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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Its particularly interesting for the Australian laws (which don't target Discord yet). The law places responsibility on the targeted platform if they are found with underage users. They must take 'reasonable steps' or face fines. It will be interesting if/when court cases appear. Will easily spoofed or tricked facial scans be considered 'reasonable' by the Australian courts? I think once the dust has settled we will start seeing some court cases and discover how reasonable some of these fig-leaves are.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
52 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadI thought age verification was only required to access "adult" content?
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.
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-...
So the claim that Discord is making ID verification "mandatory" or that you need it for gaming chats is untrue.
Image what will happen post-IPO.
Did they forget it's proprietary, and from the same person that made OpenFeint, which also had a privacy lawsuit?
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.