spaces filled with predators.
And also, people don’t just use nsfw channels for porn or questionable memes. People mark servers as 18+ for a variety of reasons, some have political discussion channels marked as nsfw to make them easier to avoid, etc.
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…
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 disagree that this will help at all. Certainly not to a degree that justifies restricting other people’s freedom. Grooming happens in small circles and doesn’t become substantially harder if teenagers can’t access nsfw channels. Predators don’t seek out adult-dominated spaces. Kids might be exposed to slightly less porn or something but they will still go to pornhub, and now an access channel where there are at least likely normal adults around that could give context id needed is restricted. Worst case they’ll be driven to fringe spaces filled with predators.
And also, people don’t just use nsfw channels for porn or questionable memes. People mark servers as 18+ for a variety of reasons, some have political discussion channels marked as nsfw to make them easier to avoid, etc.