[HN Gopher] Discord will require a face scan or ID for full acce...
___________________________________________________________________
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...
Author : x01
Score : 905 points
Date : 2026-02-09 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is not OK.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| another one bites the dust.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| F** that, guess I'm leaving that platform too now...
| boca_honey wrote:
| I think this will be the kneejerk reaction of many, but then
| you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social
| isolation) and probably acquiesce. I had the same reaction when
| platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some
| years I just started giving it to them. Now I don't even think
| about it.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile
| number every 90 days.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| Every 90 days? Wow. Can you elaborate on how that logically
| works? Like what about for doctors offices having your
| number on file and other similar situations.
| boca_honey wrote:
| He doesn't have the kind of life you and I have. He is
| probably convinced someone is out to get him. No medical
| records, no kids, no library card, etc. I've seen some
| cases like his.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| People in my country are being shot on the streets by the
| government. Let's not pretend that there are not in fact
| malicious actors out there who want you hurt for their
| amusement.
|
| You're free to make your own choices on life, but I don't
| like you chastising others' lived experiences as if
| everyone has a cushy safe life with a government working
| for them.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Your solution is subservience.
| boca_honey wrote:
| Read again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't
| care.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't
| assume others will falter in the same fashion.
| boca_honey wrote:
| Not everyone, but most people. Privacy has been around for
| a century, at most. I'm fine with it going away. This
| neurotic overprotection of personal data is just you all
| larping as super spies. Too many hacker movies, dude.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Too many hacker movies, dude.
|
| Too much fascism. They've used these relinquishes to
| build a database of people to go after based om race or
| political affiliation.
|
| Maybe they still will get me. But I'm not making it that
| easy for them.
| kyboren wrote:
| "I used to resist the boot, too. Then I was successfully
| conditioned by the environment that's been engineered around
| me. Now I just lick it subconsciously."
| boca_honey wrote:
| I also thought like you when I was in my 20's. However...
| the addolescent need to "rise up" is the first thing to go
| when you actually start a family and develop a well
| balanced social network. If you play your cards right, soon
| enough, you won't care about all this.
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| I'm 45. My friend, I still resist licking the boot. Stop
| believing that your experience is somehow more universal.
|
| I have a rich social network, I have a family, and now
| more than any time in my life do I think it's important
| to resist.
|
| Stop saying you'll get less radical as you age, it's just
| not the axiom you think it is.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I have a spouse and kids. I still stick to my guns. Both
| literally and figuratively. Speak for yourself.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto
| social isolation) and probably acquiesce.
|
| Nah I'm used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows
| how few truly deep friendships you have.
|
| You get used to it.
|
| >I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my
| cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it
| to them.
|
| Even when I gave Facebook my number, that wasn't enough. I
| drew a line at some point. If everyone else wants to
| sacrifice privacy for the sake of pseudo-community, so be it.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| In case anyone else can't read it: https://archive.is/PvpAx
| deanc wrote:
| On all my devices and all my connections (residential and
| mobile) here in the EU I end up in a captcha loop for this site
| nowadays. Is it just me?
|
| EDIT: seems like I'm not the only one [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you...
| Rooster61 wrote:
| The sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up
| their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I'm not sure if
| enough people will refuse to actually force Discord to back off
| this decision (unless their idea is to grab as much data as
| possible at once with the understanding that they are going to
| back off either way).
| accrual wrote:
| Especially if it's presented as a pop-up upon launching the app
| that suggests the user won't be able to talk to their
| friends/servers without showing ID. Carefully worded language
| would could spur some % of users to panic at losing years of
| history and immediately show ID. Folks with less privacy
| discernment hear "jump" and reply "how high".
| joquarky wrote:
| > panic at losing years of history
|
| I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately
| mentally unhealthy.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah. You male new friends and find new experiences. Or
| maybe you don't. That's the cost of freedom, I suppose.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I have done that for stripchat which was also requiring it. Not
| happy with it but I'd rather use a selfie than a whole ID
| document which includes an image anyway.
|
| The thing is, what other option do I have?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'll continue using Discord in teen mode, I guess. I'd rather
| not lose the current connections & servers I have on there,
| and I'm not optimistic about people migrating away,
| especially non-tech people.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| I get the draconian side of things, but I am also tired of
| thousands of russian, indian, domestic-funded etc. bots
| flooding the zone with divisive propaganda.
|
| In theory, this seems like it would at least be a step in the
| direction of combating disinformation.
|
| I'm curious if there are any better ways to suppress these
| propaganda machines?
| joks wrote:
| I don't see how disallowing viewing "age-restricted" content
| through Discord without giving them your ID would have any
| impact on the spread of disinformation, outside of like,
| disinfo in the form or pornographic or gory images.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| How do I know that this message isn't divisive propaganda
| posted by a bot?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Because it's not posted by a Russian/Indian account, duh!
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| I don't imagine this was a 100% their decision, it's more like
| a response to the epidemic of all the world's governments
| suddenly coming up with adult verification schemes. Discord has
| already required it in some countries, and it's definitely
| easier to get everybody to verify themselves than require it on
| a per-jurisdiction basis. The personal data they get is a
| cherry on top.
|
| Also, this is just the beginning, more social networks will
| require the same soon.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| They don't have to comply in advance.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Sounds like when Netflix reneged on family accounts.
|
| I cancelled my account in protest, but their financials say
| they made money on the change (and thus all the execs are happy
| with it).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If it helps, it really seems like Netflix is only "making
| money" these days off of cutting programming and workers.
| It's not a sustainable way to grow and it will hit a wall
| soon.
| boca_honey wrote:
| I was planning to do that. My work chat is on Discord. I am an
| adult. Google and Netflix have my legal name and credit card
| number. I don't see how Discord having my ID is any worse.
| PoisedProto wrote:
| The issue is that it's yet _another_ platform that could leak
| your data? Why would you ever want to increase that chance?
|
| Also, I'm not sure you would need to give discord your ID
| unless you're sending porn in your work chat or something.
| Simulacra wrote:
| No thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.
| verdverm wrote:
| How many people are doing age restricted stuff on Discord
| (besides the specifically there for adult content and gooning
| crowd)
|
| All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age
| concerns
| sigio wrote:
| Gaming certainly has age-concerns, many games are rated
| 13/15/16+ or 18+
|
| But yeah, leaving discord... they are not getting my ID/Photo
| verdverm wrote:
| At least Google is pushing on zero-knowledge solutions
|
| Maybe they can force everyone's hand like they did for https
|
| https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-
| secu...
| reorder9695 wrote:
| Ratings aren't legally binding though are they? I bought
| games older rated than I was, and it's totally up to people's
| parents what they're allowed to play. Are you suggesting a 15
| year old should be allowed to play the 16 rated game but not
| discuss it?
| verdverm wrote:
| Can their parents also approve their discord usage?
|
| Are you saying they need parents to buy the game, but
| shouldn't to join chats about the same game?
| stuffn wrote:
| Does it matter? The problem is that everyone uses discord for
| everything. It's not an isolated platform, it's THE platform if
| you want to have friends.
| verdverm wrote:
| If you don't access adult stuff, you don't need to verify
| age. I'm not giving them my ID, I'm not expecting anything to
| change about my Discord experience.
|
| What's the issue?
| foobarian wrote:
| Looks like it might be opt-in by server.
| nananana9 wrote:
| Honestly they're probably big enough to get away with it.
|
| If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've
| seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large
| online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down
| and be relatively unscathed.
|
| They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10
| years, and got REALLY big before they started the
| enshittification process.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Any age verification process that does not consider the age of
| the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and
| simple.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| How does anyone know whether a family is engaging in that time-
| honored tradition of passing down accounts from grandfather, to
| father, to son, to child, and their posterity, in perpetuity?
|
| Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the
| person who created the account in the first place, you have 0%
| chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.
|
| Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be
| a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the
| oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts
| are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules.
| And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really
| hard up.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| But under that argument, you would have to prove your age on
| a regular basis, the plan right now appears to be that each
| account would only need to do so once.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Just remember that the Terms of Service you agreed to are
| about as firm as explosive diarrhea.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| _You agree not to license, sell, lend, or transfer your
| account, Discord username, vanity URL, or other unique
| identifier without our prior written approval. We also
| reserve the right to delete, change, or reclaim your
| username, URL, or other identifier._
|
| If transfer of accounts is a policy violation, then Discord
| has legal cover to confidently assert that, once ID is
| verified, the ID'd person is the owner and controller of
| the account thereafter.
|
| Account selling, stealing, and sharing will certainly still
| happen, but that's grounds for banning, and not Discord's
| legal liability anymore.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| Then why could they not also legally get away with using
| account age as a proxy?
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| No law or regulation is ever 100% effective in real life.
| Income tax is not collected 100% effectively. Should we not
| do it? Criminals are not caught 100% of the time, should we
| not do it?
|
| Of course this won't be 100% effective, maybe 80-90%
| effective. That's all they need and expect from this system.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| HN is constantly obsessed with _is it perfectly effective?_
|
| No law, none, is perfectly effective. Speed limits
| certainly aren't self enforcing, but remove your
| neighborhood's speed limits first if you truly believe laws
| must be demonstrated perfect.
| smrq wrote:
| How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID?
| Once every... never?
| AJ007 wrote:
| They need to have an always-on camera looking at the person
| using the device. No camera, no discord.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Just ban that in TOS. As we know TOS is inviolable. As such
| it is not possible to sell, gift or otherwise transfer an
| account. At least this should be considered how it works for
| age verification. If account transfer is found out account
| can be terminated thus closing the loop hole.
| ncr100 wrote:
| So then it's REASONABLY not the corporation's fault if that
| user sees explicit content.
| sigio wrote:
| Yeah, my youtube/google account is almost as old as youtube
| itself is, but will constantly ask me to verify my age when
| clicking on something as marked 'not for kids'. Can we just get
| the leisure-suit-larry age-verification system ;)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Apple deleted many legacy mac-dot-com accounts without qualms,
| not long ago. It was the phone accounts, in so many ways,
| driving it .. IMHO
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Has discord even been around for 18 years?
| mmlkrx wrote:
| They are planning on doing something similar:
|
| Discord is also rolling out an age inference model that
| analyzes metadata like the types of games a user plays, their
| activity on Discord, and behavioral signals like signs of
| working hours or the amount of time they spend on Discord.
|
| "If we have a high confidence that they are an adult, they will
| not have to go through the other age verification flows,"
| varjolintu wrote:
| I'm curious to know what this "model" actually means. A real-
| time AI monitoring for conversations?
| jszymborski wrote:
| So my friend group has been looking for alternatives for a while
| now that feel like discord, works on mobile and desktop, and has
| voice chat.
|
| I use Signal but the UI is very different from Discord.
|
| I've had very mixed experiences with Element + Matrix, Element
| keeps crashing on mobile, and while voice chat kinda exists in
| Element it's not been great imho.
|
| I looked into hosting Rocket.chat, Zullip, and Mattermost but
| from what I recall voice + mobile were either missing or
| paywalled at a per-user price.
|
| Any recommendations?
| tmtvl wrote:
| I seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe
| I'll have to revisit it.
| kmnc wrote:
| "We will find ways to bring people back" yeah because that
| usually works. I imagine this gets rolled back or siloed to only
| adult specific channels.
| haritha-j wrote:
| > and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as
| graphic or sensitive.
|
| I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send
| and recieve.
| jsheard wrote:
| Pretty much every non-E2EE platform is scanning every uploaded
| image for CSAM at least, that's a baseline ass-covering
| measure.
| mapt wrote:
| And E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some
| platforms specifically because they're E2EE, and so the name
| itself must be treated as CSAM.
|
| As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or
| "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on
| Facebook are finding out.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| They have to at least for CSAM.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Really I've come to the conclusion that anything I send out of
| my LAN is probably kept on a server forever and ingested by
| LLMs, and indexed to be used against me in perpetuity at this
| point, regardless of what any terms or conditions of the site
| I'm using actually says.
| palata wrote:
| To be fair, the terms and conditions probably say that they
| can do whatever they want with that data :-).
| Gud wrote:
| Don't forget all the government creeps snooping on the wires.
| xnx wrote:
| Until the current administration, I was much more bothered
| by private misuse/abuse of date than the government. Now I
| worry about both.
| Gud wrote:
| Why? People who volunteer to work for these government
| drag nets must be total psychos.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Volunteer? I mean they do get paid.
|
| The thing is it's a mix of both.
|
| You have the fervent that love recording everything "for
| the good of the people". But then you'll just have piles
| of people with separation of duties that do things with
| very little understanding of where they fit in the
| process and very little care to.
| joquarky wrote:
| We gave those brogrammers the keys to the machine when we
| made programming more accessible.
| kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
| Good. Being OK with authoritarianism because they are on
| your side is never good.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That was always the wrong threat model hierarchy. I have
| always been more concerned what the federal, my state and
| my local government can do when given more
| power/informstion than the federal government
| kmfrk wrote:
| Speaking of hosting, Discord used to be one of the biggest
| (inadvertent) image hosts, so they might have set up the
| system to reduce legal exposure than to monitor conversations
| per se.[1]
|
| A lot of the internet broke the day they flipped that switch
| off.
|
| Weren't external Tumblr hotlinks also a thing back in the
| day?
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/16uy0an/not
| _sur...
| palata wrote:
| Everything that is not end-to-end encrypted understandably has
| to do it.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Well it's not E2EE, so what did you expect? Nothing you do on
| Discord is private, everything is screened, categorized and
| readable by third parties.
| palata wrote:
| > Users who aren't verified as adults will not be able to access
| age-restricted servers and channels
|
| I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to
| age-restricted servers and channels...
|
| Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Here's how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such
| as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was
| wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels)
| or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode.
| After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to
| turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default,
| content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you
| cannot configure.
|
| The only way _for the server owner_ to circumvent the filter is
| to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean
| the channel actually contains any NSFW content.
|
| This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed
| to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode"
| (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three
| choices:
|
| - Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at
| least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from
| being listed as public;
|
| - Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);
|
| - Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).
| palata wrote:
| Are you saying that you can "mark" the channel as "NSFW", and
| Discord will stop scanning your content, possibly allowing
| you to share very illegal content through their servers?
|
| Sounds weird to me. Pretty sure that they legally have to
| make sure that they don't host illegal content. Or does
| "NSFW" enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| That has always been the case, yes, though I'm not sure
| what you mean by "illegal" content. There is only a small
| overlap between NSFW and illegal content, and the NSFW
| filter has never been concerned with, uh, violating
| photograph copyright or something.
|
| You don't have to take my word for it, just check it
| yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed
| the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in
| preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-
| related portion of the behavior I described was implemented
| for the UK months ago.
|
| The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels
| are exempt from the explicit content filter."
|
| EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing
| content for legality rather than age-appropriateness,
| wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?
| palata wrote:
| > The description still contains: "Age-restricted
| channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."
|
| Wait! This does not mean they do not scan it. What I
| understand from that statement is that they _filter
| explicit content_ , as in they prevent it from appearing
| on the user's screen.
|
| When you enable the "NSFW" mode, you tell Discord "it's
| okay, don't filter out anything". But Discord _probably_
| still scans everything.
|
| So that makes sense to me: if you don't validate your
| age, then Discord will not allow you to join channels
| that disable the "adult" filtering. I can personally live
| without adult content on Discord...
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you
| don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.
| palata wrote:
| Well you're not using Discord in the hope that they are
| censorship-resistant, are you? :-)
|
| They can read everything that you send already, if your
| problem is that they may filter something that they
| consider NSFW and you don't... well I am not sure how big
| of a problem that is.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access
| to age-restricted servers and channels...
|
| _Way_ more than you think. There are _tons_ of Discord servers
| that only exist to share pornography.
| bramhaag wrote:
| What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm
| currently considering moving to one of these with my friend
| group:
|
| - Matrix
|
| - Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)
|
| - IRC + Mumble
|
| - Signal
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS
| rsynnott wrote:
| Element's awful, but I've found FluffyChat, another matrix
| client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with
| low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch
| parties", video and tabletop gaming...
| lostmsu wrote:
| Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding
| MSFT done ever.
| rickstanley wrote:
| It's because of the trademark:
| https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat
|
| Nevertheless, I don't like the new name either, oh well...
|
| I like this comment though:
|
| _Imagine you make a free software project and it runs into
| trademark issues because people have more money than you to
| register in more classes than your project.
|
| And then even though your project existed first, they still
| come after you anyway.
|
| And from that an even more expensive rebranding from this as
| well._
|
| from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure
| how accurate it is, but it makes me want to _revolt_ .
| kibwen wrote:
| It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other
| than change the branding.
| rsynnott wrote:
| "[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"
|
| Argh. If there's no stoat emoji, petition the Unicode
| Consortium for one, don't just use a beaver. It's not even
| the right family; the badger emoji would be closer.
| x01 wrote:
| For me, the closest alternative to Discord is Stoat. Matrix
| with Element (or other clients) would be great, but it feels so
| slow on both desktop and mobile.
| rickstanley wrote:
| I wonder how Stoat will fare, and how it is currently
| maintained, in terms of "making money"; my fear is that it
| would steer into the direction of Discord itself.
| OuterVale wrote:
| Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to
| intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind
| a paywall to remain sustainable.
| arkh wrote:
| One thing most of those lack is an easy way to share screen.
|
| Now if anyone wants to differentiate their Discord alternative,
| they want to have most of discord functionalities and add the
| possibility to be in multiple voice chats (maybe with rights
| and a channel hierarchy + different push-to-talk binds). It's a
| missed feature when doing huge operations in games and using
| the Canary client is not always enough.
| joks wrote:
| Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at
| least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313
| ghosty141 wrote:
| According to the last comment in the issue it is already
| available for self hosted clients.
| foresto wrote:
| Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call /
| MatrixRTC (in development).
|
| For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration.
| I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.
|
| https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-
| documentation/i...
| Zhyl wrote:
| Jitsi does that well
| ozlikethewizard wrote:
| Last I checked Signal was not fully open source, which is iffy,
| believe their encryption protocol is still closed. That said
| its the best of a bad bunch for E2EE messaging. If you're on
| android I'd recommend doing what I do, which is installing from
| the APK on the site, manually verifying the sig locally (you
| can use termux for this), and then lagging ever so slightly
| behind on updates to avoid potential supply chain or hostile
| takeover attacks. This is probably over cautious for most
| threat profiles, but better safe than sorry imo. Also their
| server side stuff is close sourced, technically this isnt an
| issue though as long as the E2EE holds up to scrutiny though.
|
| Edit: My information may be out of date, I cannot find any
| sources saying any part of the app is closed source these days,
| do your own research ofc but comfortable saying its the most
| accessible secure platform.
| encom wrote:
| IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.
|
| I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron.
| Total waste of time.
| joks wrote:
| IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one
| of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype,
| from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)
| joquarky wrote:
| Kids these days...
| ramon156 wrote:
| Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we
| accept times change?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| It's a viable system for the many open source software
| projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and
| Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate
| there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll
| just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature
| set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media
| sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice
| comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and
| video calling.
| joquarky wrote:
| Which of these has been around for over three decades?
|
| That would be my answer.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so
| on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.
| MYEUHD wrote:
| Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client
| subscribed wrote:
| Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy
| implications) or renting it from the third party.
| vagrantstreet wrote:
| Zulip?
| andreashaerter wrote:
| I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews
| and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important
| boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I'm
| missing, or is it just under the radar?
|
| The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the
| async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read
| conversations, not timelines.
| tabbott wrote:
| Sadly Zulip does not have a big marketing budget, and many
| reviews/tooling comparisons are paid for in some way,
| directly or otherwise, or are SEO spam that starts with
| reading other similar SEO spam.
|
| It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated
| reviews, like Capterra.
|
| (I lead the Zulip project).
| andreashaerter wrote:
| Hey, cool :-). I've used Zulip for a bit and really
| enjoyed it.
|
| We're planning to roll it out at our company (foundata)
| in Q4, so you'll get at least a few bucks from us. I'll
| also happily recommend it to our customers. As an OSS
| company and service provider, I can very much relate to
| the lack of marketing budget and the constant SEO spam.
| vagrantstreet wrote:
| I feel like the average person isn't looking for
| something professional grade, sadly it's hard to get
| people to go away from Discord at the moment. Hard to
| suggest alternatives if people aren't seeking them yet.
|
| If I had to say it would have to be something
| customizable, letting a user to delete their data even
| after getting kicked from a server, very fast and
| seamless joining process ,great gif/sticker support
| without any premium features etc. But really that's just
| some fantasy app lol. Discord is doing just fine
| destroying itself however
|
| By the way, I didn't know there was an instant online
| test app because when I searched for Zulip I was in the
| download page and it doesn't say anything about trying it
| online. Seems like a strange suggestion UX wise but
| that's how I feel about it (wonder how many people missed
| out on this?), same thing after you enter the app. It
| should have a test area for the new user to chat around
| by himself with a bot or something with locally/session
| stored messages.
| ilikepi wrote:
| This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:
|
| https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
|
| (Not affiliated)
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to
| this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a
| one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have
| baggage.
|
| This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A
| competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep
| only caused by government overreach due to their colossal
| market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice
| guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an
| effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little
| gamers, and big corporate enshittification."
| skulk wrote:
| > government overreach
|
| How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into
| that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're
| doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?
| Morromist wrote:
| the largest block of discord users are from the US which
| hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social
| media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd
| is India, which doesn't.
|
| So they are forcing users from countries that haven't
| passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do
| this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| I've been tempted for a long time.
|
| I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.
|
| I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content
| moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are
| some truly terrible people who will try to tear the
| platform apart.
| buovjaga wrote:
| For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts:
| https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...
|
| I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.
| jiffygist wrote:
| Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool
| feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger
| that implemented this yet.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Jitsi handles this very well.
|
| I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text
| chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably
| popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and
| mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It's also at
| the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average
| user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches
| people that anything open source or anything pushed by their
| nerdy friend should be avoided.
| accrual wrote:
| Here's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end
| of the article:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
|
| > Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says
| official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been
| leaked after a cyber-attack.
|
| However, their senior director states in this Verge article:
|
| > The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information
| around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a
| birth certificate or something else, any of that information.
|
| Why they didn't do that the first time?
| wolvoleo wrote:
| And do they really actually delete it this time?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >Why they didn't do that the first time?
|
| The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them,
| including attachments, rather than deleting them.
| malfist wrote:
| Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| rogue engineer
| joquarky wrote:
| How convenient.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| Ah sorry our contractor did all that highly illegal stuff.
| Too bad we can't pierce the corporate veil anymore... shucks.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any
| information around like your name, the city that you live in,
| if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that
| information._
|
| This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says:
|
| > _Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor
| partners are deleted quickly-- in most cases, immediately after
| age confirmation._
|
| What are the non-most cases?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle;
| random vendors deleting them remains an issue.
| rockskon wrote:
| Not to mention collecting them at all means those servers
| are a primo location for state actors to stage themselves
| to make copies of data before being deleted.
|
| To say nothing of insider threats of which likely exist
| across every major social media platform in service to
| foreign govs.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Weird that I have to get a list of all the cookie vendors
| that know I visit a website to show me an ad about
| something I already bought but the guys with my ID don't
| need to be listed.
| throw20251220 wrote:
| Since when the city one lives in is mentioned in the birth
| certificate?
| smcin wrote:
| It was only one example they gave, and they accept multiple
| different types of ID; a driver's license or national ID
| card being other likely ones, and DLs do say where you
| live.
| kvdveer wrote:
| None of those documents reliably state my city of
| residence. At best they document where I once lived, but
| not even that is guaranteed.
| malfist wrote:
| You are legally required to update those within 10 days
| of moving.
| throw20251220 wrote:
| What kind of tyranny do you live in? None of the
| documents I have on me say where I live.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It's pretty standard in a lot of Europe, one is required
| to update ones license with each change of address
| (although many people don't).
|
| Along with such weird (to us) things as applying for an
| exit visa from your current town when you want to move to
| a new town...
| throw20251220 wrote:
| Which parts of Europe have a town of where the person
| lives on their driving license? And what do you mean by
| "us"?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| My Spanish identity card has my full address. Not sure if
| the DNI does as well, or only the foreign resident
| version.
|
| > And what do you mean by "us"?
|
| US folks are pretty used to being able to up and drive
| across the country with a suitcase, without filing any
| paperwork (at least till the taxman comes knocking next
| April)
| throw20251220 wrote:
| I ask you about drivers license, you tell me about the
| national ID.
| gambiting wrote:
| UK driver's licence has my full home address on it. Come
| to think of it I think my Polish one used to as well.
| mcapodici wrote:
| Australia and UK goes the full distance. Your full
| address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_licence
| s_in_Austral...
| varispeed wrote:
| > The ID is immediately deleted.
|
| I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and
| other purposes.
| smaudet wrote:
| "delete" doesn't mean delete anymore, like you say, there are
| always audit logs, and there is "soft" deleting.
|
| Expect any claims that things are being deleted to be a bold
| faced lie.
| subscribed wrote:
| They wouldn't _have to_, audit checks if you stick to law,
| your own policies and such, but I think they will.
| varispeed wrote:
| So how do they prove they actually checked someone's age?
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| How does shop clerk proves they checked someone's age
| before selling them alcohol?
| Gigachad wrote:
| They don't need to prove that. The government or whatever
| would have to prove that they aren't checking ages, by
| going to the site and seeing a lack of age verification.
| observationist wrote:
| They're a nonsense company, and trusting them with any
| information is foolish. They'll store everything and anything,
| because data is valuable, and won't delete anything unless
| legally compelled to and held accountable by third party
| independent verification. This is the default.
|
| The purpose of things is what they do. They're an adtech user
| data collection company, they're not a user information
| securing company.
| debo_ wrote:
| I believe the original finding was that they were not deleting
| IDs that were involved in disputes.
| Aurornis wrote:
| They explained it in their announcement at
| https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
|
| TL;DR: The IDs were used in age-related appeals. If someone's
| account was banned for being too young they have to submit an
| ID as part of the appeal. Appeals take time to process and
| review.
|
| Discord has 200,000,000 users and age verification happens a
| lot due to the number of young users and different countries.
| plorg wrote:
| Why should we suspect the age verification and age-related
| appeals would involve different teams or processes?
| elpasi wrote:
| Age verification is done by an iframe to k-id.com.
|
| Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Appeals are like escalations. They bypass automations and
| move to manual review.
| reactordev wrote:
| This is corporate cover speak for "we keep all data"
| _ink_ wrote:
| Compliance
| reactordev wrote:
| Liars...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| > The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information
| around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a
| birth certificate or something else, any of that information.
|
| Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they
| don't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which
| is equally as important.
| hinata08 wrote:
| They also never say it goes through datacenters in room 641A
| or though Utah before it's "deleted", because it's a US
| company and they can't refuse that.
| bilekas wrote:
| Until we have some kind of "One Time ID Verification" service
| that would work, the ID will never be deleted. Or a hash of the
| info or some kind of identifiable info.
| seneca wrote:
| Hard no. Reality is that this push is everywhere. Authoritarian
| governments are cracking down hard on dissent, they're not going
| to leave huge platforms for communication untouched. We'll need
| open source decentralized alternatives.
| accrual wrote:
| Indeed, the article basically says as much in more pacifying
| terms:
|
| > driven by an international legal push for age checks and
| stronger child safety measures
| SoftTalker wrote:
| HN: Social media is terrible and ruining kids' mental health.
|
| Also HN: Any attempt to limit access to verified adults is an
| "authoritarian crackdown" and totally unacceptable.
| z0r wrote:
| Children generally have these things called "parents" who are
| supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly
| there isn't a contradiction.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Right, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I
| forgot.
| hiccup_socks wrote:
| you may be surprised to learn that you can be a parent
| and have rules without being a "helicopter parent".
|
| given your other bad faith comments in this thread,
| though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be
| contrarian for... fun? is it fun?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2
| things are bad.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Haven't cared about Discord in a long time. In fact I'm glad
| they're continuing to shoot themselves in the foot.
|
| During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to
| socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes,
| there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil
| and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We
| cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.
|
| One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for
| allegedly violating... _something_. I wish I had written down
| everyone 's emails because I permanently lost contact with a
| bunch of friends in an instant.
|
| I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some
| other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord
| again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope
| this ID verification thing is another big step towards their
| irrelevancy.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Discord has 150 million monthly active users.
|
| They'll be fine. To them, this is just another internet
| boycott, with all that entails. Reddit survived a worse one and
| grew afterward.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The difference with Reddit is it has way more persistent
| value. Everything on Discord is throwaway, but valuable posts
| on Reddit from years past are easily retrievable. The two
| aren't so comparable.
|
| One of the unspoken reasons many people have for using
| Discord is they don't want what they say to easily be
| associated with them in perpetuity. Requiring ID really chips
| away at that, in spite of what Discord has to say about
| privacy around ID.
|
| By no means am I saying that Discord will go extinct. I just
| haven't observed anything about it that's irreplaceable.
| Reddit, on the other hand, has a wealth of discussion dating
| back to the mid-to-late 00's.
| encom wrote:
| >valuable posts on Reddit
|
| [removed]
|
| [removed]
|
| [removed]
|
| [removed]
|
| [removed]
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's this thing called the Wayback Machine, but I
| lol'd at your response. It's not untrue. xD
| Terr_ wrote:
| > valuable posts on Reddit from years past are easily
| retrievable.
|
| Rant: Several years ago, everything I'd ever written for
| _over a decade_ on Reddit vanished one morning for no
| discernible reason, including all nested replies from other
| people. I appealed, my appeal was "granted", and nothing
| changed, except the appeals page refused to work because it
| said my account was already in good standing.
|
| I dug up an ancient account I had used for resume feedback,
| asked around in the help subreddits, and it too was killed
| the same way.
| alex1138 wrote:
| You should be more tolerant of the "anti-vaxx wackos". The
| covid 'vaccine' has a very large number of negative
| externalities, confirmed by scores of credentialed doctors and
| researchers
| jmye wrote:
| It's wild that this nonsense is still floating around by
| people pushing "credentialed doctors", whatever the fuck they
| think _that_ means. No one with any vague degree of
| credibility would now or ever has supported "very large
| number" and all of the "externalities" (are you sure you're
| using the right words) have been _vastly_ outweighed by the
| things the vaccine provably did.
|
| So tired of this shit.
| alex1138 wrote:
| You're wrong. I and the FLCCC disagree with you
| palata wrote:
| I wonder if Discord is legally forced to do that, or if they
| would rather do it themselves (and collect the data $$$) rather
| than wait to be imposed a solution they don't own.
|
| I feel like age verification will come, there is no way around it
| (unlike ChatControl and the likes, age verification seems
| reasonably feasible and has a lot of political traction right
| now).
|
| But I would rather have a privacy-preserving solution for that,
| e.g. from the government (which already knows my age).
| anonymousab wrote:
| There are probably enough regions where it is required or will
| be required soon, that it makes sense to just get it over with.
|
| The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled
| and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so
| adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just
| sensible future-proofing.
|
| This also lets them more safely target older users with ads,
| purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and
| other high ROI systems.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| GeoIP this nonsense. Legal liability is solved as a "good-
| faith effort" and those living in jurisdictions where this
| doesn't apply (or use a VPN) don't need to be stripped of
| privacy.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Privacy preserving between you and the third party, but the
| implication is that the government now sees what you are using.
| palata wrote:
| > but the implication is that the government now sees what
| you are using.
|
| No. The whole point of privacy preserving technology is that
| they don't.
|
| The idea is that the government checks your identity (they
| know _who you are_ ) and give you an anonymous cryptographic
| proof that you are above, say, 18. They don't know what you
| do with it.
|
| You give this cryptographic proof to Discord, and they know
| that if you have access to that proof, then you have access
| to someone who is above 18. They don't know who you are.
|
| Sure, you could ask an adult to give you a token. But you can
| also ask an adult to buy you alcohol or to do the age
| verification scan for you.
| plagiarist wrote:
| You cannot automate adults buying alcohol from a single ID
| for all the children in the nation.
|
| If age tokens are truly anonymous, what's the solution for
| preventing a single person from generating and selling them
| to whatever child wants one?
| palata wrote:
| The thing is that we go from "we don't check the age at
| all" to "children now need to work around an age
| verification" system. Seems like it will be harder for
| children, which is the goal.
|
| Then make it illegal to sell them. Some people will still
| do it, but children can already order cannabis over the
| internet.
|
| It's always a trade-off, it will never be perfect. But
| the status quo is not perfect either. The question is: is
| it better than the status quo? I think that age
| verification is not completely unreasonable (as long as
| it is made in a privacy-preserving manner). As a
| comparison, I think that ChatControl _is completely
| unreasonable_.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Discord is just the next biggest canary in the coal mine of
| increasing regulatory pressure in the EU, UK (which has had
| this Discord verification for months now due to laws there),
| and various US states.
|
| I do wish that the lawmakers had worked more hand-in-hand with
| technical exports on more privacy-preserving solutions ahead of
| enforcing these laws. But Discord is doing this because
| enforcement _has_ already started.
| elephanlemon wrote:
| Great news, there's finally going to be sufficient motivation for
| people to both build out and use open source alternatives.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Alternative: run your own self-hosted messaging server for you,
| your family and friends. No company should ever get such
| sensitive data as private conversations.
|
| Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA
| 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-
| camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan
| checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring
| occasional face checks for ages already.
| brushfoot wrote:
| > Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as
| adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the
| setting. [1]
|
| That presumably includes selfies?
|
| That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person
| must first record a facial age estimation video or upload
| identification documents.
|
| That seems dystopian.
|
| 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-
| by-...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| How do you know one party isn't 15 when the other is 25?
|
| You're never going to convince a parent or a lawmaker or even
| me that this is dystopian. Seems like a perfectly reasonable
| safeguard.
| brushfoot wrote:
| > How do you know one party isn't 15 when the other is 25?
|
| You don't. That's why parents need to be involved in their
| children's lives.
|
| CSAM is the easy excuse, anyway. That's the one lawmakers
| use, and most people are against CSAM, myself included, so
| the excuse goes down easy. But the impetus they don't talk
| about is monitoring and control.
|
| The answer isn't to destroy privacy for everyone. The
| government and these corporations don't need to know what
| you're doing every second of the day.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > That's why parents need to be involved in their
| children's lives.
|
| Can't, aren't, look at iPad kids, won't. This is about as
| logical as saying people should just drive safely, so we
| don't need guardrails and seat belts. Or saying parents
| should always watch their children, so we don't need age
| verification at the alcohol store. Besides, it's not like
| the school library or the friends of friends don't have
| devices themselves you as a parent can't see.
|
| Parents should not need to be tech experts or helicopters
| to feel their kids are safe online. That's fundamentally
| unreasonable. In which case, privacy and child safety need
| to come to an unhappy compromise, just like any other
| conflicting interest.
|
| For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always
| accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it
| everywhere else.
| tavavex wrote:
| > This is about as logical as saying people should just
| drive safely, so we don't need guardrails and seat belts.
|
| This is a terrible analogy. Regulations related to
| driving only apply to drivers, if you're a pedestrian
| then you're not subject to basically any regulations that
| licensed drivers have to abide by. On the other hand,
| internet regulation like this punishes _absolutely
| everyone_ to safeguard a small group, that being parents.
| It 's like legally forcing pedestrians to wrap themselves
| in bubble wrap while outside so the careless drivers who
| couldn't behave don't dent their cars and get hurt when a
| pedestrian flies in their windshield, when they
| inevitably collide with one of them. Why is any of this
| their responsibility?
|
| The fact that there is absolutely zero effort in pursuing
| any non-punitive options (like forcing ISPs to put
| networks of clients with kids in child-friendly mode,
| where the adult has to enter a password to temporarily
| view the unrestricted internet on their network, which
| should cover 90%+ of cases; or doing any of the proposed
| non-identifying proofs of age, like a generic "I'm an
| adult" card you can buy at the convenience store) should
| tell you that this has very little to do with actual
| concern for children. They went out of their way to enact
| the least private, most invasive, most disruptive option,
| which will not even work better than any privacy-friendly
| options, unless you expect literally every website on the
| internet to be compliant. Teens are smart, they'll be
| able to find any holes in that system, just like the
| generations before them.
|
| > For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically
| always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while
| lambasting it everywhere else.
|
| Slippery slope arguments are not automatically a fallacy.
| They can be if the causative relationship is weak or if
| the slope is massively exaggerated. But if neither of
| these things are true, "slippery slopes" is just looking
| at the trends and expecting them to continue. You can't
| look at a linear graph and say "well, I think there's no
| most likely option from now on, it could go any way
| really" without an argument for why the trend would
| suddenly deviate. The internet had been tightening up and
| the walls have been closing in for a long time, why would
| that change?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| They'll now have kompromat associated with a name, address,
| and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your
| country calls it)
| eur0pa wrote:
| No thank you, get fucked
| rdudek wrote:
| Genuine question, what is stopping users from using AI to
| generate a fake face or ID to bypass this restriction?
| anonymousab wrote:
| There is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems
| and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai
| generated images vs. AI generated image detection.
|
| In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually
| get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users
| while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.
|
| Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements
| here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they
| can just ignore and let happen on its own.
| akersten wrote:
| > prior fakes
|
| But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after
| uploading!
| hiprob wrote:
| Are they going to leak IDs of minors again like they did last
| time? Who does this protect exactly?
| malfist wrote:
| It protects the investors so they can IPO
| Insanity wrote:
| To be honest it kinda sounds like a benefit for my use-case. I
| don't engage with adult content on there and use it for one
| server with friends.
|
| And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it
| remains usable without uploading my Id.
| ethin wrote:
| You have got to be kidding me. What is it with these lawmakers
| and websites demanding people do all of this stuff using services
| that nobody has ever heard of? I myself (as someone who is blind)
| have never been able to do the face scanning thing because the
| information they provide (for, you know, getting my face focused)
| is just massively insufficient. And a lot of the ones I've seen
| also require me to (as an alternative) do some weird ID scanning
| with my camera instead of, you know, just allowing me to upload
| my ID or something? (Then again, I really wouldn't want to give
| my ID to some service nobody has ever heard of either, so there.)
| I also am concerned when tfa says "a photo of an identity
| document" what does this mean? If I have to scan my ID with my
| camera, that's not exactly going to be simple for me to pull off.
| I get that we need to protect kids, but this is not the way. Not
| when it is discrimination by another name for individuals with
| disabilities (as just one example).
| sheikhnbake wrote:
| I foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents
| from the likes of Ben Dover
| ncr100 wrote:
| Dingle Dongle
|
| Hot Ta Tas
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Can't wait to send my id to the cheapest identification provider
| they could find.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Source: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-
| by-...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I talk to three people on Discord. If I have to choose between A)
| giving Discord my ID, B) giving Discord a fraudulent ID, or C)
| just chatting with them on some other program, I'll just go with
| C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I'd figure out B. May
| get started with C ahead of time anyway.
| rozab wrote:
| What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is
| you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And
| they can't send you images flagged as porn?
|
| How does this impact you in any way?
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I'm generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs,
| content filtering for direct messages from my contacts,
| unwanted popups (it's already annoying when my friends send
| me a link to a site I haven't visited from discord before and
| it "warns" me and you cannot disable this entirely useless
| popups), and things generally becoming worse.
|
| A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring
| IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized.
|
| Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps
| being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free
| to leave the service.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| They're saying there's a very good chance that, in your use
| case, you still won't be asked to provide ID.
| dave7 wrote:
| This is correct. I'm a UK Discord user, so I've been
| subject to these requirements for ~6 months now. It's
| basically nothing - I'm in near 50 "servers", of them all
| I only really can think of one channel in one of them
| that is flagged "nsfw" and thus blocked to me as I never
| ID'd myself.
|
| If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content
| you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do
| realize there are some communities that may fare a lot
| worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be
| falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which
| yeah, that absolutely sucks.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Whether I have to provide ID myself or not, I prefer to
| live in a world where when a company even announces that
| they plan to do facial scanning, they lose most of their
| customers. Hard to keep track of everything every company
| is doing of course, but I will try to migrate off of
| Discord ASAP.
| edm0nd wrote:
| If all you use Discord for is chatting with 3 people, these
| changes will have zero impact on you and your daily usage. You
| wont ever see an ID prompt.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| It will impact me since I've decided to go with plan C ahead
| of time. Hard to keep track of everything every company does,
| but I'd rather not use a service that is unnecessarily
| aggregating facial scans + IDs of its users.
| __loam wrote:
| You don't have to make excuses for corporate decisions that
| damage user privacy.
| superkuh wrote:
| It's a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting
| down and getting rid of it's users. It was inevitable but dragged
| out far too long with all the VC money to burn. Hopefully
| everyone can figure out how to use XMPP and/or get back on IRC.
| It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be
| lost inside their walled garden though.
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| I'm afraid the thing that would be replacing Discord will be
| even worse
| joks wrote:
| XMPP and IRC are great and all but a massive part of what
| people use Discord for is group voice calls with screen-
| sharing. I'm not sure what the alternative is for that.
| TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it's not a 1:1
| replacement for a number of reasons.
| crtasm wrote:
| We use Jitsi for voice/video calls + screen sharing (but I
| realise you may be talking about all-in-one alternatives)
| em-bee wrote:
| it's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the
| chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share
| the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people
| used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more
| convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the
| chat client interface such that it can track who is in
| which jitsi room, etc...
|
| of course this has yet to be built.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I think it is more likely that the next best platform will end
| up gaining three principled civil libertarians and about seven
| zillion witches.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| IRC is a much more impoverished chat experience than
| Discord/Slack in a bunch of ways. Suggesting that people "get
| back on IRC" is not a serious proposal for making it possible
| for groups of people to chat online without being subject to
| identity verification or censorship.
| malfist wrote:
| This is just the latest in a long trend of increasing spying on
| users. Why bother having to guess who your user is, or
| fingerprint a browser if you can just force them to show you
| their national ID?
|
| This is transparently about spying on people, not "protecting
| children". The real world doesn't require you to show your ID to
| every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by.
| Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone
| within ear shot has to show ID.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| I predict out-of-the-box deepfake live-camera software will get a
| bump in popularity, there's already plenty solutions available
| that need minimal tinkering. It should be trivial to set up for
| the purpose of verification and I don't see those identity
| verification providers being able to do anything about it. Of
| course, that'll only mean stricter verification through ID only
| later on, much to the present-and-future surveillance state's
| benefit.
|
| https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| So where we all jumping to?
| q3k wrote:
| Running phpBB on some crappy shared hosting. Well, these days
| on some crappy VPS.
| mbirth wrote:
| At least this would make FAQs and other important bits of
| information available to non-users and search engines.
| sekh60 wrote:
| I'm being completely serious, but what is the current fav
| open source forum software these days? I'd love to host a
| forum for a small community I'm involved in. Not a stranger
| to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I'm
| not particular about technology used.
| tingling168 wrote:
| You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/
| sekh60 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check it out :)
| __jonas wrote:
| Every single forum I see now is using this:
|
| https://github.com/discourse/discourse
|
| Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the
| gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I
| sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super
| reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or
| whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.
| q3k wrote:
| I hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger
| threads.
|
| I just want pagination and to use my stock browser
| features...
| sekh60 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll have to look into it too, though the
| gamification sounds annoying AF.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| TeamSpeak and Ventrillo still work great. It was a monumental
| mistake to switch to these 3rd party services that are bugged
| by every intelligence apparatus on earth.
| superkuh wrote:
| I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade)
| because they added a trialware system that required getting
| approval/serial code from the company every month to continue
| operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to
| force them to TS4/5/etc. Have they stopped this or walked it
| back?
|
| And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not
| teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible,
| but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like
| actual teamspeak was.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Could use mumble instead?
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| Those are voice chat, yeah? Discord has chat too, which is
| used more than voice in many of my communities.
| agoodusername63 wrote:
| That would be great if your community only exists in a voip
| channel
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I had a look at Teamspeak but you need to email somebody for
| permission to have more than 32 users on your server.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(
|
| Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very,
| very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up:
| https://once.com/campfire
| accrual wrote:
| > Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(
|
| There's an actively developed open source server that allows
| the clients to connect!
|
| https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server
|
| I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how
| LLMs interact with it.
| mk6i wrote:
| I got you: https://github.com/mk6i/smarter-smarter-child
| hamdingers wrote:
| Seconding campfire. Straightforward, easy to host, easy to
| backup, no monetization strategy. Most self-hosted
| alternatives have complicated deployments to enable scaling
| to >1,000s of users which I will never, ever need.
| beatothewitch wrote:
| People talking about moving to Revolt. It's the most similar
| joks wrote:
| Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But
| that's in the pipeline at least
| yownie wrote:
| our groups are discussing [stoat](https://stoat.chat/).
|
| I don't know it well yet.
|
| .......yet.
| strokirk wrote:
| IRC never died.
| tym0 wrote:
| Time to spin up a mumble server again...
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| The only viable option, of course: https://escargot.chat/
| hexagonwin wrote:
| Is this open source? Would be cool to self host this..
| jedberg wrote:
| Oh yay, the company that told me to "just use your wife's phone"
| when I couldn't verify my own phone number, instead of even
| trying to fix the problem, now wants a copy of my face?
|
| Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep
| it safe.
| soared wrote:
| > After completing a chosen method, users will receive
| confirmation via a direct message from Discord's official
| account.
|
| Why isn't this delivered via some sort of notification, menu,
| pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing
| Daedren wrote:
| > Facial age estimation
|
| This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps
| it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just
| trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| When you try to use the law (or the threat of legal action) to
| force people to "do something" about anonymous, unsupervised
| kids on the public internet using their free platform, this is
| the type of solution you're going to get: the cheapest, most
| scalable one they can get away with.
|
| Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying
| "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no
| longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Which goes to show that lawmakers probably should be working
| more hand-in-hand with technical experts before making such
| laws. A regulation that provides a good technical solution
| would be more useful, especially if lawmakers could have
| helped work on ways to prove a person's age cohort estimation
| without say checking an entire physical ID (and all of the
| identity theft that can enable), or yes relying on "AI
| detection" that is quite game-able (literally so as reports
| are Death Stranding's Photo Mode is a reliable workaround for
| Discord's primary AI scanning vendor k-ID).
| seneca wrote:
| We're going to need decentralized open source alternatives with
| E2EE for any major communication services, unfortunately. It's
| just too temping of a target for Governments. They're never going
| to give up trying to destroy anonymity online.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| They already exists except that most people don't know about it
| and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing
| users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user
| friendly.
|
| Until that changes, then the governments around the world are
| going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in
| order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that
| "you are not a child" TM
| anon_anon12 wrote:
| Another company jumping on the bandwagon to data-farm in the
| pretext of safeguarding children. I really wonder if there's an
| actual method to actually safeguard children while also not
| holding on to data. Because, genuinely, you can't question this..
| Companies would just say "we are trying to protect kids" and
| that'd be the end of the argument.
| itsmorgantime wrote:
| I really wonder if when this is fully implemented if they will
| have any safe guards against selling "adult verified" accounts.
| With AI being a possible work around for those who don't want
| to share an ID, selling accounts would be another big issue
| unless they check for IP addresses and block based on locations
| and logins. EDIT: I see in another comment that its against TOS
| to sell accounts, I doubt that has stopped anyone before
| though.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| You're out of your mind if you think I'm gonna upload ID to use a
| "shitposting about video games with friends" service.
| canada_dry wrote:
| To protect my privacy, I have a photoshopped drivers license
| with a photo of my dog that I've successfully used for
| verification (e.g. AirBnB) in the past.
|
| Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any
| longer.
| chimpanzee2 wrote:
| wdym, how did your dog driver license even pass before AI ?!
| zdragnar wrote:
| The tech used some variant of OCR, presumably
| canada_dry wrote:
| He's a handsome boy.
|
| Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the
| image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual
| license# as well as the picture.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Well then what was the point? If you gave them an ID that
| matches your name and DOB, they still got an identity
| vector that can conclusively match to your physical,
| government-acknowledged identity.
|
| Not having a correct photo or license number didn't
| really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any
| half-decent verification that would look at the fields
| where that information was expected to be, anyway.
| goodpoint wrote:
| well, any dog can pass the driving exam in US
| layer8 wrote:
| It used to be that on the internet, nobody knows you're a
| dog. ;)
| chickensong wrote:
| The perfect reply. Hats off to you, good sir.
| viccis wrote:
| Youtube flagged one of my accounts as a teenager because I
| watched a few pop videos (lol) and I was not able to trick it
| with fake IDs, though I didn't try all that hard.
| everdrive wrote:
| I've been grabbing music from youtube for years. I don't
| mean commercial music. I mean talented enthusiast who does
| not sell their music anywhere. Rest assured, it will
| absolutely be gone one day, and they way things are going,
| it feels like it will be sooner rather than later.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Just use Ai to make a non existent human face, might as well
| dawnerd wrote:
| There was a story a bit ago about people using video of
| someone turning their head from side to side to trick these
| systems. And of course naturally people will easily get
| past it.
| krick wrote:
| Huh. Can you do that? I wonder what is legal status of this.
| I used to make all sorts of fake IDs (pretty good ones!) when
| I was a teen (you know, for purposes such as going to clubs,
| buying alcohol), but of course this is literally a crime, and
| not even a "minor" one. Apparently, back then it didn't
| bother me much, but with age I became more cowardly, I must
| admit. So now I use my passport data more often than not,
| even though I am not really a fan of the idea of giving a
| scan of your documents to some random guy on AirBnB
| (although, with some obvious caption photoshopped on top, to
| make the scan less re-usable). I mean, it's just a matter of
| fact that everyone requires them, and it also has that weird
| status of "semi-secret thing" that you are somehow aren't
| supposed to give to anyone, and I still have close to zero
| understanding of how that works.
|
| So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or
| physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious"
| that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can
| do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery
| service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line
| between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord
| (a private commercial corporation)?
| gambiting wrote:
| >>But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel?
| To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)?
|
| The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain
| some financial gain by providing false information. There
| is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it
| probably violates some rules around unathorized access to
| computer systems.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I found a picture of someone my age, gender, and background
| and used that in the past for some things.
|
| But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber,
| but probably won't ever use it again, either.
| ikiris wrote:
| You do realize this is wire fraud right?
| bink wrote:
| Wire fraud is more than just lying to someone over the
| Internet. It requires a financial gain.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Yeah, I've been warning everyone about the consequences but
| nobody wanted to hear it. So do people still want a general
| social media ban for teens?
| qball wrote:
| Everybody hates teenagers, so yes.
|
| It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this
| is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is the kind of thing I would have posted while in High
| School.
| eimrine wrote:
| Brilliant observation! I would like to make the statement
| more precise: not hate/hatred but jealousy.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| They're not _hated_ , they're just treated as non-entities
| that aren't assumed to have or need any agency.
|
| People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of
| citizens.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I mean, yes. Because we don't give kids all their rights
| yet. That's fair in many regards (not all. Having schools
| able to silence dissent legally feels all sorts of
| wrong). It also add protections, like not letting a 12 yo
| work in a coal mine or be sent to war.
|
| More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to
| justify often heinous actions. People want to protect
| kids.
| Gud wrote:
| Absolutely. Social media and its consequences has been a
| disaster for the human race. Ban it for everyone.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| The loss of all anonymity and privacy on the internet is
| much worse than this generation's version of the "won't
| someone think of the children" scare. It's wild how many
| people are eating this up.
| spockz wrote:
| The one (teenage verification for specific services such
| as social media) does not require the other (require
| uploading ids to every site on the internet). For one,
| the scope is limited and secondly, there must be
| different schemes possible.
| Gud wrote:
| I'm not suggesting "upload an id". I'm suggesting ban all
| these brain slugs outright.
|
| Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind
| bars.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yes we should give the government more power and put up
| "The Great American Firewall" so Americans can't use any
| foreign Facebook like companies.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I didn't respond to the suggestion of absolute
| prohibition because it's too ridiculous a concept to take
| seriously.
| vjekm wrote:
| It's the only reasonable thing to do; the status quo is
| what's ridiculous.
| ikety wrote:
| What if there is simply nothing that can be done? I don't
| mean to sound defeatist, but what if there are some
| things that truly are like pandora's box. We can't put
| the lid back on. All we can do is educated people on how
| to use the tools correctly
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools
| correctly
|
| This lives in opposition to the people who own the
| websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'd love to arrest billionaires, but can we at least
| suggest some specific and resonable goals forst? Baby
| steps.
|
| Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an
| action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of
| this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous
| cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power).
| There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate
| mantra.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| While we're architecting the lives of millions of
| strangers what other reasonable things would you
| personally like to disallow?
| vagrantstreet wrote:
| Louis Rossmann had a vid about this and it's much more
| than jut anonimity, it's about protecting yourself from
| being exploited by algorithms. Can go as far as
| influencing your political voting, or who knows what
| else.
|
| Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all
| day on end?
| jmye wrote:
| > "won't someone think of the children" scare
|
| Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is,
| is hilariously dishonest.
|
| Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to
| protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the
| sand, especially if they use social media.
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| Hilariously, the website hosting the post you are currently
| commenting on is Social Media by almost any definition.
| Autocracy and autocratic thinking are never the solution.
| You don't know what's best for everyone.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not really. By a broad definition, yes. But here there is
| no algorithmic filtering of what you see based on data
| about you that is tracked and data about you purchased
| from data brokers. Nor is there a team of psychologists
| constantly working on ways to hit your dopamine triggers
| and keep you engaged.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| But that isn't the main issue with Discord, either,
| despite their attempts to add features like the ICYMI
| tab. The problem of Discord is more in the social than
| the media.
| 9rx wrote:
| Social media has none of that. Sometimes it is conflated
| with that as Facebook was social media for the first five
| minutes of its life, until they realized you can't make
| money with social media and quickly pivoted.
| vjekm wrote:
| This place should burn too.
| tokai wrote:
| And every video game is a RPG because you play a role.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I agree that social media is a plague. Unfortunately, the
| legal definition of "social media" is likely to be so broad
| that it will include things like Hacker News or even old-
| school forums. The real plague is the infinite scroll,
| engagement-farming social media like Twitter, post-newsfeed
| Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I'm skeptical that laws
| addressing social media will target the right problem given
| how rich/powerful a company like Meta is vs. some guy
| running an Anime forum.
| replooda wrote:
| > some guy running an Anime forum.
|
| I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at
| this point.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I've flown across the US to meet what will likely be
| lifelong friends[0], and just went out to dinner and an
| escape room with some others, all of which I connected with
| through Bluesky. The worst of social media is terrible, but
| I would hate to lose the best of it by banning it outright.
| The really negative parts come are
|
| - Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to
| deal with digital public spaces
|
| - Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines
| (chronological or bust)
|
| - Waves of unwanted interactions
|
| Social media seems like it _can_ be a positive tool to me.
| I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do
| think there is a conflict of interest issue between the
| mental health of the people that use social media, and for-
| profit corporations that provide social media services.
| Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult
| due to how much financial sway social media companies have
| on legislation, but it 's an important fight to fight.
|
| [0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of
| group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to
| find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in
| people engaging in it from here.
| Gud wrote:
| Blue sky is a social network, not social media.
|
| A subtle but important distinction
| runako wrote:
| I am super curious about this distinction! Could you say
| more?
| Gud wrote:
| On a network, people interact with each other.
|
| In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and
| doom scrollers.
|
| Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.
| Izkata wrote:
| The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to
| image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used".
| Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like
| "a medium being used for social interaction".
| Gud wrote:
| It was renamed from social network to social media by
| business executives, who hijacked the social networks
| built by us
| npunt wrote:
| OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network ->
| media shows a useful distinction between what the focal
| point of activity is.
|
| Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people
| you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while
| it is not in "social media". You may as well call it
| "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use
| it most of the time.
|
| Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while
| 'social networking' is primarily based on social
| connection and interaction.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| By that logic, Discord would be a network. There's no
| default feed for Discord, you need to actively seek out
| friends and community.
|
| Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically
| has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom
| scroll.
| runako wrote:
| > "specialized ~creators~"
|
| I can understand what this means in the context of visual
| platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on
| TT in that a number of very large creators there record
| from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ
| specialized production.)
|
| In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the
| context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter,
| LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not
| social media?
|
| > On a network, people interact with each other.
|
| On any platform that would be considered social media by
| any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people
| to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than
| a subreddit, but they serve the same function.
|
| I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't
| understand the distinction.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Blueskys only difference is that it hasnt been
| enshitified yet.
| pibaker wrote:
| Sorry but you sound exactly like that comic. "Our blessed
| homeland, their barbarous waters"
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-
| their-ba...
|
| More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times
| on this social media where one party tries to exempt what
| is clearly a social media from his anti-social media
| agenda because he finds it personally more palatable.
| Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case
| it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten
| years ago and is notorious for being always politically
| charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may
| have against social media are actually less about social
| media but about people he does not like being on social
| media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars
| causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.
|
| But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally
| different from their tyrannical censors) will save us
| from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp
| in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!
| npunt wrote:
| Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.
|
| It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes
| of activity online, even if several types are combined on
| a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming",
| "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all
| different things. You can quibble about what constitutes
| the edges of the definitions but they all have different
| key activities they enable.
|
| If you lump everything together, you fail to understand
| the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone
| solve them.
|
| The key to understanding any given social platform is to
| understand the proportion of which activity that platform
| enables. This tells you things like the incentives,
| constraints, externalities, etc of the platform.
| Different designs have different effects.
| pibaker wrote:
| I don't disagree in general. I wouldn't call 4chan a
| social media, for example.
|
| What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that
| bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out
| there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied
| the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling
| point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my
| perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically
| antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted
| in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on
| that platform.
|
| Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I
| am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit,
| Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.
| everdrive wrote:
| This right here is why we keep having this problem. The
| benefits (or in more cases) the addictions are too
| enticing. So we take the good with the bad, except the
| problem is that the bad far, far outweighs the good.
| Morromist wrote:
| Sure, social media is bad for kids. Why can't their parents
| regulate them though? Isn't keeping kids away from
| dangerous things a basic requirement of being a parent?
|
| I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids
| on social media pay fines and risk having social media
| sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all
| adults have to get an "internet license".
| Gud wrote:
| It's bad for everyone, except for the advertisers, and
| arguably it's bad for them as a 2nd order effect.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| I think we just need to ban social media in general. It's
| done more harm to our societies than good.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Good bye, Hacker News. I knew ye uhh... Well, I knew ye.
| Gigachad wrote:
| HN would be improved if the comment section was removed
| and it was just high quality submissions. All the AI
| generated engagement bait articles would stop.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| define 'social media' .. were BBSs social media? usenet?
| email? aol instant messenger? physical community bulletin
| boards? classified ads? newspapers?
| mywittyname wrote:
| ID verification for sites that where people speak the truth.
|
| Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing
| propaganda.
|
| It's the worst of both worlds.
| everdrive wrote:
| Nope, I want the social media companies to be shut down, I
| want smart phones to go away permanently, and I don't want
| kids to be handed laptops or ipads in school.
| xg15 wrote:
| Then use that server without age verification?
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| I'll vibe code that sh*t in a sitting
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Seriously, and probably do a better job of it. Electron.
| Yuck.
|
| The problem isn't the platform, it's getting a critical mass
| of users. Until everyone is using it, nobody is.
| isatty wrote:
| You can say "shit" on the internet.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Only if you let them scan your face first, comrade.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I have discord for gaming communities, but also for political
| communities. Pod Save America has a discord with thousands of
| users talking political things. While I don't mask my identity
| there, I sure don't want Discord preemptively linking my state
| ID to my person. Screw that.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| If you're worried about government retaliation they can
| already figure out who you are from what discord has,
| especially with a justice department that doesn't really even
| care about looking like they're following the law
| unethical_ban wrote:
| We shouldn't reward their data collection and AI
| surveillance bullshit with apathy, though.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| For sure, I'm just saying if you're in a political
| discord depending on what exactly is being discussed you
| should really be aware you already are certainly not
| anonymous to the gov if they don't want you to be
| mywittyname wrote:
| Government, sure.
|
| But it's the non-government entities you really need to be
| worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this
| data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then
| selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just
| blindly accept the data as true.
|
| These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the
| government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data
| from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them
| across various social media, then build out profiles of
| individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough
| check book.
|
| I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on
| people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't
| want to do anything that's going to increase their ability
| to map you across the internet, because that's just going
| to improve their ability to identify you, while still
| selling lies about your personality.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Discord hasn't been video game only for a long time
| x0x0 wrote:
| I think Discord is trapped in an ugly place:
|
| 1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the
| children they made;
|
| 2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be
| easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst
| dregs of the internet;
|
| 3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff,
| free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same
| platform;
|
| 4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic
| highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse
| to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of
| underwear gnomes.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| How reasonable is this expectation? All you do by intituting
| these draconian 'wont someone please think of the children'
| ID laws is make it marginally more difficult to access
| mainstream services where there's not much crazy bad stuff
| anyway. The rest of the internet is the wild west, and good
| luck controlling that.
|
| The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the
| fact that child security is not the objective, it's the
| justification.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| That's not a reasonable societal expectation. That should be
| an expectation of the parents to follow through on.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic
| highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse
| to lay out the actual method.
|
| This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's
| actual malice, not _just_ incompetence. Leaving aside that
| this shouldn 't be done at _all_ , there is no desire to do
| this in a privacy-preserving way, because _destroying
| anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for
| governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be
| avoided_. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get
| people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for
| generations.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2.
| ..
| ActorNightly wrote:
| All social media websites should require id tbh. This is the
| new public town square - everyone should have a voice, but
| nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to
| peddle bullshit.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Feel free to go make a social media website that requires ID.
| What you are claiming is that websites that _don 't_ require
| ID should be destroyed. No.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't need a public ID to sit in my local park nor shop for
| most things on Main Street.
|
| >nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to
| peddle bullshit.
|
| We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers.
| Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad
| customers.
| gambiting wrote:
| Except that is clearly not how it works. Spend 5 minutes on
| facebook, and you will quickly realize that people have
| absolutely no problem spewing the most disgusting racist,
| xenophobic shit you have ever seen in your life, while their
| full names and pictures of them hugging their granchildren
| are there for everyone to see.
|
| >> nobody should escape the consequences
|
| There are no consequences whatsoever for this.
| Mashimo wrote:
| You don't have to, you just can't access NSFW channels and
| servers.
| sph wrote:
| Good riddance Discord. Any alternative for the masses?
|
| They're not gonna use Slack or phpBB.
| apopapo wrote:
| Why would Slack not be affected by the same stupid laws?
| tavavex wrote:
| If you're a Slack user, I don't think they need your ID to
| tell that you're an adult
|
| More seriously, it will become a problem on there is a
| significant user migration to there and a repeat of the mass
| hysteria. Due to being more niche, these smaller platforms
| are probably not in danger right now.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| By Discord's own ToS you can't use Discord if you are under 13,
| so this change is just to make sure users that are 13, 14, 15,
| 16, and 17 years old are appropriately labelled.
|
| Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to
| prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the
| service?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| https://use-their-id.com/
| plingbang wrote:
| > Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord
| users
|
| Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions
| touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all
| this?
|
| > use facial age estimation
|
| Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check
| for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator
| falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?
|
| > submit a form of identification
|
| If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's
| real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in
| one country there is no process for that.
|
| > On-device processing
|
| Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| > Does it mean that even people who reside outside
| jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have
| to deal with all this?
|
| Yes, it's global
| kevinrineer wrote:
| > If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is
| Discord legally liable?
|
| Not until a court case on the topic gives us precedent.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| The CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini. He's from McKinsey. So that
| tracks.
| postsantum wrote:
| How else would you fight growing antisemitism on Discord?
| altairprime wrote:
| https://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/
|
| The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept
| above. Notably, they do _not_ accept any privacy-protecting
| digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only
| implement national ID verifications where they receive a full
| birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow _banks_
| to attest to age-majority.
|
| Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for /
| dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than
| simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective
| lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental
| privacy efforts -- especially if one somehow got them classified
| as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more
| expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided
| PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available
| there.
|
| Yes, this isn't a scorched earth response. Every other thread of
| discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new
| to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the
| budding age checks verification market at an early stage _rather
| than_ trying to shut it down, here's your roadmap to effecting
| real change on the matter. Good luck.
| superkuh wrote:
| The endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on
| the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in
| the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie,
| Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials
| of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about
| it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as
| they are private companies. This really should be a service that
| the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future
| we're speeding towards.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I do not understand this at all. How is ID verification
| settling on banks????! And which of these banks are private?
| superkuh wrote:
| Sorry if I was inexact in my wording. It's settling on the
| existence of your bank account proving who you are. The ID
| services require you to give them your bank login credentials
| (ie, Plaid). So there are two levels of denial, at Plaid (and
| related ID services) themselves and the banks deciding
| weather or not they want to allow it (work with Plaid, or
| Plaid with them, etc) and if they want to give you a bank
| account.
| phoenixy1 wrote:
| I work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank
| login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here
| saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I
| know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe
| documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of
| age verification in Australia, so TIL.)
| superkuh wrote:
| I almost swore here but I think that'd not get my message
| across. So I'll be calm. You're a liar (edit: or
| ignorant). I tried with Plaid. Plaid explicitly required
| my bank login credentials. I went in physically and
| talked face to face to my US bank's employee that handled
| Plaid.
| phoenixy1 wrote:
| Plaid does have products that do request bank
| credentials, but those products are not used for age
| verification. It's very common that a given customer-
| facing flow will use multiple Plaid products together to
| handle multiple different customer needs, so it's likely
| that the flow you were working with was using multiple
| Plaid products and requesting bank credentials, but for a
| different reason than to perform age verification (for
| example, KYC + bank account ownership verification or KYC
| + bank account validity verification).
| superkuh wrote:
| Right. This boils down to you saying you were wrong but
| trying to avoid saying it directly. Basically,
|
| >"Requiring a bank account credentials is common and yes,
| Plaid does it, despite what I said before, when the
| company buying Plaid services wants even more legal butt
| covering as is common in the wild."
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's kind of surprising that no-one has really come out with a
| proper privacy-preserving approach to this yet. It is clearly
| _possible_; there are reasonable-looking designs for this. But
| no-one's doing it; they're just collecting photos and IDs, and
| then leaking them all over the place.
| Etheryte wrote:
| No privacy is simpler and the simpler solution is cheaper. If
| there's no real incentive to go with another option, companies
| will go with the cheaper option.
| jeltz wrote:
| They do not want to solve the problem, they want to collect our
| IDs. If they would have wanted to actually solve it they would
| not have done this on legislations where it is not a
| requirement.
| AJ007 wrote:
| It is only a matter of time before ID verification means the
| camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at
| the screen.
| squeegmeister wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-t...
|
| What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to
| provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only
| ever shares your age range with other companies that request
| it, not your birthdate.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| This is great, but if and _only if_ it remains an opt-in
| choice that _enables_ parents.
|
| There is a stark difference between enabling choice or
| compelling it.
|
| Somehow in the last 15 years, we have completely lost sight
| of agency-based ethics as a founding and fundamental
| principle of western liberalism.
|
| This has been replaced with harm-based ethics. Harm has no
| fixed definition. There is no stopping rule -- when will we
| have eradicated enough harm? It's declared by fiat by whoever
| has the means to compel and coerce -- and harm inherent in
| that enforcement are ignored.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > It is clearly _possible_
|
| Is it?
|
| I don't think it is.
|
| I truly don't believe that there's any possible way to verify
| someone's age without collecting ID from them.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Well you could have government-run cryptographically signed
| tokens. They're already in the business of holding ID data
| (i.e. they don't need to collect it and this wouldn't
| increase the attack surface).
|
| But assuming it has to be a private solution, you could do
| the same thing but make it a non-profit. Then at least _new_
| services you wish to use don't need to collect your ID.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's possible to (cryptpgraphically verifiably) split up the
| age verification and the knowledge of what the verification
| is for.
| davidczech wrote:
| It would seem like a naive solution would be some arrangement
| where Discord would ask for a proof-of-age from an official
| service ran by the State (which issues your ID)
| orthogonal_cube wrote:
| As others have said, it's obvious that no real attempts have
| been made by anyone to create a privacy-focused solution
| because the end goal is to collect photo IDs.
|
| Occasionally in my free time I have been tinkering with a
| certificate-based solution that could fulfill this sort of need
| for age verification. It's not the most robust idea but it's
| simple enough using most of what we already have. Creating a
| minimal protocol which doesn't share actual identifying
| information nor metadata of the site you're accessing is
| trivial. If I can make an 80% solution in less than 100 hours
| of my free time then some groups with more money and
| intelligence could propose a dead-simple and easy-to-adopt
| solution just as easily.
| triceratops wrote:
| Here's my solution:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282
|
| The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists
| (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the
| same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the
| potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age
| verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over
| the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only the maximal
| data collection solutions implemented by people who don't give
| a shit about privacy _or_ free speech. And the mass
| surveillance cheerleaders egg them on.
|
| If privacy and free speech activists understood that a
| proactive, privacy-preserving approach to age verification is
| the best outcome we'd be better off.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| > ever so slightly
|
| It's _not_ "slightly". They'll start with claiming to protect
| people under 18 from obviously problematic content -- porn,
| grooming, etc.
|
| It won't stop there. The scope creep will extend to
| expressing or reading "incorrect" or "dangerous" views.
|
| They'll probably call some of it "hate speech", but hate
| speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X,
| "cisgender" is designated as a slur and gets your post
| censored.
|
| The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope
| isn't slippery -- "think of the children" is a wedge bad
| actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of
| censorship.
|
| They don't even need to target adults; if you control what
| children can see and express, you have enormous control over
| all future generations of voters.
| tavavex wrote:
| I agree, but the powers that be loathe the phrase "hate
| speech". I'm betting the next encroachment will be on
| "violence", "terrorism" or even Russian-style "promotion of
| nontraditional values".
| triceratops wrote:
| It's already happening. What's your alternative? Not VPNs
| because every jurisdiction and website will eventually have
| equivalent laws or terms of service.
| tavavex wrote:
| Nearly all big websites, probably, but there are enough
| tiny countries that I think at least one will opt to act
| as a safe haven for VPN servers and website hosting
| services, acting as the only remaining window to the free
| internet. It could be a lucrative practice, similar to
| how Panama and some other countries position themselves
| as places to register ships to avoid regulation.
| triceratops wrote:
| So VPN in from Panama to access shady sites no one else
| frequents? That's your solution?
| tavavex wrote:
| Who said anything about a solution? I'm not saying this
| is good, I just brought it up as a potential end point of
| what's currently happening to the internet. I don't think
| there is anything that people like us can do, we can only
| watch.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| You need to process that _other people disagree with that
| claim_ , and _do not believe we 'd be better off_.
|
| We should not accept the Overton window shifting here, and
| say "well, if we do it to ourselves, in a privacy-preserving
| way, that's _less_ bad ".
| triceratops wrote:
| > You need to process that other people disagree with that
| claim
|
| I think I already said that in my original post.
|
| > We should not accept the Overton window shifting here
|
| Great! Let's say you and I refuse to accept it. How do we
| keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies? How can
| we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age
| restrictions on social media?
|
| You'll never convince a majority of voters in democracies
| that nothing online should be age-restricted. These are the
| people that the enemies of anonymity and free speech are
| counting on to advance their agenda.
|
| At the same time a majority of voters is currently quite
| content with the state of age verification for access to
| tobacco and alcohol. Both its strictness (or lack thereof)
| and privacy preservation (almost perfect).
|
| I'm not saying my proposal is the one that should be
| adopted. I honestly don't care which idea gets picked and I
| don't want anything from it. But it's a virtual guarantee
| that in the absence of a competing good-enough, privacy-
| preserving implementation, only the most privacy-invasive
| idea will be implemented.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776272
|
| 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838417
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or
| selfies?
|
| Build and promote alternatives that don't.
|
| > How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age
| restrictions on social media?
|
| Host services elsewhere, and ignore claims that a
| country's laws extend beyond its borders.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| It really would be less bad though wouldn't it?
|
| The more we resist turning this into a state-sided solution
| which provides a service to private companies with a YES/NO
| age verification, the more likely your data is going to be
| given to botton-of-the-barrel third party private
| companies.
|
| I'm genuinely curious what the argument is against state-
| run privacy focused age verification is here. We already
| protect real life adult spaces with IDs. You hand your ID
| to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device
| when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.
|
| What makes these social media platforms special that they
| have entirely different rules?
|
| I will say, if they came for small privately-hosted
| communities, I can understand the cause for alarm. But so
| far it appears to be limited to massive misinformation
| machines.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The issue with your solution still comes down to yet another
| centralizing middleman with no real incentive to be
| efficient. And all the incentive to lobby governments and
| extract more wealth from the people.
|
| This can of course be done government by government, but that
| isn't scalable for a global company.
| triceratops wrote:
| It doesn't have to be 1 middleman. Multiple companies can
| issue the cards, just like there are multiple beer and
| cigarette and lottery companies.
|
| I wish I could edit my post because a lot of people had the
| same misconception when I first wrote it.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| To add context to the discussion, it is important to recall that
| Discord was reported to have recently filed paperwork with the
| SEC for an IPO [1]. Thus it seems likely that the real reason for
| the age verification (i.e., user identification) policy is to
| boost its perceived earnings potential among Wall Street
| investors. According to this theory, Discord is the new Facebook.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-
| happen-...
| instagib wrote:
| Credit card verification not an option.
|
| Facial video estimates or submit an id card.
|
| Option 3: if we analyze all of your data we have and see you are
| not going to bed at 8pm for middle school, you get adult status.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a
| related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do
| when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one
| platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a
| subset of your community?
| noosphr wrote:
| Shake your head and move on.
|
| It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become
| hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn
| people about it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the
| community stops using it and uses something else, and the
| others either follow them or don't.
|
| You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both
| to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability
| to communicate with each other.
|
| The _ideal_ outcome is for everyone to stop using the
| intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That 's even
| what often happens over time, but not always immediately.
| Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.
| altruios wrote:
| We start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated.
| Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security.
|
| Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with
| mutations from competitors galore.
| debo_ wrote:
| Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while:
| https://itsfoss.com/revolt/
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| https://stoat.chat/
| TechniKris wrote:
| > Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated
|
| Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/
|
| > Discord is a good design
|
| Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or
| https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.
|
| ... With the only caveat being that general experience of
| using Matrix is awful.
|
| I second the other commenter's suggestion of using
| https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which
| matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.
| sneak wrote:
| Matrix is slow, buggy trash with bad clients.
|
| (Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause
| its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and
| tell me that I'm not using their seemingly annual complete
| new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes
| it perfect now.)
| subscribed wrote:
| Bad clients issue stemming from the bad design.
|
| Soatok covered it very well here:
| https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-
| matrixs-ol...
|
| I'm quite sure most of these issues were fixed by now,
| but the fundamental issues remain, at least in this
| federation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Pretty much why centralized billionaires will always win.
| It takes a lot of resources (in terms of hardware and
| engineering) to make things at scale and smooth. The rich
| abuse this, the not rich can't afford to be principled.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Mumble already exists. IRC exists. Matrix exists. Discord is
| a surveillance tool by design. Jason Citron pulled the same
| hijinx with Aurora Feint, but I assume he has been betraying
| users to CIA-and-Friends from the start so he gets a pass for
| breaking the same laws.
|
| Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark
| money support from feds or worse.
| devsda wrote:
| It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco
| i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and
| then finally accept the change.
|
| May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the
| masses.
| esseph wrote:
| That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people
| went to mastadon/bluesky.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Reddit dropped a lot in quality after that. I suspect a lot
| of people stopped posting, even if they did continue using it
| in some capacity.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I uninstalled it from my phone entirely. Definitely helped
| curb my usage.
| gbear605 wrote:
| For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I'm
| happier without it.
| JoeBOFH wrote:
| Hah I did the same thing. I only ever interact with it now
| when it appears in search results.
| quotemstr wrote:
| One of the starkest social desirability biases in tech is
| between federated and centralized platforms. Most people, in
| public, _say_ they support distributed, federated systems, but
| when push comes to shove, they all use centralized platforms
| anyway.
| volf_ wrote:
| atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue
| bakugo wrote:
| If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase
| likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting
| in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.
|
| Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation
| literally grew up with it, same for most of the other
| established social media apps. The concept of alternatives
| largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were
| probably already sending pictures of themselves and other
| personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like
| Discord doesn't already have all of that.
| ziml77 wrote:
| There's also people who have been through enough of these
| moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of
| it all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm always exhausted by a migration. But I don't move off
| because there's an easy alternative. There never is. I do
| it to maintain principles, even at the cost of my social
| circles.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC...
| yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my
| friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more
| sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?
|
| People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet
| another noise machine they have to check in the list of
| snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch,
| discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox,
| minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and
| slack/teams for work.
|
| Absolutely exhausting to be honest.
| andrepd wrote:
| Kids today are alarmingly bad at technology. This is not a
| "kids these days" situation, this is absolutely true. They
| understand "tap on icon, open app, there's a feed and DMs".
|
| I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of
| this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with
| technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew
| up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.
| subscribed wrote:
| Correct. From my personal experience (have kids and
| nieces/nephew this age), and all think an app is the
| thing that they scroll in, and any attempt to explain the
| very basics on internet connectivity, servers, databases,
| etc, ends up in them basically experiencing blue screen
| moment and backing away to the safety of the endless
| scroll.
|
| The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post
| attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes
| later they will download phone flashlight app that
| requires Google services for app delivery.
|
| Shocking.
|
| I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to
| technology in any other way than pointing to
| help/manual/search engines and asking questions.
| nhhvhy wrote:
| I don't think people understand the true level of tech
| illiteracy of Gen Z. A couple years back I did an
| internship with the IT guy at my high school, and the
| vast majority of the problems students had with the
| Chromebooks we used were, in no specific order:
| - Not understanding that a dead battery means it won't
| turn on - Trying to use them without an internet
| connection - "The screen won't work" when trying to
| non-touchscreen models like a tablet - "I can't see
| my stuff" when using the guest mode rather than their
| login, or when they used a PC and they couldn't see the
| docs icon on their desktop
|
| That's not even to mention the abysmal typing skills of
| most students, so many 15WPM hunt-and-peck typers..
|
| There's a mountain of issues along those lines we ran
| into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I work with kids and it's admittedly a bit
| disheartening having conversations like
|
| > why don't you make a separate account for your sibling
|
| > I don't know how to make an email
|
| > but you needed an email for your account
|
| > yeah, I just use my school email
|
| By that time my age as a young teen I knew how to make
| new accounts and research what I didn't know. And I'm not
| sure of its my place to help them create an email without
| knowledge from their parents.
| tavavex wrote:
| I feel like asking someone working IT about the average
| technical literacy of the people they work with is
| similar to asking an EMT about the health of an average
| person. Not to discredit your experience, but you should
| account for the fact that a lot of the people you helped
| were the ones who were already filtered out by their
| inability to fix trivial problems.
|
| I'm not saying this issue doesn't exist. But I want to
| reframe it as the low bar for using tech dropping through
| the floor. Previously, you had to have at least somewhat
| of an idea for what you're doing, but nowadays most
| people who don't care about tech are reliant on using the
| "grandma school of thought" in memorizing basic patterns
| and relationships without having a bigger model of what's
| going on. This mostly affects newer generations and older
| people who only started using technology recently,
| because this strategy didn't fly in the past. But
| technical literacy is falling for everyone.
|
| But the absence of the low bar doesn't mean that
| everyone's chasing it. In high school, I was surrounded
| by peers who were interested in tech, sometimes being far
| better than me. The average level of understanding was
| pretty alright. In university, lots of people did just
| fine. I know countless people my age who are highly
| skilled in computer science. We're not in the majority,
| but there's plenty of us. I'm tired of it always being
| framed as an issue stemming from some kind of unique lack
| of personal responsibility and low intelligence, complete
| with applying stereotypes to hundreds of millions of
| people. _Every_ average user will optimize actually
| understanding anything out of their brain if given an
| opportunity, it 's just that that opportunity had only
| appeared fairly recently.
| andrepd wrote:
| People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums
| into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad
| idea. And it was. But nobody cared.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email
| server?
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| No, we'd like to go back to the culture that created
| protocols to solve our needs, such that people could create
| interoperable servers and clients to implement those
| protocols.
| andrepd wrote:
| Email is an open protocol, perfectly suited for delivering
| messages between people. Discord is a closed application,
| unsearchable, any server or account may be nuked at
| discord's discretion, thus it's entirely unsuited to
| replace e.g. a forum.
|
| You do understand the difference?
| Jblx2 wrote:
| Maybe time for a Usenet renaissance?
| idatum wrote:
| I'm seeing Groups.io show up more for hobbies/interests I
| have. It seems email can be a way to slow down heated
| discussions. Perhaps at the expense of push-back on using
| more email?
|
| Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their
| discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?
| daedrdev wrote:
| discord being a closed, unsearchable platform is one of its
| main features.
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other
| platforms like Reddit, and it died.
|
| Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their
| community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real
| damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to
| a fledgling app.
|
| WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government
| boosted Signal.
|
| Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Its hard to say. Reddit is still a shit show, but I still
| peer into niche communities you won't find anywhere else on
| the internet.
|
| Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC
| esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community:
| not so easy to replace.
| rurp wrote:
| Oh I think it definitely did damage, just not enough to kill
| such a massive platform overnight. Twitter has lost a
| significant amount of users while other social networks grew
| or held steady, and the cultural impact seems to have waned a
| lot.
|
| I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon
| era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be
| very active on there and discussions would often spill over
| into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less
| than before.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Try to tell them it's a bad idea. And be ready to leave that
| community if nothing changes. That's pretty much the way of
| life for an internet vagrant. Maybe you hope the community
| migrates too. Maybe you try to remake the community. But those
| aren't in your control.
|
| I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This
| won't be different.
| alexashka wrote:
| Most everyone will go down the path of least resistance. A few
| outliers will try to resist, get old and/or tired. A few of the
| few will reach acceptance, comprehend the serenity prayer. A
| few of the few of the few will reach enlightenment.
|
| What _you_ do depends on where you 're at - statistically,
| you'll go down the path of least resistance which is totally,
| totally fine.
| alex1138 wrote:
| You can, of course, not do this (you meaning the company,
| Discord)
|
| You can choose to be respectful of people who have valid reasons
| for not providing ID
|
| But you want that sweet IPO money (as stated elsewhere in this
| thread). You don't actually care about the internet and how
| anonymity is a cool thing for certain vulnerable groups
|
| All these tech CEOs should face prison time and I'm not joking.
| They've displayed a complete laissez faire attitude to all of
| these concerns
| cbold wrote:
| When the openclaw/moltbook fad dies, those Mac mini's could be
| repurposed for a p2p forum network.
| stuffn wrote:
| Finally I feel validated complaining for the last decade about
| the move away from IRC/teamspeak to centralized services. I've
| been called all kinds of names.
|
| Now those same people are complaining they're gonna have to
| submit their faces to discord. Which will eventually be used to
| prosecute or commit fraud. I'm left wondering if "tech
| enthusiasts" are ever actually correct.
| anthk wrote:
| Heh, that happened with phony nostalgic gen-z kids trying to
| recreate 'old times' with Discord and turd themning for Windows
| AKA called 'Frutiger Aero' while bitching against XMPP calling
| it 'malware'.
|
| They wil learn by brute force. As we had to do.
| bitbytebane wrote:
| Discord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying.
| Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.
| vkou wrote:
| If you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use
| discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this
| enough.
| jusgu wrote:
| it's not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be
| where everyone already is, even if there's less privacy
| AuthAuth wrote:
| IRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make
| discord enjoyable.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| If you have any hope of replacing Discord, you need to actually
| understand Discord. Among many other things, people use Discord
| because it has persistent history, integrated images and
| videos, video and audio calls, and screen sharing.
| keithnz wrote:
| lot of people complaining, but, seems like they rolled it out
| already in UK and Australia... no real complaints I know of, and
| I'm in NZ and are on NZ/Aussie discords. Also teen mode doesn't
| actually seem that restrictive. Seems an ok move to me. But for
| whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes
| to discord on here.
| rwmj wrote:
| I have a discord account that I use very rarely, and just tried
| it (from the UK) and it didn't ask me for any ID or face scan.
| If they do start doing that, I'll simply stop using the
| service.
| pibaker wrote:
| It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da
| kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the
| richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem
| hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.
|
| Rules for thee, free love for me.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| I'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really
| keep it to adults and be safe.
| RIMR wrote:
| I'm just going to go ahead and say that "free love" is a
| terribly inappropriate way to refer to sex trafficking,
| regardless of the age of the victims, unless you're being
| facetious (e.g., The Onion's "Penis Goofin'" allegations
| against Epstein).
| cgriswald wrote:
| I'm going to suggest re-reading the top level comment and
| the GP's response. I don't see anyone suggesting non-
| facetiously that free love and sex trafficking are
| synonymous nor that sex trafficking of adults is
| acceptable. I think the top level poster is being
| facetious; such a view is how these creeps might think. I
| think the respondent is, intentionally or mistakenly,
| ignoring that context and using the term at face value.
| handedness wrote:
| 'I'm fine with extreme indulgence, but just really keep it
| restrained and be safe.'
|
| By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be
| normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms.
|
| There's also an argument to be made that normalizing
| debauchery invites scope creep.
| volf_ wrote:
| do as we say, not as we do
| ActorNightly wrote:
| What do you mean day by day.
|
| We have known this to be the case, for quite some time, yet
| majority of the public still thought that a convicted felon was
| good enough to be president.
| dijit wrote:
| I think that's the exact irony that the parent is eluding to.
|
| It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth[1] lies squarely in
| the center of the foundational belief that those who've
| acquired such means have done so because they reflect "the
| highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that
| humanity has yet accomplished."
|
| It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its
| most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is
| not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence
| Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty,
| degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've
| sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well
| past time to reneg on the social contract.
|
| 1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-
| history/gospelofwealth/
| rob74 wrote:
| I think you've got that quote backwards. In full it
| reads:
|
| > _Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws
| sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the
| Idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type
| of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity
| has yet accomplished._
|
| Or (to shorten it a bit): "These laws (of capitalism)
| [...] are nevertheless [..] the best and most valuable of
| all that humanity has yet accomplished". So this is only
| an unlimited belief in the virtues of capitalism, not in
| the virtues of rich people.
|
| From the introduction:
|
| > _Carnegie believed in giving wealth away during one's
| lifetime, and this essay includes one of his most famous
| quotes, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
| Carnegie's message continues to resonate with and inspire
| leaders and philanthropists around the world._
|
| I really wonder what Carnegie would think about his
| successors dismantling USAID?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I believe the connection he was making was that the laws,
| results, and people profiting from the system all
| represent the best of humanity. That said, whether read
| forwards or backwards, the point still stands. I
| appreciate your attention to detail.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Andrew Carnegie wrote and lived in an era without an
| income tax. In that era rich men were expected to be
| broadly philanthropic, to steward their wealth for the
| good of the common, to act with generosity and
| responsibility. Because the state did not provide a
| safety net, the wealthy faced immense social pressure to
| act as stewards of the public good.
|
| In today's era those expectations do not exist. The
| public-facing, gilded age palaces, which by their public
| nature tend to enforce good behavior by forcing them to
| physically interact with the society they profited from,
| have been replaced by private, gated bunkers behind tall
| hedges blurred out on Google Maps. The wealthy wear jeans
| and hoodies to "blend in" or appear common, when they are
| very much not. A rail tycoon in a 10X beaver tophat might
| offer a beggar something on the street. A tech mogul in a
| hoody might not even get solicited.
|
| Income tax - and broadly speaking many other changes to
| the social contract between upper and lower classes, like
| the bureaucratization of welfare - has not just allowed
| but incentivized the wealthy to shirk the
| responsibilities of old, and outsource their morality to
| a (corrupt, as many have pointed out) government. And
| it's not good. There is no honor in giving anymore.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If we repeal the income tax, virtue will return to the
| wealthy.
|
| Is that something you believe?
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Improbable. It's hard to un-ring a bell once rung. Was
| adding critical context to the Carnegie citation.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| Are you really asking this? For real?
|
| You're shooting the messenger.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| It's all about the kids when you need a certain segment of
| the population to vote a certain way.
| echelon wrote:
| It's never about kids. If they cared about kids, they would
| have school lunch and wouldn't starve.
|
| It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And
| creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and
| business leaders.
|
| Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of
| privacy and from monitoring and tracking.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That is the uncharitable interpretation. I think it is at
| least as likely that voters consistently get to chose between
| a turd sandwich and a giant douche, so it will always be
| possible to accuse them of preferring a terrible candidate.
|
| Also, nitpick: it was neither a majority of the public, or a
| majority of the eligible voting population, or even a
| majority of the people who voted.
|
| I think a really good first step, at least in the US, towards
| making our candidate selection better would be to mandate
| open primaries.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I think your interpretation is uncharitable. One of the
| options is a fraud and a pedophile and the other wasn't.
| They absolutely were not equally bad.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| This is the most uncharitable take and common of the people
| who try to play the middle or wave away their decision to
| vote for Trump.
|
| The decision was quite literally between a known criminal
| and already even at the time known to be likely pedophile
| (and now it's basically a fact) and someone who is none of
| that.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >a turd sandwich and a giant douche
|
| Ah yes, the famous conservative talking point of "well
| yeah, my side is bad, but your side is just as bad".
|
| From a pure performance standard across economy and quality
| of life, its pretty clear that Democratic policies always
| end up as net positive, while conservative policies may
| seem good in the short term but allways end up bad long
| term. But to see this you have to understand politics, and
| understand the effects aren't always immediate. However,
| the situation this time around is way simpler.
|
| Basically in 2016, you could be excused for voting for
| Trump. Things were going well enough that mattered, Hilary
| was not the best candidate, and maybe a little mix up
| needed to happen. In 2020, if you voted for Trump, you are
| absolutely clueless about politics and have no idea what is
| actually good for the country, but at least its all
| political reasons.
|
| In 2024, it wasn't about politics - it was a choice between
| either allowing a convicted felon who tried to overthrow US
| government (with Supreme Courts saying he did nothing wrong
| mind you) back into a position of power, or not. As it
| turns out 7/10 people who either voted for trump or didn't
| vote are ok with the rich and elite getting away with what
| they want.
|
| So generally when people act surprised about anything that
| happens in regards to Einstein or any other things that
| Trump will do, like interfere with elections and possibly
| go for third term, just remember that those people don't
| actually care. This is what they want.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > From a pure performance standard across economy and
| quality of life, its pretty clear that Democratic
| policies always end up as net positive,
|
| All one has to do is point at San Francisco as this us
| provably false. Dems have been in charge their for
| decades and it's arguably not working.
| notjtrig wrote:
| Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.
| otterley wrote:
| This is a completely useless statistic, and I'm not even
| close to being a Trump fan.
| tux3 wrote:
| I am not a native English speaker, I may be missing a cultural
| nuance, but I wouldn't call any of what they did love. That
| word enters nowhere in a sickening child abuse island.
| ambicapter wrote:
| it's just sarcasm.
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| and they keep protecting the pedos from prosecution. lol.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is no worse than Discord just banning NSFW content
| wholesale throughout the platform (which they would be entirely
| within their rights to do). It's a big fat nothingburger.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have
| minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at
| "14-28 year olds".
| danaris wrote:
| It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of
| personally identifying information.
| subscribed wrote:
| Especially by the company already involved in a leak of a
| massive trove of pictures, personal details (including
| IDs), etc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
|
| What could possibly go wrong this time...
| Morromist wrote:
| It would be in their rights to do it.
|
| Its users who value their privacy will be in their rights to
| leave and we will.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| They have a right to ask for my passport and SSN. And I have
| a right to say "hell no" and delete my account in response.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.
| Macha wrote:
| The owners of Tumblr thought being banned from the app
| store was certain death, but losing the nsfw content was
| only possible death.
| oguz-ismail2 wrote:
| It's a question of scale. Neither crime is less serious but far
| more children are groomed and abused over Discord than flown in
| via some super rich sicko's private jet for a 'costume party'.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that,
| though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+
| johndhi wrote:
| he was convicted of soliciting prostitution (not of minors),
| right?
|
| why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew
| the details of what he did wrong?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| This article was on the front page recently:
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534
|
| So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth
| getting involved with.
| johndhi wrote:
| good call! hadn't read that.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| He pled to Procuring Person under 18 for Prostitution.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted
| procuring a child for prostitution.
| Finnucane wrote:
| He ran a sex-trafficking ring that involved hundreds of girls
| and women. Possibly over a thousand. He wasn't keeping it all
| to himself.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > not of minors, right?
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-
| release/file/1180481...
|
| "The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old
| at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein
| intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his
| victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because,
| in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their
| age."
|
| > why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with
| knew the details of what he did wrong?
|
| Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| People don't realize that all of our problems lately are
| stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we
| find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and
| bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards,
| and lack of accountability from them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue
| that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested
| parties are very engaged.
|
| Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so
| many people shrugging in response. One good push back from
| everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But
| that implies the people are united and not instead driven
| into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's
| basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I
| don't know how we come back from that
|
| Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first
| step.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| [warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically]
|
| Our media landscape has people focusing on basically
| everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that
| liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much
| effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a
| whole really thinking about how to solve our very real
| problems.
|
| China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say,
| growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when
| millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better
| at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and
| international soft power.
|
| One of my great fears is that democracy _was_ the right
| model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won 't
| keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a
| competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.
| thwarted wrote:
| > _China 's technocratic rule...seems a lot better at
| creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and
| international soft power._
|
| This requires that those in/with the power actually have
| altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How
| rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China?
|
| I elided the population starving part in order to not
| distract from the possibility of truly selfless
| governance strategy. It may very well be the case that
| millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the
| needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the
| millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no
| mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable.
| But that not everyone sees it that way is really what
| we're fighting against.
|
| "I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go
| hungry."
|
| "But mah profits!"
|
| "You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but
| that's now a solved problem"
|
| "But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Corruption definitely happens in China but even as a US
| person I can think of at least one major case where there
| were very real consequences for that. How many US govt
| officials have been executed for corruption?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong
|
| Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very
| much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very
| misguided agricultural practices.
|
| My point is that in the same period, China has gone from
| "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass
| starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high
| speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world
| and nobody is even close."
|
| While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to
| do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in
| entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average
| lifetime GDP per capita".
| vharuck wrote:
| Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than
| democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in
| _what goal_ will be efficiently pursued. When a
| technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve
| overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people
| left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent
| authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound
| democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to
| recover from.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| While I like your message here, I don't think
| authoritarianism is actually more efficient (efficient at
| what?) usually. Because often it goes hand in hand with
| economic and social extraction, which is inherently
| inefficient.
|
| But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point -
| while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and
| execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than
| representative government, the worst case authoritarian
| govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with
| a functional democracy.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are
| disengaged, while the most interested parties are very
| engaged._
|
| That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average
| $26.53 million [1]
|
| You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000
| salary.
|
| Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you
| suppose motivates the donors?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_U
| nited...
| psychoslave wrote:
| You can't find that because any concentration of power means
| the corruption forces have only very limited surface to
| pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to
| swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience.
|
| People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved
| into alien agendas on which they have no agency.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems,
| proportional representation would help a lot. As it would
| make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the
| main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of
| winning).
|
| (although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that
| we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election
| with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads
| at the expense of the more established Conservative and
| Labour parties)
| kypro wrote:
| FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be
| done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad.
|
| Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants
| quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes
| it very easy for those people to be removed. This is
| typically the model that works best in business and other
| cooperative pursuits anyway.
|
| Throwing more people in the room with different opinions
| will ensure significant decisions can almost never made.
| Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will
| be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by
| centrists who can't really change anything and anything
| they do change will be disliked by everyone.
| sally_glance wrote:
| Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make
| sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea
| is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the
| people who have been granted a lot of power are very good
| at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we
| put in place...
| 9dev wrote:
| Which is exactly why we need a strong federation, and broad
| participation in democratic process across the bank. Many
| people can't even be bothered to vote, much less
| participate in their local, municipal governments. That
| must change.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Voting is meaningless if it's not for a program with
| people charged to implement it being on revokable mandat
| if they go out of the rails of the planned destination.
|
| Instead general elections are theaters were all that is
| voted is which clown is going to have a blank check.
| drdaeman wrote:
| It's easy to solve concentration of power, just distribute
| it more. Nowadays we can have quite large distributed
| systems.
|
| It's nigh impossible to invent a system that truly
| formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for
| everyone's best long-term interests, minimizing
| unhappiness.
| rapind wrote:
| 100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended
| with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail
| to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these
| systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want
| more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem
| to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current
| billionaires!)
|
| For example in the US, the executive order is a massive
| problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies
| the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge
| problem.
|
| Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be
| questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How
| will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth
| it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it
| back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle
| and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.
| quantummagic wrote:
| Except it's very easy to "sell" government overreach.
| Whenever a plane flies into a tower, or flu season is
| extra scary, people will clamor for strict government
| authority. With every such event, the government gains
| capabilities and tendencies that always end up with a few
| people having outsized power over the masses.
| rapind wrote:
| Yes, but I don't think it's so straightforward. I think
| there are bad actors marketing this overreach. Like the
| surveillance industry for the Patriot Act (tech, defence,
| telcom, maybe compliance vendors?). I don't think their
| goal is to create a distopia, but we should always be
| looking at incentives for large government programs.
| quantummagic wrote:
| It is straightforward, and very predictable. Bad actors,
| aren't an anomaly.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who
| want more power
|
| I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents
| us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more
| equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they
| have, the lazier and more bored they get.
|
| Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop
| caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't
| all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because
| humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other
| people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.
| rapind wrote:
| Is there a way to accept but also limit greed that is
| reliable and durable?
|
| Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will
| be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we
| have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so
| hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you
| did stop working (against societies interest!)?
|
| This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism
| bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good,
| but at some point it gets ridiculous.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Well we can look at attempts at socialism and see that
| some failed, some were successful:
| https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/successful-
| sociali...
|
| But of course success is relative to some cultural
| values. We could just as well wonder about success and
| failure in implementation of any political system.
|
| The most remarkable trait of humans is cognitive
| plasticity, so determining any natural tendency that
| would be more inate than acquired is just a game of
| pretending there are hypothetical humans living out of
| any cultural influence that would still exhibit
| predominent behavioral traits.
|
| Competition is a social construct. There are people out
| there whose biggest concern is keeping focus on enjoying
| what they are, freeing their attention from the illusion
| of possession, avoiding any financial/material bounds
| they can and staying away of contingent hierarchical
| servitudes.
|
| They are also many people who holds desires for both of
| these perspectives, or any interpolation/extrapolation
| that they can suggest.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the
| powerful get rich.
| WillAdams wrote:
| My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions
| --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a
| minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate
| from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a
| physically written out check or money order physically signed
| by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class
| envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter
| explaining the reason for the donation.
|
| If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm
| fine with that.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Bundling would get around that to some extent
| WillAdams wrote:
| 1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1
| stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage
| folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would
| probably result in this being equivalent to a job
| creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.
| ashleyn wrote:
| This is the central problem with Citizens United. The
| supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A
| cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally
| unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist
| judges or a constitutional amendment.
| uncletscollie wrote:
| Activist judges?
|
| The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant
| new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided
| law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?
| jmcgough wrote:
| PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country
| Gigachad wrote:
| These days instead of paying out politicians you just buy
| social media bots or even the whole platform to push
| propaganda to the general public so they start agreeing
| with you.
| root_axis wrote:
| What's to prevent them from just ignoring those
| restrictions?
| malfist wrote:
| Most of the money in politics isn't direct contribution to
| candidates, it's PACs.
|
| PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do
| things like advise congress people on legislation they'd
| like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or
| candidates, some advocate for movements.
|
| What they're not supposed to be doing is directly
| coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a
| candidate. But that's a line that has been continually
| fuzzed.
|
| An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC
| (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this.
| While better elected representatives and officials would
| always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we
| design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and
| double standards. We were even (collectively, across
| humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long
| ago.
| bsenftner wrote:
| We need _regulations on the politicians_ because, clearly,
| their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution
| back.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I didn't really mean "regulations" but more a political
| (and civic) system in which a given individual's
| corruption etc. gets caught quickly and/or there are too
| many disincentives for them to to do much based on it.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem
| in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and
| every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways.
| The only variable is how long the people of any individual
| society can remain free and prosperous before their decline.
| Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off
| massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary
| reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other
| outcome is terminal decline.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You can't have truly representative government if the people
| voting don't understand or care that they're not being
| represented particularly well.
|
| It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't
| represent the interests of your people because the people
| have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for
| with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their
| tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just
| don't result in anything)
| dbspin wrote:
| Sortation.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Sortition?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Post Citizens United, that's going to require a
| Constitutional amendment.
|
| And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would
| need to ratify it.
| asdff wrote:
| Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before
| Citizens United
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is unhelpful fatalism and actively dissuades reform.
| Not all politicians are "corrupt and bought". And
| further, there is an enormous difference before and after
| this Supreme Court decision.
|
| It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United,
| it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from
| individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal
| dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less
| accountability.
| asdff wrote:
| >there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack
| of accountability from them
|
| The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to
| the stone age ever since we elevated the first person
| arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government
| developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know
| how to get around this and it depresses me that we will
| always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.
| tankenmate wrote:
| Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't
| concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.
|
| And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1)
| control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued
| when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises
| selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs
| a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the
| contrapositive is also true.
| fud3748 wrote:
| Sure, it's easy to tax "wealth". Except most wealth today
| is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob
| decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell
| her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on
| "wealth" of $10 billion.
| antonyh wrote:
| Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.
| vintermann wrote:
| There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice
| in Y rather than in $.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that
| should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| you can tax stock without taxing inventory.
|
| Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting
| worik wrote:
| > you can tax stock without taxing inventory.
|
| How? What is the difference between "stock" and
| "inventory"?
| flir wrote:
| So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see
| that as a win/win.
| AaronM wrote:
| If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain,
| that should immediately trigger a tax event.
|
| The real solution though is for the legislative branch to
| not be beholden to those same people and be able to
| quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are
| discovered.
| cluckindan wrote:
| That would instantly wipe out most leverage from the
| stock market, and from a casual bystander perspective, it
| would be a great thing.
| njarboe wrote:
| Agreed. This would get rid of borrow against gains to
| spend tax free. But also just get rid of the income tax,
| it is the worst way to tax, and do a land value tax.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain,
| that should immediately trigger a tax event.
|
| How does that work when a house is used as collateral on
| a loan? Or artwork?
|
| The loans are just a symptom, the problem is in the
| Estate Tax, and those loans are being used as a tool to
| wait out the clock and then dodge dynastic taxes
| entirely.
|
| Remove the final loophole, and they'll stop playing weird
| games to get there all on their own. Plus it'll be way
| less-disruptive to everyone involves in regular loans for
| regular reasons.
| charcircuit wrote:
| There is not a loophole. When you die your loans get paid
| off first. The money to pay off these loans would be
| taxed. It could delay paying taxes until you die, but you
| can't escape it.
| croes wrote:
| Who says you need to tax the whole wealth if it in form
| of Ys?
|
| We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10
| billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a
| social network and name it Y
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Many countries have figured out a wealth tax, so this
| isn't an impossible problem.
| nine_k wrote:
| With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not
| that easy to walk it back :-/
| redleader55 wrote:
| It would be so nice of that tax was actually
| "burned"(similar to proof of stake), instead of being used
| to fund even greater inflation. This comes in the form of a
| huge administration, which gets payed for providing, many
| times, negative value. Alternatively, it is used to pay
| social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current
| political party in power.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for
| the sole purpose of keeping the current political party
| in power
|
| This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax
| problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that
| money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their
| citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this
| as a negative
| malfist wrote:
| Oh we spend that money, just on weapons or handouts to
| the welfare class known as the ultrawealthy.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Us does spend the money on healthcare, it is just very
| inefficient. US government spends much more per capita
| than any other country. 50% than the #2 country, Germany.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-
| health...
| malfist wrote:
| But that's mostly people/companies spending on health
| care, not as much the government (because that'd be
| socialism, apparently)
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I'm just talking about government spending. If you add
| private spending it is even more unbalanced. Just per
| capita government spending alone:
|
| US $12k
|
| Germany $8k
|
| UK $6k
|
| Medicaid + Medicare is 22% of all US federal spending.
| Defense is 13%.
| astrange wrote:
| The welfare classes that the government hands money to
| are elderly people and children.
| worik wrote:
| I am amazed. What an incredible statement!
|
| The USA is very corrupt, true. But getting rid of the
| "huge administration" and burning tax receipts is not
| going to solve that. How could it?
|
| One of the roles of the state in a modern society should
| be to ensure no one is left behind to starve, wither and
| freeze amongst the incredible resources we (as a society)
| have accumulated.
|
| That takes administration. That takes resources. That is
| what your taxes should be used for.
|
| I agree that far too much is used to give aid to the
| powerful, but the solution to that should not be to
| condemn the weak.
|
| Burning taxes and de-funding the administration is
| exactly that: condemning the weak.
| jlhawn wrote:
| > control inflation
|
| I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase
| in the money supply. The way the US government funds
| deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though
| it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury
| bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to
| the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from
| the way that banks issue loans which _is_ by creating new
| money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets
| "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes
| do not actually control inflation in the way you are
| describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed
| by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price
| inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current
| productive capacity of the economy. An example would be
| paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a
| shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with
| more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage.
| Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect
| of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs
| do).
|
| Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and
| does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from
| banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are
| various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with
| their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize
| unemployment.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is overly simplistic. Most economic activity is not
| related to the government at all. Taxation _can_ slow
| economic growth and inflation, but the government running
| at a deficit or surplus is neither a cause or a solution
| for inflation but rather a byproduct of multiple aspects of
| government policy.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth
| isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.
|
| 1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-
| impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-
| value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar
| to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really
| likes/trusts the outcome.
|
| 2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual
| transactions between people with "skin in the game" are
| harder to fake. The extent to which _wages_ are preferred
| as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income
| split.
| astrange wrote:
| > 2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual
| transactions between people with "skin in the game" are
| harder to fake.
|
| Also because taxing income (or other cash) is
| disinflationary. Taxing assets is inflationary because it
| forces sales.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-
| impossible to accurately and objectively judge the
| present-value of many types of assets. Even the case
| most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes,
| nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.
|
| You can easily get within 10% of the "real" value on most
| assets. And, in particular, assets like stock have a
| built in ticker to tell you their exact current value.
|
| This sort of evaluation happens all the time privately.
| For example, car insurance companies have gotten
| extremely good at evaluating the value of a car to
| determine when to simply total it.
|
| The only thing that really makes it tricky is hidden
| assets or assets with no market value.
|
| The likes of the richest people, who I think most of the
| "tax wealth" people are thinking of, have the majority of
| their wealth in equity. It's easy to tax the majority of
| their wealth.
|
| This does not need to be a perfect system to be very
| effective at generating revenue and redistributing
| wealth.
| cj wrote:
| The main counterargument:
|
| You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it's valued at
| $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
|
| Now it's 2026 and you finally decide to sell the BTC for
| the original price of $60k.
|
| Except you've paid taxes on $40k in paper gains that
| disappeared before you sold the asset.
|
| How do we solve that?
|
| (Replace "bitcoin" with "startup stock option" if you
| really want to illustrate the problem - imagine having to
| pay taxes on stock options you decide to never exercise)
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Wealthy people own assets, not money. Stealing their assets
| doesn't reduce the money supply. Elon Musk is "rich" mainly
| in paper wealth.
|
| Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production
| costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave,
| and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as
| a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available
| capital for production.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave
|
| Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the
| Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of
| trickle down economics mentality?
| Saline9515 wrote:
| The problem is black-and-white thinking that ignores
| reality.
|
| There are different kinds of wealthy people. Some built
| their wealth through talent and luck. Some inherited it.
| Some gained it through state cronyism and clientelism.
|
| Some own scarce assets (like real estate). Others created
| new assets (e.g., startup founders).
|
| You can dislike Elon Musk, but his owning a large stake
| in Tesla doesn't make others poorer. That's not true of a
| landlord who corners housing supply in a city.
|
| Wealth taxes are essentially revenge taxes without a
| clear objective. France tried one for years. It was
| costly to administer, riddled with exemptions, encouraged
| avoidance instead of productivity, and sustained an
| industry of tax specialists. The revenue was largely
| recycled into clientelist spending, sometimes increasing
| the wealth of the same elites (e.g., via housing
| subsidies).
|
| If the goal is to curb land hoarding, implement a land
| value tax. If it's to reduce dynastic concentration, tax
| large single-heir inheritances more heavily and lower the
| rate when estates are widely divided. If it's to reduce
| cronyism, cut state spending, simplify regulation, and
| strengthen competition.
| mulmen wrote:
| > If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave
|
| You say this like it's a bad thing.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth
| isn't concentrated in so few hands?
|
| Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem
| you responded to, yours is impossible to solve
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| This wouldn't stop the AMA from controlling medicine.
| simplify wrote:
| Since when has raising taxes _actually_ solved any major
| problem? We have enough taxes, the issue is the corrupt
| politicians swindling it to themselves and their cronies.
| wwweston wrote:
| You either win big enough under the current system, with its
| system problems, or you never win to improve it.
|
| Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of
| xkcd's nerd sniping.
|
| And the biggest challenge to representative government might
| well be that most people are terrible at engaging it
| productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people
| don't vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some
| significant portion of those that do vote can't correctly
| draw a line between policies they'd like and candidates who
| intend to work on delivering, and that's before we get to the
| portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate
| policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a
| concept.
|
| The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well
| considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be
| seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree
| of fidelity to the input from the electorate.
|
| If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those
| who want representative government is to change enough of the
| electorate first.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The
| problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the
| federal government and devolving power to the states,
| communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the
| negative effects of humans with too much authority.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Reducing the size of the government just makes it where
| billionaires and corporations control everything instead,
| which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign
| in their power/wealth as well.
| eikenberry wrote:
| +1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not
| the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need
| to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for
| instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement
| to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd
| think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover
| the rest.
| worik wrote:
| Abolishing private property is another way of defanging
| power
| eikenberry wrote:
| Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like
| mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.
| 837263292029 wrote:
| Let's start with your private property.
| AppleAtCha wrote:
| This assumes that govt and individual families are the only
| players in the game. Now as in other historical periods
| large corporations hold arguably more power than either of
| those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to
| them consolidating even more power and wielding it
| globally.
| simplify wrote:
| Power is not the problem, because power exists regardless
| of who owns it.
|
| We the people actually have a relatively high amount of
| power in our states and communities. We just don't use it.
| The real solution is to convince the masses to pay
| attention, which is harder today than it ever was.
| root_axis wrote:
| The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that
| won is being well represented with respect to the values of
| their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a
| daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be
| reconciled.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Representation needs to be less about black/white political
| ideology and more about the specific needs of various
| people. Farmers need representation, white color workers
| need representation, small business owners need
| representation, but their needs are all different, and
| don't really boil down to left/right politics. The
| government isn't treated as a forum to collaborate on
| solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to
| create boogeymen that get people riled up.
| overfeed wrote:
| > white color workers need representation [...]
|
| Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup.
| jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"
| root_axis wrote:
| That makes sense, but for most voters the left/right
| politics matters more than the economic identities you
| mentioned.
|
| Most people don't care that much about the economy, they
| make up their minds based on other issues, then find a
| way to rationalize the state of the economy with that
| choice after the fact.
| conception wrote:
| I would say one side is being told that they should believe
| it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really
| disliking obamacare but loving the aca.
| reddozen wrote:
| The problem in America is that more than half the country
| does not live in a shared factual reality. Like:
|
| * Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all
| innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)
|
| * World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out
| American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but
| Burisma was worse!
|
| * The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were
| attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred)
| attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's
| interests but how's that the big deal?
|
| * Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes
| under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6
| seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.
| runjake wrote:
| This comment is not well-formatted and a bit "zomg", but
| an important mention:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger
| _ph...
|
| This is the infamous call where Trump, according to the
| recorded tapes, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential
| election results by demanding that Raffensperger "find
| 11,780 votes".
| rchaud wrote:
| There is one reality that's undeniable: that political
| donations by individuals are strictly monitored and can
| land you in jail if violated, but PAC money is
| untraceable and unlimited. That fact alone has led to
| stacking the deck in favor of lobbyists and monied
| interests at the expense of the electorate and national
| institutions.
| reddozen wrote:
| I assume you mean Citizens United v FEC. Should they not
| have been allowed to release their documentary? Its not
| an easy question and there's a reason none of the
| dissents directly address Roberts' opinion.
| 5ykh wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer and won't address the merits or lack
| thereof of the ruling on the particulars of the case. The
| effect of the ruling was a sweeping change in money in
| politics. It effectively legalized an oligarchic take
| over of governance. It's a fact that money and
| advertising largely determine outcomes in battleground
| races. Tipping those races, along with the structural
| power imbalance in federal politics, means that control
| of the government is relatively easy and cheap.
|
| https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/15-years-
| after-c...
| antonymoose wrote:
| I agree while also disagreeing. It feels to me like the
| Democrats seemingly always get their way while in power
| while Republican presidents with a congressional majority
| get little to nothing done.
|
| To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits:
| "If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to
| exist."
|
| Taking a look at what's been accomplished this past year,
| it's a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a
| token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal
| immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.
|
| It's just theater until they lose out in the midterms and
| they to rally their base again in 2028 to "Save America" or
| "Keep It Great" or whatever hokum.
|
| Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.
| efnx wrote:
| The Republicans this term have gotten plenty done, it's
| just nothing that helps average people. Their wins can't
| be widely celebrated and so they aren't, as much.
|
| https://www.project2025.observer/
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Term limits for congress.
| tremon wrote:
| And age limits for congress.
| Affric wrote:
| What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media
| and social media's influences over our politics in the last
| century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too
| concentrated in the wrong hands.
|
| China's qualifications for influencers thing is interesting
| by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media
| publishers.
| leptons wrote:
| >Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't
| corrupt and bought off
|
| The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption _is a
| feature_.
| recroad wrote:
| It's a representative government, it just represents Israel
| via AIPAC.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It is kind of obvious that once someone reaches such a power
| they should be monitored all the time.
|
| Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off
| the charts. It's way beyond any group of immigrants for example
| that these same people are trying to demonize.
|
| Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their
| phone.
| agilob wrote:
| They will have that exception on their phones.
| hacker_homie wrote:
| I think politicians should be the least privileged people in
| a society except those in prison. Any protections or
| exceptions for them alone are unconstitutional.
| ozgung wrote:
| It's not irony. It's by design. Politics is for controlling
| people. Rules don't apply to rulers. No one cares about
| children or anything. Even manipulating the public opinion is
| outdated. Technology helps them to control. Freedom is an
| illusion today. We are not free anymore.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Technology might be one half, but the other half is
| demographics.
|
| 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded
| ideas.
|
| Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the
| politically powerful).
|
| Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever
| solution they feel promises a bit more security.
| themafia wrote:
| > 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-
| minded ideas.
|
| The government generated most of those too. As technology
| became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't
| mean they were standing around with their hands in their
| pockets prior to that.
|
| > Nowadays, our societies are old on average
|
| Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then
| does this actually have any impact?
|
| > Older people on average are more inclined to pick
| whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.
|
| In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this
| logic.
| rglover wrote:
| The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.
|
| _Moo._
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Politics is simply how a society governs itself. Whether or
| not a society values the rules being enforce to rulers is
| itself _politics_. Dismissing politics like this is how we
| end up with exactly the problem of rules not applying to
| rulers.
|
| Get involved with politics. Be part of politics. _That_ is
| how freedom is earned & maintained.
| morgengold wrote:
| I hope this time it really sinks in that law and rules are only
| for the little man. Time to think about the system from
| scratch.
| imiric wrote:
| What makes you think next time will be different?
|
| Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up
| in the same place.
|
| The problem is not them. The problem is us.
| jMyles wrote:
| > Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end
| up in the same place.
|
| The optimistic take is that this phenomenon is a
| characteristic of the _emergence_ of an information age
| (through the agricultural and industrial ages), and will no
| longer be true of the internet-connected human.
| 0sdi wrote:
| it has never been about children.
| hkpack wrote:
| These are literally _the same people_.
|
| Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing
| kids to create porn with grok on X.
| omnimus wrote:
| He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create
| child porn with grok on X.
| Arubis wrote:
| And, further, that all the child rape was coordinated, for the
| most part, in the clear over fucking Gmail.
|
| But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.
| squidsoup wrote:
| You're really pulling your punches there.
| schnable wrote:
| It's useful to point out hypocrisy, but are you suggesting we
| shouldn't try to protect kids because of Jeffrey Epstein?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when
| you see a few of them committing crimes!
| wnevets wrote:
| > that the richest and most powerful members of our society
| have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex
| trafficker.
|
| In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Peter Mandelson was pushing very hard for digital ID cards
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect
| da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the
| richest and most powerful members of our society have no
| problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.
|
| They are hypocrites. In the UK there are _hundreds of
| thousands_ of girls who have been raped between the 1990s and
| now (17 000 cases of sexual exploitation in the UK in the year
| 2024 alone). At least one UK politician refer to the girls who
| 've been raped as "white trash" and recently people are shocked
| because many are implying that these girls, who are typically
| mass-raped, have been considered to be consenting.
|
| It's known for a fact they tried to bury the story once it's
| been revealed. Turns out the same method is used by these
| grooming gangs in countless cities nearly all across the UK.
|
| It's not just that the richest and most powerful do frequent
| child sex trafficker: it's that many politicians and judges all
| over the west are totally fine closing their eyes on the mass
| raping of girls (some boys are victims of rapes too but it's
| mostly girls).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal
|
| > Rules for thee, free love for me.
|
| Rules for thee, free love for me and for my voters base.
| kneel25 wrote:
| I think it's wild you would make that connection for this topic
| ikrenji wrote:
| the "protect da kids" narrative is just a veil to make us give
| up more privacy and freedom for "security"
| aeternum wrote:
| It's far easier to control and prosecute communication when an
| identity is attached.
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, the people in that group were literally writing
| articles about how meetoo went too far and sponsored lawsuits
| against feminists exposing the stuff.
|
| So like, their ideal vision of the world was "every man can
| treat women and kids this way, they belong to kitchen anyway".
| dchi04 wrote:
| A lot of whining here about how this is an imperfect response to
| the issue of children being exploited on Discord / using the
| platform to engage with inappropriate content.
|
| Until someone offers up something better, I take these types of
| initiatives from social media platforms as huge wins. Ignoring
| the problem will not make it better. We've been ignoring it for
| about 20 years now, and it's only gotten worse.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| Be responsible for your spawn and don't be a weenie about
| asserting boundaries for them.
| peterlk wrote:
| The solution is parents! Stop making your bad parenting my
| problem!
| dchi04 wrote:
| If you believe that all parents are intelligent, informed,
| and put their children's well-being before everything, you
| are unfortunately wrong about society. Kids don't deserve to
| suffer just because they have neglectful parents.
|
| Discord, on the other hand, should be at least somewhat
| responsible for the interactions of children (which they
| profit off of) on their platform.
|
| And finally, you, a sentient adult with free will, can use
| another platform. Not your problem unless you want to make it
| yours, which is the response of choice on this thread.
| otterley wrote:
| How has it become your "problem"? Do you believe everyone
| should be able to get into any location anywhere worldwide
| without screening?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The thing stopping kids from getting "exploited on Discord"
| ought to be the same thing that stops them from stabbing each
| other with pencils. Raise your kids better, and stop expecting
| everyone else to tolerate your failure to do so.
| dchi04 wrote:
| A majority of Americans are in favor of age verification.
|
| https://www.edweek.org/technology/not-meant-for-children-
| adu...
|
| Have you ever considered that it's the other way around?
| Maybe the security needs of a minority shouldn't block
| policies with wide support that will protect children online?
|
| Either way, the whole "parent better" argument doesn't work.
| It's victim-blaming. Thousands of kids download Discord every
| day to play video games with their friends only to eventually
| be invited to servers which host explicit content / bad
| actors that we know can permanently harm them. A bunch of
| software engineers on HN may understand the risks that online
| platforms pose to their children, but much of the population
| cannot/will not fully comprehend this. We should not allow
| their children to experience terrible things just because
| their parents aren't read up about which platforms will
| gladly allow creeps to interact with or message their kids.
|
| The answer here is simple: if you don't like age
| verification, move on to a different service. Creating spaces
| where there are rules and order on the internet for those
| that are vulnerable is much more important than you not
| wanting to upload a picture of your ID to a platform that
| you're using completely voluntarily.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If parents can't figure out how to block their kids from
| accessing inappropriate content online, they shouldn't be
| giving them smartphones and computers. Diminishing adult
| spaces for adults in order to make them safer for kids is
| how you dumb down the entire world.
| dchi04 wrote:
| The entire point is that it's not dumbing down the entire
| world. It's dumbing it down for kids that fail age
| verification.
| ncr100 wrote:
| I wish I could simply show Discord my adult genitals as
| evidence of my adult-hood.
|
| The sharing of my ID with a known incompetent company &
| business seems like a risk they're foisting upon me.
| dchi04 wrote:
| You are not going to be liable if your information is leaked.
| They will be.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think she is a polarizing figure to some, but journalist Taylor
| Lorenz has been complaining about this sort of thing for a long
| time. She has been increasingly warning about a future in which
| we need to scan IDs for all of our online services, in the name
| of protecting kids. (With the obvious implications about that
| data leaking, governments using it to track dissidents, etc.)
| digiown wrote:
| Future? Just look at China. They do all this already.
| stemlord wrote:
| Curious how this will affect midjourney's earnings
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| what is the relation?
| codergautam wrote:
| Midjourney is primarily a Discord bot that generates images
| from text prompts within the Discord app. Now many paying
| Midjourney users could be forced to verify themselves.
| cheschire wrote:
| I deleted my Facebook account in 2011. After finding out how much
| critical neighborhood information I have been missing, I finally
| registered a new Facebook account fifteen years later to follow
| my neighborhood groups.
|
| A month later, the account was suspended for supposedly breaking
| guidelines. I never posted a single message, never reacted to any
| posts.
|
| They then required me to upload a video scan of my face to prove
| I was a person.
|
| We aren't quite at the end of the internet, but man I can really
| see the end of this journey coming sometime soon.
| prophesi wrote:
| Had a similar experience after rejoining a few years ago. My
| account wasn't suspended for breaking guidelines AFAIK, but
| rather flagged as a suspicious account that required an upload
| of my face and driver's license. I think the account still
| exists in this limbo state because I'd rather not upload all of
| that to Facebook, and yet still not able to login to request
| for the account to be deleted.
| monksy wrote:
| That won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many
| times it's used to permaban you later.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| FB/Discord/etc were never the internet. They were walled
| gardens you could enter via the internet. This could be a
| revitalization of the internet - pushing people back to
| decentralized ways of communications.
| cheschire wrote:
| Perhaps you may have not read about how Iran is moving to a
| whitelisted internet. Or perhaps you believe this will not
| happen in your country.
|
| However, "think of the children" will always result in more
| restriction in western countries, not less. We are watching
| countries prove that it works to isolate from each other.
| Europe is not isolating from America in exactly the same way,
| but is isolating business processes from American services.
|
| We are not on the cusp of the end of the internet, but the
| cliff sure seems in view to me.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > Perhaps you may have not read about how Iran is moving to
| a whitelisted internet. Or perhaps you believe this will
| not happen in your country.
|
| I hope for it to happen in my country, with local companies
| and developers competing to create the new social networks.
| The current arrangement fine foreign entities too much
| power.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > perhaps you believe this will not happen in your country.
|
| That would hurt billionaires in America, so I'm not too
| worried about that gaining traction in my country. Even if
| it ultimately becomes the next superpower regime.
|
| More relevantly, I wonder of such restrictions would impede
| the First Amendment even if they did want to try.
| snohobro wrote:
| Ironically, this may be one of the many straws that breaks the
| proverbial internet camel's back. We all wax and wane about the
| old internet, the pre-homogenized, non-corporate, Wild West
| internet.
|
| Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to
| create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist
| independent of the corpo-sphere.
|
| The only reason 'the way things used to be' went away was
| because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn't
| anymore. So let's just go back to the old thing.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I yearn for the days of yore when a few of us would co-lo
| some boxes at a small local ISP we were friendly with, where
| we'd get to take advantage of their always-on and (at the
| time) blazing-fast T1 connectivity. It was low-cost for
| everyone, and we'd host our own services for whatever was
| useful to us and our friend groups.
|
| On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup
| access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got
| DDoS'd -- _again_ -- and clogged up the pipes.
|
| ---
|
| These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are
| bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+
| connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also
| bigger.
|
| How do we get back to what we had?
| elevation wrote:
| Compete with facebook in an area you can actually win.
| Don't try to be all of a mobile messenger, news feed,
| telephony platform, marketplace, forum, async messaging...
| just do one of those things well for a group of users
| (potentially around a focus.)
|
| Piggy back off of an existing community that has already
| built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local
| activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and
| involves equipment. Your board will become the best place
| for users (who already trust one another) to swap used
| gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation
| metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and
| spammers spoil everyone's experience.)
|
| In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as
| the community of choice.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms
| as the community of choice.
|
| And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the
| platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the
| cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it
| comes down to the fact that scaling such communication
| isn't free.
|
| We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going
| all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric
| FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
| krater23 wrote:
| Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs
| you today 3,50EUR - 15EUR/month, when you can't pay that,
| you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not
| 1990 anymore...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on
| the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really
| expensive.
|
| Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30
| years of people used to free and open mass communication.
| How many will give that up for proper freedoms and
| protection from state actors?
|
| Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms
| whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or
| timeline.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently
| constrained?
|
| Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs.
| Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all
| of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love:
| Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to
| start the thing up and keep it going and it was not,
| broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-
| losing operation.
|
| But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by
| the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the
| financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for
| tight, local communities (often with small dozens of
| semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and
| pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-
| style growth off of the table.
|
| So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.
|
| What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to
| this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there
| are giants like Meta stomping around?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently
| constrained?
|
| Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only
| structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect.
| It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much
| not going to compete with other forums as a platform.
|
| I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be
| what people en masse want. They want to connect with all
| their friends and family, and discover new ones through
| specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people,
| that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills
| that void, the unprincipled will.
|
| >What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to
| this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there
| are giants like Meta stomping around?
|
| Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized.
| It's less a matter of "do we have the
| technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive
| network effects?"
| elevation wrote:
| > scaling such communication isn't free.
|
| So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2
| classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your
| operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps
| moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target
| audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.
| grishka wrote:
| The fediverse already exists.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| The fediverse is a mess that only works well about half the
| time (roughly). The other half federation breaks,
| moderation becomes impossible, moderators become
| intolerable but accounts are impossible to migrate.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I have my small little groups. I've walked away from big
| sites constantly and this won't be an exception. Definitely
| going to cancel my Nitro today until/unless they revert this.
|
| But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming
| communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation,
| speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and
| not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal
| knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.
|
| Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on
| Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| The interests of the people who own/control technology, and
| have the most influence over standards, will make sure you
| are forced to participate.
|
| And they have always organized society to make sure this is
| the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just
| the interests of the people who create and have most
| influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common
| amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the
| capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it
| necessary for you to participate.
|
| Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic
| development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech
| skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as
| tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have
| the most influence on its development: those who own it, who
| are often the same people who determine standards.
|
| The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody
| could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced
| by those who produce it.
|
| They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor
| functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they
| already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on
| VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading",
| etc.
|
| It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power
| have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to
| create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist
| independent of the corpo-sphere.
|
| The normies already did this. They just did it on centralized
| platforms like Discord. Until their backs get broken we're
| not getting anywhere. (Although I may be being a little too
| cynical.)
| elevation wrote:
| I helped an elderly woman create her first FB account. She'd
| just lost her husband and wanted to notify his friends about
| his upcoming memorial service. She knew their names but didn't
| have contact information.
|
| We created the account from an Apple device, registering from
| her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP
| issued email address -- all strong signals of consumer
| authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within
| half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.
|
| There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of
| her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them
| everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the
| appeal, they closed her account permanently.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg, folks. It matters when his default
| philosophy is "They trust me dumb fucks". Copying Snapchat 9
| times is more of a priority than account security. He wasn't
| "making a good point". He's a malicious asshole who deserved
| jail years ago
| retired wrote:
| It sure beats the Reddit system where you think you are
| interacting with people, only to find out a couple of days
| later that your fresh account is shadow-banned and nobody is
| seeing your comments and that none of your likes went
| through.
|
| At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.
| kps wrote:
| Reddit and HN.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Since when does HN have shadowbans?
| phpnode wrote:
| since almost forever, that's what the "show dead" toggle
| in your profile settings is for - it shows the dead posts
| from shadow banned people
| andersa wrote:
| I always assumed that those were posts that got flagged
| too often.
| daneel_w wrote:
| "Spamming", or rather, responding too quickly in an
| intense discussion, is cause for automatic shadowban here
| on HN. It happened to me on a previous account some years
| ago. The posts themselves were harmless, I merely
| responded to too many users in a too short timeframe. My
| attempts at having the ban undone also turned out to be a
| waste of time. Completely absurd.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I wasn't aware HN had it, but considering the number of
| [flagged] by people who work for big tech I'm sure some
| people actually posting truthful things have ended up on
| the shadowban list
| dymk wrote:
| No, FB has their own shadowban system
| qingcharles wrote:
| Tip: You can always tell if you are banned on Reddit by
| accessing the shadowban appeal page which is only visible
| if you are shadowbanned yourself:
|
| https://reddit.com/appeal
| chamomeal wrote:
| Last year I finally caved and tried to sign up for instagram.
| It's tragic but it's almost like a second internet. So many
| small business and bands only have instagram. So many lil
| communities post their events only on instagram. I always
| have to ask friends with instagram to tell me when a brewery
| is open, when a show starts, etc.
|
| So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook
| account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it
| wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to
| be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I
| am, still locked out of all this information lmao
| MostlyStable wrote:
| While I recognize that, as a business who needs reach, they
| kind of need to be using these websites where everyone is,
| I really wonder how difficult it would be to mirror
| everything they post to some more open and accessible
| location (a self hosted webpage, anything). I can't blame
| them for using Instagram/Facebook/whatever, but I _can_
| blame them for using nothing _but_ that site. It would
| almost certainly get very little traffic so it wouldn 't
| need much bandwidth and costs should be low, and it would
| be a lot more consumer friendly.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Not to defend, but to understand. Last year our old "High
| School class of 19NN" group received about a dozen join
| requests per week from bogus accounts for a couple of years.
| At first they were trivial to discriminate because they were
| folks located on the opposite side of the Earth. But over
| time they became filled with pictures and names of (randomly
| generated?) Americans.
|
| I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and
| had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school
| class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal
| blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few
| questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.
|
| The hamfisted false positive response you described is
| probably a result of the above.
| tintor wrote:
| `I could still tell because their profiles were sterile`
|
| That is exactly example that parent posted about. Not every
| fb user is addicted to it, and has used it for long time.
| jmaker wrote:
| Many consumer banking apps have begun integrating similar
| identity verification third-party providers. They are very
| inaccurate.
|
| Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone
| but doesn't with another (iPhone 17's distortion), sometimes
| it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to
| recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos
| for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their
| system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same
| video identification flow again, which effectively blocks
| your money in the account.
|
| I'm closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these
| video id flows. Simply because it's way too easy to lose
| access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is
| not good enough for this vital requirement, I don't want to
| know how they treat other requirements. They simply
| outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are
| way too unreliable.
| mihaaly wrote:
| When I researched a bank learning they want to use some
| third party never-herd-of identification service on me was
| the moment I knew I do not want to share any of my personal
| details and consumer habits with that so called bank. They
| do not care enough to pretend they keep all my data in-
| house.
| jmaker wrote:
| I've got the feeling that it's spreading and is soon to
| become the default.
|
| Another banking app has failed to identify me a couple of
| times (I attribute it to iPhone 17's front camera
| distortion) and fell back to the snail mail id code as a
| 2nd factor. It arrived only several business days later.
| Instead of just letting me use my own 2nd factor such as
| a TOTP device or a physical security key. But maybe there
| are some legal requirements for that flow, I'm out of the
| loop.
|
| So there's a whole range between passkey-is-enough on one
| end and outsourced video id or snail mail for 2nd factor
| on the other. The latter can of course be misused to
| siphon as much personal information as possible out of
| you, even linking and scraping your other banking
| accounts for consumer profiling - designed as a requisite
| part of the authentication/authorization flow.
| tintor wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this and tells us which banks?
| kstrauser wrote:
| My sister died a few years ago. A couple of months later,
| someone created an account with her name and profile pic and
| started inviting family members. Quite frankly, I would have
| been ready to brawl with this person if I were in a room with
| them.
|
| I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those
| completely benign actions look identical to a common identity
| theft pattern.
| burnte wrote:
| > There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture
| of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them
| everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the
| appeal, they closed her account permanently.
|
| I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and
| Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems
| and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well
| under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and
| the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load
| on human support staff. They don't care if your account is
| reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance,
| did all you could, and then just give up.
|
| I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I
| happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at
| the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit
| card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to
| feel good about an account.
|
| Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this
| system to send in verification documents. I gave everything
| it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent
| over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't
| prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a
| natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a
| physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was
| asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank
| statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was
| asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was
| the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as
| they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing
| further would be done without a passport, not even
| communication.
|
| I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on
| purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's
| hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to
| humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to
| improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a
| system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You
| funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject
| their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went
| through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one
| you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without
| it you were screwed.
|
| Companies still do this today.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| My friend has a restaurant and showed me the ad he wanted to
| promote on Instagram about a pizza coupon was suspended for
| breaking the guidelines, they mentioned gambling or something.
| I was quite impressed. When you see that one of the
| "magnificent 7" is dysfunctional to that level, it's hard not
| to think we're living the last decades of American economic
| hegemony, by now propelled mostly by inertial monopolies than
| anything else.
| elevation wrote:
| The big ad networks want a cut from business users and will
| actively suppress posts from business accounts that haven't
| paid up.
|
| But instead of paying Instagram for reach, consider taking
| the same budget and spending it delivering samples and
| coupons to other local businesses mid/late morning. Bonus
| points if you make the coupons unique for each delivery so
| you can track which local businesses are your biggest fans.
| Office managers are generally receptive to this kind of cold
| call and you can leave a catering menu. Catering gigs can
| keep your kitchen busy during the off hours.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, same here. I tried logging in years back and they wanted
| my driver's license. My last comment must have been in 2013 or
| so.
|
| I don't see it as the journey's end. But it's gonna be a much
| quieter road if most people don't walk away from this stuff.
| Maybe that's for the best.
| erghjunk wrote:
| I have a similar story. I quit in like 2016 or so and 9ish
| years later I wanted to shop for a used car for my oldest kid.
| I know already, of course, that Facebook now holds a monopoly
| on peer to peer sales of goods like that so I tried to make a
| new Facebook account. I was denied at the creation and told I
| had to try again with a video of my face (which I begrudgingly
| did) at which point I was denied AGAIN and told there was no
| appeals process.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > a monopoly on peer to peer sales of goods like that
|
| I don't know ... around these parts (Santa Fe/ABQ) while
| Marketplace is very popular, Craigslist continues to be
| widely used for this, especially since an ever growing number
| of younger people are not on Facebook (either at all, or not
| regularly).
| erghjunk wrote:
| I would be just fine with a return to Craigslist but it's
| still mostly useless in my neck of the woods despite once
| being the main (digital) tool for p2p sales.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Twitter (before Musk) and Facebook did the same thing to me...
| and that was a long time ago.
|
| Discord tried to do it to me a few months ago but I refused,
| contacted support instead. Eventually they made it work but it
| took forever. Lucky for me I hate Discord so tried to avoid it
| anyway.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| I had the same experience when I deleted my FB then years later
| reregistered one using the same email. I think thats kind of a
| good thing in some ways, specifically in the FB case because I
| wouldnt want someone to go online saying they are me when they
| are not.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Instagram did a similar thing for me back in 2016-ish.
|
| A family member had been sharing some photos they were taking,
| but only on Instagram.
|
| So I signed up an account, verified via email and phone number.
| I wasn't initially able to find the family member's account. A
| week later after I got the spelling of their username right,
| Instagram popped up "Your account has been suspended". They
| then sent me an email saying I needed to take a photo of myself
| holding government ID, and a piece of paper with a hand-written
| code they supplied, plus a close-up photo of said government
| ID. No way was I supplying all that just to be able to browse
| some photos.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Do you not buy/sell on marketplace? I guess this might be a
| wrong website to ask such questions.
| Venn1 wrote:
| I set up a forum when I started my site for Linux content
| creation. Discord had become a black hole for technical know-how
| on a scale IRC could never dream of, and finding answers to
| common questions was nigh impossible since the technology has
| changed and the modern way to solve problem X was never asked in
| a forum and never indexed by a search engine. Granted, Reddit
| provided a bit of a stopgap over the last decade, but the
| solutions in the comments these days are more often than not a
| confidently incorrect copy-pasta from GPT.
|
| I use Discord for chat and voice calls since that is what I
| expect from a chat app, but the amount of companies that have
| built their community / knowledge base / support system around
| Discord is worrying. You know they can just delete that, right?
|
| I'll continue to use Discord for chat until prompted to put my
| face in the hole :)
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Key changes are
|
| - ID verification to see porn on Discord.
|
| - Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers.
|
| Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure
| who this serves.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It serves UK, EU, and various US States' regulations to
| "protect the kids".
|
| Discord is only the next biggest canary in the coal mine. These
| regulations are going to force a lot more websites and apps to
| do this, too.
|
| I wish these sorts of regulations had been written hand-in-hand
| with a more directly technically-minded approach. The world
| needs a better technical way to try to verify a person's
| estimated age cohort without a full ID check and/or AI-analyzed
| video face scan _before_ we start regulating "every" website
| that may post "adult content" (however you choose to define
| that) starts to require such checks.
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| It should go without saying but,
|
| *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE*
| (for whatever reason)
|
| This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments
| within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message.
| And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same.
| It's not like they give you anything of real value for that
| money.
| pipo234 wrote:
| Not a subscriber, but I understand your call for retribution.
|
| I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the
| responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better
| than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids
| stuff...
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens
| mode as a feature
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| I'll reply for both you and GPP,
|
| I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I
| use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the
| slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system
| now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user's
| video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user's
| device"
|
| ...are they really going to implement a facial recognition
| algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck
| off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I pay for nitro as of now (not for much longer). If
| absolutely nothing else, I'm not going to give them
| monthly payments (which generally required a CC. Aka "I'm
| an adult") and still not be trusted to be an adult.
|
| And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and
| will be abused.
|
| - M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.
|
| - Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they
| just happen to add friction on something that is
| convenient for billionaire studios.
|
| - LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of
| course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face
| scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious
| parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised
| people
|
| The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've
| seen it happen in real time.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Discord has been immensely hostile to the public in general
| since forever, and people love to flock to it and throw money
| at the company behind it.
|
| I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible
| habits just because of this.
| Choco31415 wrote:
| It's not incomprehensible. Discord makes it so much easier to
| organize communities than most other platforms.
|
| Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe,
| nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup
| that Discord does.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of
| setup that Discord does
|
| Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features
| is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for
| voice channels much of the time)
| thinkling wrote:
| Most importantly, Slack limits the amount of message
| history you get to keep if you're not paying. And the
| payment plans are per-user fees which quickly becomes
| non-viable for non-commercial use.
| karaziox wrote:
| This doesn't feel like a real question... Slack free tier
| is basically crappy Discord, limited message history, no
| voice channels, huddles are also behind the paying tiers.
| It is basically worse on all aspects unless you start
| paying
| chocolatkey wrote:
| A nonprofit I help out just moved from Slack to Discord
| for a very simple reason: Slack pricing was too
| expensive, and as the amount of people increased, the
| price continues to climb. Discord is free
| jdranczewski wrote:
| For large communities, the very granular role-based
| permission system of Discord can be put to some good use,
| I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.
| tempestn wrote:
| The biggest one for me is that Discord will keep all
| history for free servers, whereas Slack only gives you
| access to 3 months iirc (and as of a year or two ago, has
| started permanently deleting older content).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual
| participants in a group voice call?
| bilekas wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me, I've been meaning to cancel for
| months but it's only 2.50EUR and having to sign into my apple
| account was such an effort I never got around to it.
| mkaic wrote:
| Just cancelled mine after reading this comment, I only really
| cared about the bigger file uploads and the HD screen-sharing
| anyways and I can live without those.
|
| Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of
| some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the
| same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...
| mdavidn wrote:
| It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my
| 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an
| adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Yeah because they don't haha. It boggles the mind because the
| headline is clickbait.
| airstrike wrote:
| Cancelled
| gloosx wrote:
| can't wait to beat it with a face-swap or some random driving
| license found on the internet
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great, yet another reason not to use it.
| gigel82 wrote:
| It's clear "age verification" is not something we'll get rid of,
| so I think instead we should push for a publicly verifiable
| double-blind (zero-knowledge proof) solution that can ensure it
| only gives the websites a boolean and doesn't allow correlation
| from either side.
|
| The alternative is having to give your ID to Facebook, Google,
| Microsoft, and all the other bad actors...
| areoform wrote:
| There's a special phenomenon that happens as startups grow large.
| They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product,
| their users and how it's used. It's a drift away from users. And
| a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift
| towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-
| practical-dri...
|
| As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to
| attract a certain type of person who is more interested in
| mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up
| for future corporate rise than building a product. These people
| play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter
| environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals
| leaving the company.
|
| Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B /
| yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then
| deciding to ban porn,
| https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...
|
| Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical
| "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.
|
| Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc
| etc.
|
| Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose.
| Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.
| tyleo wrote:
| I don't think this is a phenomenon. At the best places I've
| worked, I've seen success correlated with actual user value.
| You do find climbers at certain places but I tend to think it's
| a large reason they fail.
|
| Also, I don't think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My
| understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A
| pretty effective one.
| tyre wrote:
| Do you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a
| huge gamble. You're basically inviting competitors and
| pissing off your supply (content creators.)
|
| If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely
| motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum
| diversify. It's their livelihood.
| tyleo wrote:
| I don't know for sure but it's been implied that it was an
| intentional action to garner public outrage at the banks
| who wanted to stop processing their transactions.
| guluarte wrote:
| that's true, guilds moved to discord because it was easier to
| use than teamspeak
| canada_dry wrote:
| In pretty much all cases, the companies in question had peaked
| were experiencing declining growth and attempting to do a hail-
| Mary... and failed miserably.
|
| Compare Digg and slash. One completely died, the other has
| stuck with its formula and hasn't disappeared, but has just
| faded into irrelevance.
| marcd35 wrote:
| I think this decision is more defensive than "losing touch with
| their customers." The winds are shifting in other countries
| that are cracking down on social media use for children.
| Discord does not want to get caught in the shit storm of legal
| issues if they fail to comply. This is a proactive measure.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing
| us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you're in a democracy, that's the call to pay attention
| and vote in helpful representatives.
| Aerroon wrote:
| There are no helpful representatives is the problem. It
| doesn't matter who you vote for, because they're all just
| varying degrees of bad.
|
| There isn't a single politician I could vote for that
| could improve this situation. Even if there was, they
| would just get swept away by the ocean of people who
| actually believe in this "think of the children"
| narrative.
| nemomarx wrote:
| This is the real issue, and it's why just cancelling your
| discord subs and moving to stoat or etc isn't a solid long-
| term strategy. If KOSA passes in the us basically every
| platform will have to do something like this.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's a big if. And yes, if push comes to shove I guess
| I'll become a forum pirate. I won't tie my real ID up in
| anymore private servers than absolutely necessary (which as
| of now is governmental entities and banks, a highly
| regulated sector).
| nemomarx wrote:
| I don't think it's that big of an if anymore - there's
| worldwide pressure and interest groups to get some kind
| of age check on all these companies, at least. Keep some
| alternate contacts for friends at least
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There's always been pressure. People have been fighting
| for decades on this. The only thing that's changed is how
| they've tried to disenfranchise dissent.
|
| There still is push back, so I won't say this is a losing
| battle. I'll keep fighting regardless.
|
| >Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least
|
| They know where to reach me. Whether they care enough to
| go outside their gardens to talk is another matter.
| areoform wrote:
| Multi-billion dollar corporations have never had any
| problems lobbying for their interests before.
|
| Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links,
| scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for
| "ground truth" is the real interest here?
| nemomarx wrote:
| They were already collecting everyone's messages and
| social links, and would still be doing it without this.
| But I'm not sure if the age verification / ID collection
| is really as useful for advertising compared to just
| being able to read all of your chats, right?
| areoform wrote:
| > this decision is more defensive
|
| That is prioritizing internal politics over the realities of
| their product. The Discord userbase is young. And it serves a
| variety of use cases / the same account can be used to access
| open source communities, coordinate video game time with
| friends, interact professionally, and have a supercharged
| group chat for close IRL friends.
|
| In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early
| 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage
| friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/
|
| Any decision that isn't along the Apple's hard privacy stance
| lines, "we'll protect user privacy" is prioritizing the
| discomfort of that decision over the user base / use case.
| Morromist wrote:
| I think this is about "losing touch with their customers" and
| the need to IPO and make money from the customers.
|
| The thing is, most of discords users are in countries which
| haven't yet passed laws that ban children from using apps
| like discord. If they were privacy focused they could do this
| only where the law requires it, like Australia.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I think this is actually a different growth problem, which is
| that they became so large that several countries are designing
| new regulations that specifically target them. I think discord
| is trying to spin this into a regulation-as-moat opportunity
| instead of dying by a thousand papercuts.
| m132 wrote:
| There's a bright side to this. With people getting used to every
| website casually requiring a face scan and ID pic, setting up
| phishing campaigns and opening rogue bank accounts is going to
| become easier than ever.
| montacir_AL wrote:
| no more discord GenZ
| hxegon wrote:
| Honestly I think this is necessary. I'm not sure how heavy handed
| their exact implementation of stuff like content filtering would
| be, but I've seen way too much sketchy stuff on discord servers.
| Predators, blackmail, harassment campaigns, it's not great and a
| lot of the servers I'm in already require ID verification by mods
| to even chat in general. It'd be great if this was opt-in on a
| server by server basis but I could see that being a problem too.
|
| I've seen way too many governments / companies use "protect the
| children" as a way to try and push overreaching garbage policy,
| however I think this one actually might help.
|
| That said, depends on exact details of how they want to do this.
| We'll see how it goes.
| sneak wrote:
| Showing ID doesn't stop crime or criminals, or stop fake
| accounts.
|
| I'm simply going to scan someone else's ID to keep my account.
| ballooney wrote:
| What are your favourite active irc channels for technical
| hobbies?
| serf wrote:
| to everyone that tried to persuade me to move my projects from
| forums to discord :
|
| phpBB never made me scan my face.
| anonnon wrote:
| Thanks to all the OSS projects that adopted this in preference to
| mailing lists to better appeal to zoomers. (And note that while
| these projects often do still have mailing lists, most of the
| actual discussion now takes place on Discord, behind an
| authwall.)
| psychoslave wrote:
| I'm so glad I always refused to accept this one.
|
| I don't know what people need as lesson. We already have so many
| FLOW options, and yet they are so many running after the last
| shiny ready for enshitification ready to go platform.
|
| Expect them to sell your whole life to whatever party with enough
| money to throw at their face.
| sneak wrote:
| Reminder: "age verification" is just another way of spelling
| "every single user of the service must provide a government ID to
| use it".
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| No thanks
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| Yeah good fucking luck with that. Time for the "discord
| alternatives" search on Google.
| dgxyz wrote:
| My social group are moving to a private IRC server already. This
| is probably the best outcome really. I don't think any of us are
| under 50. But we have relatives who remember when this would have
| resulted in some of us being killed. I wish I was
| sensationalising but I'm not.
| eshack94 wrote:
| Is this the final straw that kills their platform?
| jonstaab wrote:
| FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr:
| https://flotilla.social/
| hollow-moe wrote:
| Glad I left months ago
| toephu2 wrote:
| Glad I never signed up to begin with
| mlsu wrote:
| This is coming for all web-based services soon. Don't think for a
| second it's just Discord.
|
| It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| IIRC EU was going for a zero-knowledge-proof of age system, but I
| guess discord isn't going to be using that then. (I don't think
| the ZKP system is available yet)
|
| (here's part of it: https://digital-
| strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| It was nice while it lasted. Account removed. I understand the
| rationale and I don't care anyway. It is a shame, because one of
| the niche forums I was occasionally visiting there does not offer
| other locations.. but I would like to think this may change
| people's mind.
|
| Yay to further fragmentation:D
| poidos wrote:
| Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something,
| thanks for the push Discord!
| smcleod wrote:
| I truly do hope this sinks Discord. It's a dreadful platform and
| an information black hole.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Calling it right now. There will be a data breach and we'll find
| out they in fact did not delete the ID data.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I miss the era of Internet forums. They didn't need to be
| federated, just simple deployments of MyBB, vBulletin, PHP,
| Xenforo and so on.
|
| I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it
| inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought
| people together.
|
| And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn't make
| any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music
| which still reverberates through me today.
|
| Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels
| like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this
| point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss,
| then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays
| really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the
| digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access.
| Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.
| duncanscomments wrote:
| >And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn't make
| any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music
| which still reverberates through me today.
|
| Could not relate to this more. Spent my formative years in
| those forums and they genuinely helped mold many of the tastes
| and interests that have stuck with me into adulthood. Not to
| over-romanticize, at the end of the day it was just a forum on
| a music tracker - but the sense of community and sheer
| diversity of thread topics made it such an interesting place to
| peruse.
|
| Discord certainly has its applications. But since it became the
| defacato community tool, I find it essentially useless.
| Discussions are ephemeral (from a UX standpoint at least), and
| much more constrained. Its difficult to lurk and only chime in
| now and then unless you're regularly online.
| hinata08 wrote:
| I hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience
| when they open source their IDs again.
|
| Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who
| wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their
| names.
|
| A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord
| isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement
| in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still
| on Discord)
|
| For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for
| moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing
| economy
|
| The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a
| decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their
| governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask
| but don't keep this time, which isn't enough.
|
| Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS
| after an account is created.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| +1.
|
| It's a push out.
|
| That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Finally the kids will be safe. We did it everyone! /s
| storus wrote:
| I use Discord to talk to university students (top 10 in CS) and
| it only works with university email. I am wondering if I am going
| to be treated as <13 from now on as well or if they waive it in
| our case.
| jcranmer wrote:
| It is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.
| reactordev wrote:
| So glad I never put my eggs in the discord basket
| lacoolj wrote:
| So how do we know (other than obvious, NSFW servers) if we are in
| a server that is not "teen appropriate"? I don't feel the need to
| prove I'm old af, so if I'm in a server for sports betting, is
| that not teen appropriate? What about a pokemon server with a lot
| of swearing? Or just a custom server made by a friend for web
| dev, but has lots of random politics thrown around?
|
| I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so
| hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.
| unixhero wrote:
| Good to reduce fraud, isn't this zero trust in practice.
| bilekas wrote:
| So a good EU OpenSource alternative : https://stoat.chat/
| formerly known as Revolt.
| 8xeh wrote:
| They'll have to "partner" with some company that's in the
| business of building a database of IDs and biometrics to do AI
| things with. Other companies in this space (Jumio) have a bad
| habit of ignoring privacy laws and will keep your information for
| years.
|
| I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but
| there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or
| passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for
| hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts
| (Plaid) too.
|
| (It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in
| the US.)
|
| Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my
| jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be
| breaking the law.
| bilekas wrote:
| When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just
| be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online
| for everyone else.
|
| Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I
| wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were
| chat control.
|
| > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU
| politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under
| "professional secrecy" rules.
|
| https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...
|
| What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes,
| that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is
| political suicide.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Parents need to have personal responsibility, but
| corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of
| any. Game seems rigged.
| bilekas wrote:
| As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then
| you could see a shift in their opinions.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Passing off responsibility to parents is already the status
| quo. Hardly political suicide.
|
| Saying that companies should face some level of
| responsibility for their products is the dangerous move.
| That's part of why the Internet has barely been regulated.
| npunt wrote:
| Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful
| thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone
| to just do something.
| blharr wrote:
| Sure, but the ID solution is an "if everyone just gives up
| their privacy / anonymity / sensitive data" and the mechanism
| is by denial of service
|
| In fact its worse. Every site must also implement this
| security check. Or everyone must agree to just use sites and
| services that follow this policy. Otherwise anyone can just
| use another, often 'less safe' website.
| npunt wrote:
| I'm not advocating for that either, I'm only pointing out
| that "if everyone just" is a collective action problem that
| is a non-solution because it doesn't describe the mechanism
| by which everyone does something.
|
| Your example confuses the locus of control. The platform is
| making the choice and relies on user _inaction_ rather than
| action. Users as a whole basically always descend
| gradients, and if they like / are addicted to the service,
| they'll descend with enough momentum to carry them over
| one-time friction like an ID check. The null hypothesis is
| they continue using the service. For it to be an "if
| everyone just" answer, it would be "if everyone just
| decided to stop using these extremely sticky services"
| because that is the de facto choice they are presented
| with. And it similarly suffers from an "if everyone just"
| lack of plausible mechanism.
|
| The point of calling out non-solutions masquerading as
| solutions is to keep people's energy focused on possible
| but unstated solutions, rather than spending time blaming
| people for behavior largely determined by myriad immovable
| circumstances.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from
| them, I think people severely overestimate the level of
| involvement that many parents have with their kids. Social
| workers who are checking in on middle school kids at the
| hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school
| kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren't also
| going to have time to enforce online safety.
|
| If this is what it means for a parent to "do their job" then
| what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or
| unable to police their kids' Discord account?
|
| For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end
| of low-trust social media. They can't tell if a user is a child
| or even a human. People will move to things like group chats
| because they don't rely on sending your ID to a verification
| service in the Philippines.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have
| become so consolidated and enshittified that it's seriously a
| choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a
| very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting
| a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from
| Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It's kind of a no-
| win situation.
|
| I'd love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online
| spaces where I can't necessarily assume they will be perfect
| (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to
| learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least
| assume they won't be overwhelmed by the impossibility of
| successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if
| there's one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it's a self-
| contained community of real humans from which the powers that
| be can't extract "value".
| bilekas wrote:
| > Parents are just burnt out, I think.
|
| I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting
| forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just
| ignore what your kids are doing.
|
| It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the
| government.
| antonymoose wrote:
| No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and
| volume of their children's social contact on a platform
| like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for
| me.
|
| Can we normalize "it takes a village" again? After all,
| we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist
| for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult
| movie theater you'd be in jail. Why do we pretend we
| don't live in a world with laws and standard conduct the
| second we connect to a modem?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What's ruined by this? Honestly asking
| bilekas wrote:
| It's giving my identification to a no face company, that I
| don't know will handle the data correctly. And if they don't
| I have absolutely no recourse.
|
| Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to
| use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So
| to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random
| company is insulting to me.
| Gigachad wrote:
| You don't have to ID after this, you just won't be able to
| access NSFW discord servers.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my
| 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access
| is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn't be as hard as it is. It's
| so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I'm not one
| to do that but I've strongly considered it many times.
|
| Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they
| can't enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn't
| practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork
| and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to
| bifurcate those. It's also impossible to disable the forced
| short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should
| just be doing their job"
|
| you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of
| discussion is not really productive.
| dmix wrote:
| The UK/US haven't even spent widely on internet addiction
| education or built widescale programs like they did for drugs
| or even speech therapy. Jumping immediately to banning and
| gatekeeping everything on the internet is silly and naive.
| The world won't be a better place because we fear other kids
| parenting skills, it will be highly locked down and these ID
| checks/bans will hit every part of the internet.
| nottorp wrote:
| And how much does Discord commit to paying in damages if my face
| scan or ID scan leaks from their servers? Via security
| vulnerabilities or employees making some money on the side?
| delegate wrote:
| One thing that could happen is that someone might decide to vibe
| code a Discord clone, without all the extra crap. I'm sure there
| are people out there doing this already.
|
| There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are
| successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get
| rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and
| increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission
| is replaced by internal politics and processes.
|
| Software starts getting features which users don't want or need,
| side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to
| 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|...
|
| Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as
| a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the
| biggest companies in history.
|
| AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of
| software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory,
| people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made
| that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong
| arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on
| islands.
|
| At least I hope this will be the case.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| People have dropped platforms en masse over lesser things. This
| is not going to go well. Are they even going to make it to their
| IPO?
| oth001 wrote:
| And I'll be uninstalling and looking for an alternative
| tonymet wrote:
| I know Discord is popular, but I've tried about 3 dozen servers
| on a ton of hobby topics (linux , raspberry pi, golang, various
| games, politics) and I've found the caliber of conversation to be
| very poor. Nothing like forums, stack exchange or even reddit
| (especially pre-2012) in terms of topic focus, support quality,
| creativity, technicality. Convos tend to be banal, cliche,
| monoculture.
|
| I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their
| Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?
| chickensong wrote:
| It excels for small communities, groups of friends and the
| like. My IRC channel migrated because it's user friendly,
| embeds images, and voice chat is a breeze.
| tonymet wrote:
| I agree for private servers it's good. We used it for backup
| ops when our internal chat server went down. The feature set
| is very good
| oth001 wrote:
| Also curious how people like Epstein and James Alefantis are just
| casually using Gmail and Instagram to post CSAM and suggestive
| torturing of kids. Seems like the onus should be on the
| companies, not the users..
| sejje wrote:
| Wow.
|
| On one hand, I'm not surprised.
|
| But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a
| company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal,
| such an important bit of information to protect from hacks.
|
| I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified
| they won't.
|
| The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.
| apazzolini wrote:
| Based on the (lack of) people I see refusing the _optional_
| facial recognition check at the TSA checkpoint for flying, I can
| 't imagine this will be anything other than an overwhelming
| success for Discord and the surveillance state.
| nunez wrote:
| Discord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.
| tabbott wrote:
| I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a
| reasonable place for me to post some thoughts.
|
| Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how
| worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like
| Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to
| the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with
| their closest friends and family members, linked up with their
| identity.
|
| Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server
| for your community are:
|
| - Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy
| to upgrade.
|
| - Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the
| firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell
| us that they prefer the user experience to everything else
| they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)
|
| - Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about
| data protection, identity, etc.
|
| - It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and
| maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully
| contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern
| alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are
| more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going
| out of business.
|
| - We are a values-focused organization
| (https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is
| important to us all.
|
| - Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with
| the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile
| app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is
| free for community use and soon to be E2EE).
|
| I'm happy to answer any questions.
| areoform wrote:
| Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get
| my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without
| handholding?
| crabmusket wrote:
| Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved
| to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though
| so I can't speak to that.
|
| I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma
| test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how
| hyperactive the UI is.
| Vinnl wrote:
| As a software engineer who's had to interact with Discord
| only a handful of times, I had no idea when other people
| could hear me or where I had to click to find people I was
| looking for.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I've only rarely used it for voice, so I think I'm not in
| the right demographic. But I find its text/chat UI janky
| as hell.
| tabbott wrote:
| I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them
| watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with
| what we see with our internal usability studies with
| nontechnical users.
|
| Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is
| this one:
|
| https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/
|
| > Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate
| with their team leads. "Most of our agents are in their 60s
| or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That's
| why we love Zulip," says Erik Dittert, who's been leading GUT
| contact's IT team for the past 20 years.
|
| I would recommend doing a little training/handholding
| call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true
| for any new app.
|
| My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and
| I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started
| every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a
| signature, like you would an email. :)
| crabmusket wrote:
| > start on desktop
|
| Echoing this. Navigation is better and clearer on desktop.
| The mobile apps works really well once you know what you're
| doing. Part of onboarding into Zulip is being able to get
| an "overview" of the community and the discussions that are
| currently happening, and this is easier on desktop.
| guhidalg wrote:
| In my experience, the median user for communication apps
| is mobile _only_. Before that, it better be a website
| that works well on phones, and decently on desktop.
|
| As a developer I don't like it, but reality doesn't have
| to appease me.
| crabmusket wrote:
| This is a case where people can start talking past each
| other.
|
| In my view and experience, Zulip is a collaboration
| platform for groups who want to get shit done. I wouldn't
| recommend it for a "place to hang out".
|
| People who are serious about achieving something will use
| a laptop. Similarly, in a cousin comment - they will
| watch a short onboarding video.
|
| No platform is "intuitive" for everyone. WhatsApp and
| Signal are "basically just SMS" so they can lean on the
| knowledge phone users built in the 00s and 10s. Anything
| else is a new mental model and takes some adjustment.
|
| EDIT: also if you are an open source community, or a
| company, and you choose Discord for your support/project
| collab community... do better. (Looking at you
| CloudFlare)
| areoform wrote:
| > and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video
|
| I'm going to be very honest here. The jock ain't watching
| no video. Dude has (possibly) early CTE. Do you think he
| has the attention span to sit through a two minute video?
| _For a messaging app??_
|
| That's an automatic fail.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Tbf, Discord takes way more than 2 minutes to understand.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| First, quarterbacks are not typically the concerning
| position with respect to CTE. Second, because he plays
| football he doesn't have a 2-minute attention span? "Dumb
| jock" is about as accurate as "ignorant HN poster".
| Third, he either spent 2 minutes learning how to use
| discord, or stumbled through it long enough to learn, why
| can't he do the same thing with Zulip? Would it help if
| they chopped it into a dozen TicToks?
| crabmusket wrote:
| I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip.
| Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so
| much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half
| because of your organisational values, which are more aligned
| with ours than are those of Salesforce.
|
| The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has
| that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.
|
| Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the
| Zulip team work in public is inspiring!
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in
| #general"
|
| my experience is exact opposite
| katsudon wrote:
| How so? I haven't used Zulip but am curious to hear why
| adastra22 wrote:
| Not the person you are replying to, but I much prefer
| catching up on a small number of channels, than having to
| click around a bunch of different individual topics. But
| it is a tradeoff.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS)
| efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?
| tabbott wrote:
| Onboarding has a thread going here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401.
|
| My understanding is that Campfire hasn't been actively
| developed for ~10 years (https://once.com/campfire/changelog
| shows some minor fixes after the OSS launch; their GitHub has
| no 2026 commits). There are no mobile apps. It is not an
| actively maintained Discord alternative.
|
| Stoat is early in development. For example,
| https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits,
| compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish
| them luck! It's really important that we have multiple
| independent efforts.
|
| https://www.rocket.chat/ and https://mattermost.com/ are
| open-core military contractors these days. You'll see what I
| mean if you visit their websites. But like Zulip, they are
| full-featured team chat systems, and if the parts of their
| system that are OSS work for your organization, they're
| certainly valid options.
|
| Finally there is Matrix/Element. They have an inspiring
| vision and similar values to mine, and I'd recommend checking
| it out. Element/Matrix is built on an ambitious distributed
| consensus protocol with an E2EE option, which provides
| capabilities Zulip don't have but also adds complexity. Zulip
| is focused on just doing team chat really well, and does not
| support more than ~100K users in an instance. Hopefully will
| have a lot more resources now, thanks to Current Events. I
| wish the Element team the very best of luck!
|
| ----------------------------------------
|
| Overall, Zulip's focus has always been on making a delightful
| chat experience, especially when you have multiple
| conversations happening at the same time. We aren't trying to
| build a clone, but instead the best possible experience for
| having lots of possibly complex conversations. So there will
| be some differences from what you're used to.
|
| But critically, we spend a very large amount of our time
| relentlessly fixing micro-interactions that annoy us or are
| reported to us. If you read #design, #issues, and #feedback
| in https://zulip.com/development-community/, you'll get an
| idea of how we work.
|
| So while there's some features we don't have that are present
| in other products, and we don't have dozens of designers on
| staff to do cool end-of-year animated reports like Discord
| does, you can expect few bugs and a lot of interaction design
| polish.
|
| -----------------------------------------
|
| The one mistake that I think a lot of folks make in
| evaluating options is focusing on buzzwords like E2EE without
| thinking through their threat model. E2EE doesn't add much
| practical security over self-hosting for many threat models,
| and it comes with significant usability trade-offs. And some
| current E2EE systems don't actually protect against a
| malicious server, say because they only protect message
| content, not metadata like who has access to what... just
| against raiding the server's disk.
|
| (For example, WhatsApp has E2EE for message content, but I
| expect Meta's databases know everyone who's had a
| conversation with me on WhatsApp and the precise timestamps
| and approximate lengths of every message I've sent or
| received on the platform. And apparently some keyboard apps
| send what you're typing to remote servers!).
| bloqs wrote:
| Sold
| stefanka wrote:
| Thank you! Zulip is a great project.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| What is the video calling and screen share experience like?
| crabmusket wrote:
| Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this
| with a light integration in the UI.
| Firehawke wrote:
| I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it
| means splitting things across multiple apps.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing,
| no deal.
| barbs wrote:
| Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet
| https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi
| BrouteMinou wrote:
| Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?
| orblivion wrote:
| It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a
| fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics"
| (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the
| flood of conversation.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Channels + topics >>> just channels
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| 1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your
| server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3
| Valk3_ wrote:
| > Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the
| firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell
| us that they prefer the user experience to everything else
| they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)
|
| Could you expand on this?
| bo1024 wrote:
| Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are
| grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and
| topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and
| create a different topic for any given point that needs
| discussion about that project.
|
| Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and
| was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn't get in the
| way of the other threads.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > didn't get in the way of the other threads
|
| But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to
| the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide
| discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on
| something _else_ , but bad when you can't remember where a
| discussion was.
| bo1024 wrote:
| What's the state of accessibility on Zulip?
|
| (Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)
| tabbott wrote:
| You can do everything with the keyboard, and we do write
| everything with screenreader accessibility and colorblindness
| accessibility in mind.
|
| But we don't have a dedicated accessibility tester on staff,
| so we're reliant on people reporting issues that bother them
| in actual use.
|
| I should also mention there's a nice TUI app:
| https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal, which can be helpful
| for some people.
| rw_grim wrote:
| This is great to hear and ironically we (Pidgin) just decided
| that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to
| add support for just barely 24 hours ago before all this
| Discord nonsense!
|
| https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...
| tabbott wrote:
| Awesome, feel free to start a thread in #integrations in
| chat.zulip.org! We'd be happy to chat about some of the
| things that will make your life easier to do carefully when
| writing a new client.
|
| The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system.
| Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints,
| say https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each
| endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from
| https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code
| using feature level checks to support all server versions.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and
| easy to upgrade.
|
| You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip.
| Nothing else matters to me
| esseph wrote:
| Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile
| governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.
| sgarman wrote:
| My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice
| with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.
| dijit wrote:
| Doesn't exist in Zulip, theres a "camera" button that
| generates a jitsi link, I tried (and failed) to make it a
| google meet link, but it works surprisingly well, though it
| is a context switch.
| dijit wrote:
| Hey, just wanted to say that I am a happy Zulip customer.
|
| I used it at my previous employer and after a month of
| hangringing from people- many did not desire to go back to what
| we had before. (though some people did say they wanted Slack
| for the emojis and "prettiness").
|
| Now I started in a new position and I've positioned Zulip (on
| prem) as the only viable solution since we're shirking SaaS as
| a strategic move.
|
| The people who followed me to the new place are quite glad of
| this, or at least thats what I am told.
|
| So, thank you, sincerely.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > hangringing
|
| I'm sorry to be that guy but it's "handwringing" - twisting
| your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree
| crabmusket wrote:
| > like twisting your hand until you agree
|
| I'm also gonna be that guy - hand wringing is a stereotype
| of an expression of distress, not coercion. You're thinking
| of the idiom "twisting someone's arm".
| dwb wrote:
| I believe it was actually meant to be haranguing
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangu
| i...
| tabbott wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing the story!
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I don't have any questions as of yet, but reading your site; it
| speaks to me and those values align with mine. Just wanted to
| say that I think the world could use a bit more of this.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I'm asking because I hate Matrix and actually want you to
| convince me: why should I accept the risk of migrating my
| friend group from Discord to Zulip, which has already "broken
| the seal" of restricting features behind a monthly fee even for
| self-hosted users, when I could migrate us to Matrix instead?
| Matrix seems like the much less risky option.
|
| I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't
| restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's
| involved in proving that we should qualify.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Mobile push notifications are a special case because it's
| literally not technically possible to self-host them. Or
| rather, it's possible if you build the iOS and Android apps
| from source and distribute them through TestFlight or an
| analogous Android channel, but it's not possible for the
| developer of an App Store or Play Store app to allow its
| users to point it at a different push-notification server,
| because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary.
| So if you want your self-hosted Zulip server to work with the
| Zulip client apps in the App Store and Play Store, you have
| to use Zulip's push server, and there's nothing Zulip can do
| to fix that.
|
| Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the
| App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push
| notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-
| hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be
| used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't
| know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix
| still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's
| goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately
| distributed mobile app.
|
| Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature
| that's technically possible to self-host.
| cyberax wrote:
| > because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app
| binary
|
| Nope. On iOS the flow is:
|
| 1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's
| approval).
|
| 2. Send this token to your server.
|
| 3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this
| token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple,
| and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to
| an individual app.
|
| The situation is different on Android. Google went out of
| their way to make it impossible to customize `google-
| services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow
| won't work. But notifications ultimately work using
| veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play
| Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a
| write-up about this....
| zukzuk wrote:
| Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it's been "soon" for
| probably a year now. It's a bit odd that encrypted
| notifications still don't work, and I'd argue it's a very big
| caveat with regard to privacy and security.
|
| Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly
| regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to
| safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a
| major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it's weird that transit
| encryption was left as an afterthought.
| rustystump wrote:
| First time hearing about this project and it feels mature.
| However, the landing page example of the app on web is...messy
| and noisy to the point i am totally lost.
|
| This is not the case for slack or discord. I think having an
| awesome clean first impression would do wonders to sell what
| younare doing.
| jsrcout wrote:
| ENOPE.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Medium term, moving to another platform is the best solution. In
| the short term, I think using some other platform for the locked
| features is best?
|
| For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have
| to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have
| better alternatives.
| jm4 wrote:
| It took all of 2 minutes to delete my account and block Discord
| from my network. Credit to Discord for making the process very
| easy using the mobile app. I'm not going to put up with this crap
| just to occasionally use this app to play games with friends. My
| kids sure as hell aren't going to comply with this policy either.
| docmars wrote:
| This is such a huge mistake, Discord. Hopefully enough people put
| a lot of pressure on them to reverse this.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| it's like there's an inherent user-hostility in every platform
| that is expressed in a less-than-ideal user experience in it's
| usage or in the ways that the host will harvest all of your
| personally identifying information for various purposes (which it
| will also inevitably fail to properly secure, resulting in a near
| guaranteed leak at some point in the future).
|
| I personally don't find ease-of-use to be worth the price of my
| privacy but most people are more than happy to sell themselves
| out piecemeal in the form of data until there's nothing left but
| a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to attest to their ever
| having existed.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| right now someone is vibecoding a locally hostable discord clone.
| btown wrote:
| > The first option uses AI to analyze a user's video selfie,
| which Discord says never leaves the user's device. If the age
| group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect,
| users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity
| document instead.
|
| Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all
| the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard
| of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the
| question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-
| side...
| digiown wrote:
| Can't you just modify the client to send the resulting signal
| then? I'd anticipate a ton of tutorials like: Just paste this
| script into the console to get past the age gate!
| qrobit wrote:
| It will be easy to check with devtools when the update is
| released
| utf_8x wrote:
| If you're looking for an alternative to Discord, check out Stoat
| (formerly Revolt). [1] Especially if you're an iOS dev with some
| free time as the iOS client could really use some love... [2]
|
| (not affiliated with the project, just really want to see it
| succeed)
|
| [1] https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Just another instance of companies participating in the creation
| of the police state.
|
| These companies do not do this under external pressure from the
| state, they do this because it benefits and consolidates their
| power as well.
|
| It's bricks for their castle wall.
|
| Corporations should not be considered a separate entity from the
| state. Corporations form state power. This doesn't mean they are
| always in-line with the state, but that they lead the state as a
| block, as a class, defending their common interests.
|
| Policing is one of them.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Good. Maybe then we'll stop having Open Source projects using it
| as their only store of knowledge :)
| gverrilla wrote:
| Good, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".
| expedition32 wrote:
| Based. Kids should start gamefaqs again!
| andreagrandi wrote:
| Jump here, you can see Lucca (as we say in Italy, more or less..)
| dismalaf wrote:
| I'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to
| lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| Okay, i'm not very good at coding, especially web.
|
| It seems to me that the "logical" solution to this is some sort
| of local key like "sudo" that the user enters/has access to. This
| key is on a cookie or request or something that says "This
| request is being done by a verified adult" and then the website
| goes "cool here's your data". If the request does not have it,
| then the website says "Sorry you need one of these
| keys/permissions to access".
|
| I see this as elegant because like modern IDs, YES THEY COULD GET
| AROUND IT, but at least it gives parents and users who want to
| abide and try the ability. Kids get fake id's, they get stuff
| they shouldn't. So long as audits show that the businesses are
| trying to catch this and punishing those who ignore procedures
| properly, things are "fine".
|
| How infeasible is this from a coding perspective? I get that
| we're fucking with standards here, but I figured it would make
| most sane users and companies happy. Companies don't have to keep
| PII, just a log of "yes this access from this IP was approved,
| but we discovered is was used falsely and banned that key", and
| users have a tool that's setup once locally (or refreshed when
| you want a new key).
|
| I guess you'd need some way to authenticate these as if it's too
| easy to spoof whats the point, but it strikes me as leagues
| better of "store everyone's colonic map"
|
| How off base am I here? Is the theory somewhat sound or is this
| just dead from the ground up?
| calmworm wrote:
| Why does the idea of collecting millions of images of minors not
| sit right? Roblox, Character.ai, Discord...
| b_brief wrote:
| I can see the moderation and age-verification motivations here,
| but I am wary of how this changes expectations around identity on
| social platforms.
|
| Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-
| term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully
| reckoned with yet.
| abalone wrote:
| Taylor Lorenz has done excellent reporting on this. It's a right
| wing censorial moral panic that's forced some Democrats to go
| along with it by positioning it as "protecting kids". This
| legislation is moving at a fast clip and we have to fight back.
|
| * SCREEN Act age verification with huge implications for all
| online privacy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
|
| * Abolishing Section 230, the law that protects platforms like
| this from being sued for user content (just published today):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
|
| * UK online safety act (it's not just the U.S.) - interview with
| the lawyer defending 4chan:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
| winddude wrote:
| Delete!
| thephotonsphere wrote:
| Okay, that's the end of #Discord (at least for me) because I will
| never upload 'selfies' or a copy of my id to a social media site,
| or something.
| cantalopes wrote:
| I guesa i dont need to use discord anymore
| gsich wrote:
| Good bye. Discord is not trustworthy with this kind of data. As
| proven recently.
| rockskon wrote:
| This is categorically unacceptable.
|
| People's livelihoods and safety are threatened when there's
| people's personally identifying information associated with their
| Discord chats - even if linked by "anonymous" identifiers.
|
| Imagine your photo ID next to the horniest thing you've stated
| next to some random asshole on the Internet.
|
| Discord has _no_ moral right to make such a dramatically
| consequential decision about the personal privacy of its users in
| jurisdictions where such age verification tech is not mandatory.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Actively withdrawing from all US proprietary software and
| subscriptions ...
| burnte wrote:
| Goodbye Discord.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| The usual "to protect the kids" bs. Only people who does not
| understand the implications of this, will provide personal
| information.
|
| Watch:
|
| A) Discord relaxing its rule because of mass exodus B) People
| moving elsewhere where no personal information is required
| dmix wrote:
| This won't stop at Discord. Banning websites/apps and ID gating
| is going to be everywhere in a decade.
|
| Protect the kids puritanism is on max level right now, throw in
| some future terrorist attack or political issues that scare
| people enough like they fear TikTok and the internet will be
| fully controlled.
| pmdr wrote:
| I'll hardly miss using Discord, but if this isn't going to be a
| wake-up call to ALL (mainly) open-source projects using it, then
| we're all doomed.
|
| We should seriously go back to mailing lists and IRC as a
| standard for OSS. Everything else should be viewed as disposable.
| starkparker wrote:
| Really really surprised there isn't more discussion about the
| background inference service that's mentioned in passing here. If
| you thought Electron/wrapped web apps were a performance problem,
| I can't imagine the weight of _also_ running a local AI model
| that's constantly playing Guess My Age.
| monksy wrote:
| Please do not fall of the deceptive language that is used here.
| They're calling this "teen experience".
|
| This is not about "i see gentila we ban". They're very vague
| about what is obscene, sticking to that level of a consistent
| definition, and they're very heavy handed in punishing.
|
| They're introducing a highly restricted experience unless you
| hand over your details to either a "technology" (which that's
| very unclear about how honest they're being) or a company that
| has been caught for leaking sensitive details.
| templar_snow wrote:
| As an ethical conundrum, this one is clear. The safety of women
| and children online (human trafficking, r*pe and child abuse
| networks openly coordinate at industrial scale on Discord, Roblox
| and Telegram) trumps the concerns of a relatively small group of
| Richard Stallman-level purity obsessives. Good move on Discord's
| part; hopefully Roblox and Telegram shape up and follow suit. If
| you don't understand the severity of the current situation in
| 2026, Google the group "764."
| seanw444 wrote:
| I've needed a nudge to cancel my 5 year Nitro streak. This was
| it. I guess if they reverse course before March when the billing
| cycle is over, I'll renew. Hope I'm not alone in this. The only
| way they'll decide to not move forward with this is if enough
| people do the same.
| amniarix wrote:
| https://keet.io is this industry's best kept secret. Encypted p2p
| chat with audio and video, no signups, it just works. My kids and
| their friends switched from Discord to Keet to avoid all the
| signup / authentication friction.
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