Discord announced mandatory age verification globally starting in March, what do you think?

General
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Here’s one of many sources online: Discord Is About to Force You to Prove Your Age | Lifehacker

TLDR is:

  • All accounts are “teen accounts” until age verified
  • Verification requires a face scan to be processed by genAI (they have said the data will never leave users devices and that they never store a copy of it) or by uploading a government issued ID
  • Some of the features of teen accounts: they cannot access NSFW servers or channels, images that Discord thinks are spicy will be blurred for them, and they are unable to speak in stage channels, among others.

Discord is framing this from a child safety standpoint. From the conversations I’ve seen, looks like a lot of people debate if that is the real motivation for Discord here, or if this kind of approach even makes children meaningfully safer.

I wanted to share the news to make sure you were all aware, but I also wanted to ask:

  • Will you continue to use Discord?
  • Will you age verify?
  • Will you go somewhere else?
0 voters

This certainly makes me thankful for spaces like this. Though forums aren’t as easy to engage friends in casually.

t/suki host migration and sso
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(I’ve gone ahead and taken the liberty to edit your post to convert your questions into a poll, since this seemed to be your intention. If this isn’t what you want, please feel free to revert it!)

As for casual engagement, I am working on adding a chatplace for t/suki. Right now, the primary roadblock is for me to figure out how to set up a better single-sign on situation and it’s been taking some time since I don’t really know what I’m doing and I am also very busy right now.

I currently prefer PornHub’s stance on this, which is to use device-based age verification instead. They originally posted this message in response to Texas laws requiring age verification:

Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible.

As we’ve seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. […]

The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.

You can view the full message by visiting PornHub while in Texas (or through a VPN that lets you connect to a server in Texas).

I think trusting a bunch of private companies to handle your sensitive data properly is haphazard. The more places you have to do this kind of verification, the more a matter of time it is that someone will do it wrong. A device-based age verification process could avoid this issue, as your ID could be verified in person without making a digital copy when you receive your device. Then, all websites have to do is check a flag instead of having to handle sensitive data properly.

Granted, I think device-based age verification still has some issues, but I think it has potential and I like it a whole lot better than the current state of things.

So, I’ll keep using Discord, but I won’t age verify and I’ll be trying to move somewhere else entirely.

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I also just wouldn’t trust most companies with sensitive info like that, even if their security is decent, starting to store this kind of data just makes them a literal honeypot and hackers will absolutely target them. Let’s not forget that Discord’s support service already leaked ids Update on a Security Incident Involving Third-Party Customer Service

I’ll use Discord as long as people I want to chat with use but I will certainly be on the lookout for something I can convince people to flock to instead. Unless they keep doing boneheaded moves that necessitate a departure sooner!

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Currently I do not plan to age verify, however I have years of screenshots, personal notes, and interpersonal memories on the app. Discord has been the primary facilitator of my closest personal relationships for the past 10 years.

I’m currently afraid of losing access to content that I wanted to archive. (More specifically images, since I don’t actively participate in any adult flagged servers or channels.)

So before March, I am going to attempt to find some way to scrape all those DM and server histories for my own records.

Regarding Discord automatically censoring images on “teen” accounts: I have certainly created and posted art it might censor, depending on what it considers objectionable. But I’m also concerned about it censoring things that shouldn’t be censored.

5

I’m hoping their Nitro customers will provide enough pressure to get them to realize the error in this new policy. I’ve seen so many people cancel left and right (including myself). Still, it’s a huge shake up and I’ve already lost so much trust in Discord at this point.

I’m already present on Matrix (and will definitely join the t/suki Matrix) but I’m curious if there are any other services people are trying out. A friend of mine who hopped of Discord a year ago told me that he now prefers Stoat and Nerimity over Matrix (mainly because he got burned by Element’s new policies). I’ve got to link back with him and see where he’s at now.

6

Since my work life is partially stuck on Discord, I can’t sadly outright ditch it. Might have to age verify too in the worst case, even if I’m far from thrilled about that prospect. Anyway, just got a Matrix account going to shake things up a tiny bit at least.

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The poll is missing one thing: you can’t choose no on all options :3

But realistically I’m doing the lazy thing: see how usable discord will be and wait to see if people switch to an alternative.

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I think the option you’re looking for is only “Will you continue to use Discord?”, unless you mean that you won’t use Discord in the future and you also won’t use something else instead of Discord.

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I’ve hopped onto Fluxer and actually purchased their Visionary tier, which is essentially an early-adopters’ lifetime Plutonium (aka their Nitro equivalent). It’s been in development for ~5 years or so and entered open beta at the end of January; when there’s not a service outage, it’s a very smooth user experience with a GUI that makes actual sense.

I’m hoping to drop Discord ASAP and convince folks who’re dissatisfied with Stoat to give Fluxer a whirl. I’m very eager not to let Discord dox me.

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This one seems pretty promising. I like that they offer self-hosting too and that it’s open-source.

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Some shocking (but not so surprising) news about the Discord Age Verification rollout:

https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-verification-2000668951

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I would normally say, “Dark Google how do I convince people to start treating Discord like the Unity company” but I’m sure Google loves having my data too. We really need more folks to go back to forums like these or start treating emails less like a dreaded chore to clean every few months and more like the reliable communication method that it is!

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Can confirm Fluxer is good so far! It has the occasional outage but otherwise the past week or so it’s been stable. Aesthetically looks very similar to Discord, they just (at the time of writing this) don’t have a mobile app… Yet! Haven’t been able to get into Stoat because their account authentication system is very delayed :frowning:

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Official response from Discord just dropped today:

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The good ol’ attitude of “We can do anything we want because we’re so big! Whoops… Welp, let’s backpedal and do it later anyway when people are less upset.” :yawning_face:

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Rightfully so. In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works.

No shit! Maybe they should’ve started with an announcement like this instead of the media getting to it. Better yet, not doing it at all :upside_down_face:

Either way, I’m not paying for Nitro again until they walk it back completely.