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?
Conservatives have been using the “think of the children line” to justify Draconian overeach for years. All while simultaneously doing everything in their power to take away programs that help children.
political parties aren’t real. Their only purpose is market segmentation.
It doesn’t matter which teams win in sports, billionaires own all the leagues.
Let’s not act like the dems don’t do some of the same shit.
And no I’m not both sidesing this shit…just saying that the dems/left uses this reasoning a lot as well.
As a parent: 100% agree
So are you for or against mass surveillance veiled as “child safety”?
Should be pretty evident from the comment.
I can’t help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope
So they’re going to turn everybody into teenagers. Last I checked, teenagers can’t buy things like nitro right? Doesn’t that completely fuck up their own business model?
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
The practice of making a “free” thing so you can whore your MAU numbers out to private equity to keep the lights on should be wholesale abolished.
The EU has apparently decided that this has to be done for most public platforms by July 2026, so Discord may not have much of a choice and other platforms will likely follow: (Edit: I forgot, the EU strict age verification stuff seems to be limited to EU DSA’s definition of “platforms” so as a text messenger I’m not sure Discord is part of it. But this’ll still likely be coming to more services near you and perhaps Discord is just voluntarily joining the chaos…)
I could be wrong I’m not a lawyer, assume everything I write from here is bullshit, but see here:
https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say “Online services get up to 12 months to apply age verification, EU guidelines say” This was in July 2025.
EU guidelines in question seem to be: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors + https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226 Quotes:
“[…] the Union legislature enacted Article 28 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and the Council (6). Paragraph 1 of this provision obliges providers of online platforms […] to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors, […]”
“Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”
“In the following circumstances, […] the Commission considers the use of access restrictions supported by age verification methods an appropriate and proportionate measure to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors: […] an online platform accessible to minors has identified risks to minors’ privacy, safety, or security, including content, conduct and consumer risks as well as contact risks (e.g., arising from features such as live chat, image/video sharing, anonymous messaging)”
“Age estimation methods can complement age verification technologies and can be used in addition to the former,” (AKA the alternative to a literal gov ID check seems to be big data AI sucking up all user data to estimate user age.)
The in my opinion horrible solution the EU seems to have found to avoid sharing the physical ID for services that don’t want to request one, is apparently this app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui Which from what I can tell 1. it requires Google device attestation so all custom ROMs are out and to be a citizen you can apparently no longer own your device, 2. unless you use iOS or Android you’re apparently not a citizen, 3. once everyone is used to using some citizen app like that, I feel like a fascist government could easily tie it to a social score or other authoritarian measures bewyond the age verification. 4. There is a privacy friendly alternative approach anyway, that most governments seem to conveniently be ignoring: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/13/california-law-online-age-checks-00606115
Anyway, I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. But spread the word, somehow press seems to be ignoring this.
Hi, it’s me your lawyer!
Here’s some legal advice for you: delete Discord, hit the gym, lawyer up.
This has been official legal advice from me, your official lawyer.
Peace!
I’m already making backups and deleting all the posts and DMs I made on discord. Yes I know they probably have everything backed up, but there is always a possibility that they lose that shit or don’t fully back up everything. I am not interesting in playing along with their bullshit.
What’s wild to me is that I’m not on corporate social media, and the outrage has absolutely exploded on Mastodon and Lemmy. I wonder how bad it has gotten on the corporate media sites, because there’s no way the algorithm hasn’t noticed it.
It reminds me of when OnlyFans (stupidly) told us all they weren’t going to allow porn anymore, as if that wasn’t the core of their business.
I haven’t even heard about it on Discord itself.
Anecdotal obviously, but I’m not sure it’s a big news story on corporate media sites.
Huh, wow.
Could be I’m wrong.
It makes sense that it wouldn’t be story on corporate news sites though.
If Gen Z had left Twitter when Musk ruined it this wouldn’t be happening.
If people didn’t leave Twitter when it became an unholy cestpool of alt-right propaganda, they have chosen to stay there because their audience is the alt-right.
alt-right
Ah, haven’t heard that in a long time. 'Member when Nazis weren’t mainstream conservatives?
Oh right, another account to delete.
How to kill your company 101
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.
They for sure made the calculation, how many leave maybe 10-20% if we are lucky. How many stay and give them the right to sell their most sensitive data. How much money do they make with the data? Its more than they lose for sure.
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.
They, like some political parties across the west, are arrogant in thinking people have no other choice. They’ve consolidated it all down into a few options, buying out their rivals, or crushing them legally, and or using anti competitive behavior to hurt them, that’s against the law but not enforced because plutocracy, and think we have no other options, the other option is worse, so they can continually get worse and not lose market share, because what are you going to do?
You can start your own websites, they will use the law and courts to try and crush them. They will lean on isp’s to strangle the traffic, get hosting sites to refuse to host them, they will lean on credit card processors to not process transactions for them. Maybe manufacture a terrorist connection to justify personally going after anyone involved in the website or it’s operation.
There is no limit to the caprice of these entrenched interests where we are headed, with an openly corrupt government; openly sold out courts with contempt for the constitution and ancient rights of English Common Law countries, open contempt for their citizen charges seeking redress from powerful interests abusing them; an executive branch that is all but openly harvesting protection money, payoffs, and bidding off regulatory actions, bidding off laws and executive orders and justice department investigations, and setting the federal government up like a political machine from a century prior, where everybody pays and the boss gets a cut of everything. Like boss tweed or something, I don’t know what we’d expect with a mobbed up blackmailing and blackmailed real estate baron from New York City that’s been involved in over 10k court cases and never once paid any real price for cheating everyone he’s done business with that couldn’t hurt him and slandered them to justify it.
We could go on with the corruption bit, but point being, any new sites that start to get critical mass need to be set up in a way that they can’t strangle traffic off on them, and that they cannot take down the whole unit for allegations of criminality in any part of it. Easy enough for them to set up a fake terror account, wire money from here to terror there, and then take the entire thing down. To sanction everyone involved. The federation bit could help limit the liability and prevent a lot of that maybe. But we need our own infrastructures. We need our own internets. We should be setting up community cooperative internets everywhere. There is no reason we should pay two companies trillions of dollars to provide internet poorly and spy on us in the process, when hundreds of billions could provide ourselves internet at cost under a less intrusive nature.
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.
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.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
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.
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.
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?
My understanding is that if your community is not adult content and you aren’t on any adult servers, you won’t need to ID verify. But I suspect it’s only a matter of time before all accounts are required to verify.
“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.
Idk, they lose users from stuff like this. For every one real user they lose, they are picking up several fake ones, the mechanized troll divisions, loitering chatbots with air support and artillery cover from amplifier accounts, influence agents, and political support to back them up.
The internet is dead, and those metrics are not the real metrics, the traffic from fake users, inauthentic users, is now greater than real people using the internet it’s been reported.
So your metrics might even go up in user numbers/volume. It doesn’t mean real people didn’t leave, and while your value might not decrease having fake users and bots fill the void, the real value of that website decreases, and that real value will show through eventually.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that mate.
This is just supposition. They have the hard data.
Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.
It’s not at all false that the true value in something lies in the true value, and that our clown economy that prizes confidence men and confidence games that value Tesla at a trillion dollars are unsustainable, and will in time come back to intrinsic values.
Having fake users may keep the company looking just as good, but it lessens the value. Interactions with bots doesn’t satisfy most people, and will lessen the value to them, and they will use the site less. Moreover any advartising on the platform will see less payout because more of the accounts being served the ads are fake accounts operating under false pretense.
Just like reddit, they more than make up for users that left with new fake accounts, and they are already overrun with them, but when people are stuck interacting with those fake accounts they will generally use it less, because they aren’t witty, they aren’t insightful, they are spitting out learned answers that only sheep would enjoy fraternizing with. The fake accounts shout down real users, drown out real discussion anyplace that that discussion threatens the entrenched interests that employ those mechanized trolls, not just governments but corpoorations, all of them basically, they have trade groups that farm out contracts, often to AI, Actually Indians, to run the influence operations with the help of regular ai and computer programs because they are low cost and speak english well enough.
While the ivy league hacks running our businesses and government don’t care if they have fake users that run off real users that makes their site less valuable intrinsically, because for now it doesn’t affect their profitability, and they are unable to look beyond their next set of financial statements, it will catch up to them.
They will use their corrupt influence and anti competitive tactics to try and crush any upstarts that are nearing critical mass, so they don’t think they have to cater to the user base at all, that we have no options, no alternatives. Let’s make them wrong about that. Because following their lead is the end of the world.
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.
A blip of users
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.
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.
I’ve been off Facebook for at least 15 years. I’ve been trying to move people away from it for so long, or at least getting people to stop sharing shit about their kids, but a lot of people use it as their primary means of communication, news, photo sharing, etc. I just don’t get it. I do think most people I know just have ghost accounts now, though. But for some, Facebook is their internet. When they send me Facebook links, I just don’t interact with it at all. I don’t know what they sent me because I refuse to click the link, and even if I did, Facebook is blocked by my firewall and DNS so I won’t even be able to see it without getting around my own network. I just don’t even respond.
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.
They’ve stated elsewhere that even though they’re deploying “age inference” (whatever that is), verification is mandatory if you don’t want your account to be restricted to PG-13, basically.
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.
Actually, if it would be possible to somehow ask parents beforehand, it probably would be perfect.
Say, you register an internet connection and sign an email that will receive requests from DNS upon visiting explicit sites. Whenever you visit these sites, you get an email with a “Confirm” button. Let’s say it has 1 hour cooldown before sending request for the same domain again. In case your child dials up pornhub, you have a choice + you know they are trying to access something meant for adults.
As for open access points, they already been using DNS sinkholes and are totally not for NSFW stuff anyway, so all access denied by default.
No ID needed aside of signing up for an internet connection which already requires an ID anyway. Everyone is happy. No idea if it is possible.
They are not though, deleting the information. They are just not keeping it in that part of the system.
Anytime you think they are deleting your information, ask yourself, is that information valuable to them? The answer is always yes. Then ask, why would they delete it? Why would they not keep it secretly or otherwise? They would, they always do.
Which doesn’t even address the point that other interests got that information when you gave it to steam. You verifying your age is information the national security state would sweep up, but possibly others, to say nothing of hackers targeting the company holding the data. Some of whom are the national security state.
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!!
Oh no, I pissed off the angry little children and their alts. What won’t I do? :(
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.
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.
Anytime they scan your id the information is stored. They know you went into that store and bought alcohol. If you think they aren’t storing that information, I’ve an exciting investment opportunity for you.
It doesn’t matter if the schlepps at the store don’t see the information stored and don’t retain a record, obviously they wouldn’t.
I hear that. My local ABC store doesn’t scan my ID, though I don’t see a future where they don’t eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.
I can’t just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it’s cold medicine or a prescription. **
Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.
** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.
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.
