[HN Gopher] Discord cuts ties with identity verification softwar...
___________________________________________________________________
Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona
Author : robtherobber
Score : 392 points
Date : 2026-02-24 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Ah man, just tried to submit this with the title "Discord cuts
| ties with Peter Thiel-backed SaaS once code tied to US spying
| found" which is slightly better I think, and fits exactly within
| 80 characters :)
|
| I think the whole "after its code was found tied to U.S.
| surveillance efforts" part is new and wasn't known before, so
| feels important to have in the title too. Although most of us
| probably assumed it was true before too.
| blitzar wrote:
| > once code tied to US spying found
|
| New and also should be the big story.
|
| "Butcher cuts ties with supplier when steaks found to be human
| meat" shouldnt be a story about changing suppliers ...
| robtherobber wrote:
| That would have been a better title, I agree.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Is this actually a thing that is true?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I don't think HN titles are judged by "is it true?" but
| rather how close the submission title is to the original
| title and otherwise represents the content of the submission.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts"
| part is new ... Although most of us probably assumed it was
| true before too.
|
| This makes me feel VERY old.
|
| 641A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
|
| Retroactive telecom immunity:
| https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/17
|
| The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20
| years. Snowden should not have been a shocking revelation to
| any one but it was, and that was 13 years ago.
|
| Its less of a "assumed it was true" and more of a "oh look
| another one, not shocking".
| bigyabai wrote:
| > The government spying on what you do has been old news for
| 20 years.
|
| The methodology has evolved dramatically in those 20 years,
| what we've seen from Snowden is almost certainly obsolete in
| the light of new surveillance tactics. Even as a pessimist
| myself, I'm still routinely shocked by the lengths that
| American tech has been bugged.
|
| Salt Typhoon is really the icing on this cake; "lawful"
| intercept turned against the state that implemented it. There
| are more twists left in this story no matter how jaded you
| might feel.
| rapnie wrote:
| You might email @dang and request a title change.
| hn@ycombinator.com is the email address.
| jyscao wrote:
| So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification
| requirement for users, or imply they're no longer using this 3rd
| party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn't too clear on
| that.
| Macha wrote:
| K-id is the vendor they were proposing which did on device
| processing. They were trying to downplay the initiative by
| saying all the k-id data stayed on device.
|
| This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a
| switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not
| uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring
| people that it was ok because you didn't save data but also be
| trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I
| guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled.
| (Though it does call into question discord's judgment that they
| thought this was a good idea).
|
| Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government
| links were discovered and also probably a part of this
| decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in
| November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK
| and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were
| breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad
| idea
| m4rtink wrote:
| I don't think you can ever trust closed source software that
| also requires network for other features that it really does
| on-device processing for something specific.
|
| It might not even send the sensitive data immediately but
| bundle it with other traffic once it goes online.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face
| verification requirement for users,
|
| No, they're outsourcing the verification to an external
| company. Just not this one.
|
| Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove
| content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other
| features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use
| voice then no verification is required.
| blibble wrote:
| probably find out the new identity verification firm is just
| a shell around the Thiel company
| tclancy wrote:
| Or bought just long enough later to make it too late.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Well, until the upcoming batch of laws goes through
| classifying discussion of lgbtq people as inherently mature
| content. This is one half of a two part strategy by the
| american right to make queer content de facto illegal again
| without running into first amendment protections. Getting the
| payment processors banning "mature" content is the other leg
| of this stool.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this
| is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over
| 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to
| access pornography.
|
| The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content
| behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely
| harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the
| age gates.
|
| It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly
| eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended
| up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with
| "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started
| with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in
| public schools".
|
| No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's
| health, including birthing and abortion information.
|
| Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so
| they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
|
| I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam
| sites will also be outlawed.
| troosevelt wrote:
| I think it's possible if not probable you are correct,
| but a lot of this is not as coordinated as you might
| think. Religious conservatives just think porn is the
| devil, and more and more, I find non-religious people
| that view it as such, too, without some wider plot to
| take rights away from gay people. They're just prudes and
| they're happy to remove those rights when given the
| chance. This certainly is the average conservative, it's
| not a top-down marching order, it's just how they view
| things.
|
| To back this up, you suggest that Bush's _Child_ was part
| of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not
| an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist
| in favor of traditional education, he 's not of the Trump
| ilk, and _Child_ was very much a Bush keystone. The push
| to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther
| down the road and pushed by very different people.
|
| I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing
| everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often
| gets you nowhere.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| Let me reframe a bit on this one.
|
| You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized
| group, but very loosely organized with people continually
| carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove
| our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster
| than the previous one, but they're still running in the
| same direction.
|
| A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for
| Charter Schools across the United States (rather than
| fund public education). And while these schools are
| supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB
| allowed parents to choose private, religious options if
| their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian
| testing expectations, made it pretty easy).
|
| So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get
| where we're at today, but it was still always headed in
| this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a
| funded alternative to public school, rather than
| investing in our public schools with our public funds.
|
| On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be
| difficult to distill the information down in a way that
| makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of
| people and power and ideaologies.
|
| At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did
| succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The
| relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of
| adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area
| without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in
| every direction, is what made this happen.
|
| I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're
| over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they
| will continue to push where they can until they figure
| out ways in which they can succeed.
|
| It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the
| other side of this definitely need to recognize the
| threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes
| this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single
| headed hydra.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think you're the one not knowing your enemies here.
| There _is_ a plan to strip queer people of rights, it is
| already well underway. You cannot possibly have an
| effective plan of opposition if you don 't acknowledge
| the incredible economic, social, and technological
| resources that have been spent spreading and nurturing
| the prejudices that you can now call "uncoordinated." A
| lot of the individuals furthering these measures do not
| identify themselves with "a plot," sure, but it doesn't
| mean they don't have a role in it.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last
| decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the
| traditional religious oligarchs.
|
| What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia.
| The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of
| the politics and economics of the government so as long
| as the religious elite have the ability to enforce
| religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of
| church and state and this marrying of those two in the
| United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Giving the overprudish religious fanatics what they want
| to earn their support has actually been an open plan of
| the right wing in the US since at least Reagan.
|
| Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis
| partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the
| religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays
| were dying.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| As far as I am aware, "sensitive content" is blocked even in
| private messages. So it impacts your ability to chat with
| friends.
| Aurornis wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, the sensitive content filter is for
| images, not text chat.
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/18210995019671...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Discord isn't scrapping its plans, just assuring people that
| one of the vendors they trialed in a sub-market they aren't
| moving forward with globally. They've been trying for a multi-
| vendor solution from the beginning and k-ID is the vendor
| they've been much more publicly happy with than Persona.
|
| Today Discord also released a rather comprehensive (and good)
| recap of the plan so far, their apologies for some of their
| messaging mistakes, and what comes next:
| https://discord.com/blog/getting-global-age-assurance-right-...
|
| (Also, from that post most notably mentioned about the global
| rollout is delayed in light of some of these vendor
| verification issues and also hoping to rollout a few more
| features to even further lesson the need for age verification
| by many users. One such feature being first-class opt-in
| "spoiler channels", which some servers had been using age
| restricted channels for that rather than opt-in roles and
| somewhat more complex role-based permissions.)
| ta9000 wrote:
| Too fucking late, eat shit Discord. We're all moving to E2E
| encrypted platforms.
| squeefers wrote:
| where we definitely will not be moaning about the same thing in
| 18 months time
| alphawhisky wrote:
| Joke's on you, once I finish setting up my P2P tin can
| network I'll be invisible.
| dgxyz wrote:
| I just nuked it and didn't replace it. Bloated piece of shit
| full of misery.
|
| We decided to just meet up in person twice a month and play
| board games instead.
| encom wrote:
| What's the point of E2E on a chatroom/channel/"""server""" that
| anyone can join?
|
| Yes, I'm making (another) argument in favour of IRC. IRC has
| optional client-server encryption, and you can set channel
| modes to only allow encrypted clients access. So that way you
| at least prevent eavesdropping.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This does not cure the face scanning nonsense. I deleted and am
| not going back.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Nearly 2,500 accessible files were found sitting on a U.S.
| government-authorized endpoint, researchers pointed out on X. The
| files showed Persona conducted facial recognition checks against
| watchlists and screened users against lists of politically
| exposed persons._
|
| > _Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including
| screening for "adverse media"_
|
| im sure everyone _assumed_ this, but its good to _know_ it.
|
| > _And the information was openly available. "We didn't even have
| to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was
| just on the doorstep,"_
|
| it is kind of scary how often these types of situations are only
| found out because of wild incompetence. you have to imagine that
| _most_ similar situations dont suffer from the same incompetence
| (and thus arent known)
|
| > _"At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users
| is a top priority._
|
| please, i wish companies would just stop saying this obvious lie.
| you know that you dont care. we know that you dont care.
|
| > _It's dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to
| everyone to be real online._
|
| .... says the ceo of the company that you have to send your face
| ( "facedox", if you will) to
| navbaker wrote:
| That last quote, buried at the end of the article, absolutely
| killed me. I cannot believe he had the nerve to say that doing
| what he does everyday
| midtake wrote:
| > According to Discord, only a small number of users were part of
| this test, in which any information submitted could be stored for
| up to seven days before it would be deleted.
|
| Ah yes, we only store it for 7 days. During those 7 days, we pass
| it to Persona, and who knows how long they keep it!
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Discord's previous statement:
|
| > "Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are
| deleted quickly-- in most cases, immediately after age
| confirmation"
|
| So now it's not "immediately" but 7 days? I don't know how
| anyone can trust any statement from these guys.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| The one thing you can trust is this:
|
| If a tech company says something to you, and they don't give
| you the means to verify it on your own, _they are lying to
| you_. Do not trust anything they say, ever.
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| "I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these
| guys."
|
| this is the fun part, you can't!
| jandrese wrote:
| The way I read that is Discord would delete your data, but
| they were taking an intentionally hands off approach to the
| data broker they subcontracted to identify you.
| mkesper wrote:
| Related: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed
| Over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245
| bri3d wrote:
| The referenced write-up based on the Persona front end code is
| here:
|
| https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona
|
| I definitely recommend reading this primary source before drawing
| conclusions about the code as most of the secondary reporting is
| quite low quality.
| dunder_cat wrote:
| Seems to be down for me.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260220192124/https://vmfunc.re...
| beacon294 wrote:
| It's up.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Submitted 6 days ago but flagged
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059129
|
| @dang can this get a second chance?
| vincnetas wrote:
| damn. why did the website stole my audio?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Some of the most interesting authors in tech on the internet
| have just absolute awful websites. Blinking animations
| everywhere, weird sounds, "cute" little javascript animations
| like it's 1999 again.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| the last time the website was submitted, over half the
| comments talked about website design instead of the actual
| content. we can probably skip doing it again.
|
| different people have different tastes. people complain
| about boring websites, people complain about websites with
| animations or colors. the only guarantee is that the
| conversation isnt interesting.
|
| if you are on the side that doesnt like music, animations,
| whatever, i recommend a combination of noscript and using
| reader mode.
| Larrikin wrote:
| The layout and design is a matter of taste. I actually
| find websites like OP refreshing to see.
|
| Blasting music or sound on auto play when you aren't
| directly navigating to audio or video content is just
| rude.
|
| It's the same as playing your speaker on the subway.
| rezonant wrote:
| This is my problem with it. Put in a mute button if
| you're going to do this, otherwise it's just user
| hostile. No problem with stylized websites and fun
| animations.
| rezonant wrote:
| Why not use your main account to post this, unless you
| mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago when your
| account was created? Genuinely curious what benefit a
| fresh account gives you here?
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _unless you mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago_
|
| maybe you are unaware, but you can browse HN without an
| account, _and_ you can browse previous submissions (years
| back, even!). its not like i can only see posts made in
| the last 4 days.
|
| second, i saw the original post because it was posted in
| this very comment chain we are on, 5 hours ago, by
| bondarchuk
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137961).
|
| my turn! what is your comment trying to accomplish by
| cross-examining me about something completely unrelated?
| what point are you trying to make?
|
| if you think my comment is wrong, you should talk about
| the contents of the comment, not the age of my account.
| fuddle wrote:
| Yeah, come on! I'm trying to watch a video and read the
| article!
| vincnetas wrote:
| yeah no. i was listening to background music of my choice
| while browsing the internet.
| dgxyz wrote:
| Good article but the web site gave me eye and ear cancer.
|
| Please make it actually readable and don't steal my audio!
| nebezb wrote:
| I read it and, maybe it's because I've spent too much time in
| fintech, I don't share most of the concerns.
|
| The differences in proclaimed data retention periods is
| concerning though. The rest is par for the course for KYC/AML.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Tell me more before I doom about this too much.
| bri3d wrote:
| I agree; I didn't want to editorialize too much as I think
| the writeup stands on its own.
|
| My takeaway was that in this case, even an author with a
| clear and extreme bias against this sort of thing could find
| only unfortunately-common bad practices rather than deeply
| nefarious intent. Of course, this is just the front-end code,
| but this just looks like a KYC platform to me. Most of the
| secondary reports on this write-up seem to completely ignore
| section 0x13 and jump to the specific conclusions the author
| does not draw.
|
| The fact that we've created a system where Discord need and
| want a KYC platform is a different and quite strange thing,
| but the KYC platform itself just looks like what it says on
| the tin.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| That was a great read, very interesting!
| cloverich wrote:
| Note also there's a direct response from Persona's security
| team here[1], and a lot of back and forth from Rick on
| Twitter[2].
|
| [1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-
| map...
|
| [2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
| nailer wrote:
| > About the name: The subdomain was called onyx, a reference
| to the Pokemon Onix (a Pokemon made of multiple boulders,
| fitting for a multi-node architecture). It was an informal
| codename chosen by the engineer. It had no connection
| whatsoever to Fivecast ONYX, an unrelated 3rd party
| commercial product previously used by ICE. We understand this
| coincidence caused confusion, and we address it further
| below.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Twitter requires login to view the replies, might use an
| alternative:
|
| https://nitter.net/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385
| mikkupikku wrote:
| For some reason, discord has never asked more from me than a
| verified email address. No phone number or anything else. Maybe
| I'm being monitored and they don't want to spook me off the
| honeypot? Half joking..
| harrisoned wrote:
| Same for me, and my account is almost a decade old. I think it
| depends a lot where are you from and the kind of activity, as i
| read stories of people being asked to register a number out of
| nowhere. Many servers requires you to have it tho, due to spam
| protection. I just don't talk on those.
| pram wrote:
| It's tragic but I have the "verified" setting turned on my
| public server because it's literally impossible to stop a
| determined spammer with the tools Discord has. They can make
| new accounts faster than you can ban them, and there's no
| like "IP ban" equivalent
| ronsor wrote:
| Discord bans are IP bans by default, but new IP addresses
| are cheap. Even phone numbers are cheap for a determined
| spammer.
| grayhatter wrote:
| If your account is a decade old, and you registered at 13,
| you're now 23 and they don't need to verify you're older than
| 18. If you were younger than 13, they might be required to
| delete your account.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Each discord server can decide whether they only will allow
| people with a phone number on. When you hit one of those,
| Discord will ask you for your number.
| harrisoned wrote:
| Those require a phone for you to send messages and interact.
| It will ask you to 'Verify phone', but you can chose not to
| and stay on the server as read-only, Discord itself won't
| bother you about it. I am on a few like that for quite some
| time.
| rideontime wrote:
| I'm glad to see "Peter Thiel-backed" becoming a widely-recognized
| epithet.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| it is truly amazing how much damage one person is able to do to
| civilized society
|
| if you expand the scope to a handful of adjacent figures, the
| catastrophe is truly amazing
| pphysch wrote:
| Thiel is one of the more public faces of what is now known as
| the "Epstein class" of societal predators. But one of many
| and certainly not the epicenter.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Yep Epstein class. It's a great phrase for the billionaire
| elites who have corrupted our society through their wealth.
| We need heavy taxes on them now to preserve our democracy.
|
| And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting
| with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is
| said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked
| with destabilizing America.
| timacles wrote:
| There is certainly a shadow cabal of these elite
| billionaire types that avoid all public exposure yet are
| working very hard to destroy society and profit
| verdverm wrote:
| Some people are trying to use a different word than
| "cabal" because of the racial associations and history.
|
| Oligarchs/y are among my choices, but I have supplanted
| that with Epstein Class now, to be more accurate to whom
| I refer
| Kapura wrote:
| yeah, this is what unchecked wealth gives you. yay
| capitalism.
| EQmWgw87pw wrote:
| I'm hearing this a lot but never with any substance, would
| you care to elaborate with a hard action or idea with a
| direct result?
| pfraze wrote:
| What are you, Thiel's alt? The guy backed Facebook, built a
| mass surveillance firm, and talks about democracy as an
| obstacle. How do you expect people to feel about him?
| EQmWgw87pw wrote:
| I would not advocate against democracy. But do you
| believe it is flawless?
| e2le wrote:
| No system is flawless. Every democratic system has its
| own issues. What is increasingly clear is that the
| current crop of tech billionaires do not belong anywhere
| near a position of power. God help us. The quality of
| individual is disappointing.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| certainly better than a feudal system being passed off as
| libertarian
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Direct quote from Peter Thiel:
|
| > I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible
| p_j_w wrote:
| Maybe a society that can be so damaged by someone because
| they're incredibly wealthy shouldn't be considered civilized.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| What is more civilized than concentrating large amounts of
| power into the hands of a few? Hierarchy and civilization
| seem to go hand-in-hand.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western
| civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at
| poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.
|
| (This is a joke in case that wasn't clear)
| jordanb wrote:
| It was always difficult to get normal people to understand
| why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that
| clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive"
| question.
|
| I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for
| his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to
| get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates
| or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about
| these people is professionally managed public relations
| content.
| timacles wrote:
| A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their
| language or whatever you want to call it, so they can't
| even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and
| paranoid man children with no scruples.
|
| They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of
| their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a
| strong character.
| jordanb wrote:
| Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope
| itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got
| this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him
| palatable?"
| heliumtera wrote:
| >It was always difficult to get normal people to understand
| why the tech billionaires are so bad
|
| By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two
| things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the
| past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion
| than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the
| behalf of tech billionaires.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They're not so much offended by it as that they would
| like to join the billionaire class and believe that those
| in power may at some point come to review their voting
| behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN
| username on the application form.
|
| Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at
| the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling
| effect for you and technically they have that ability.
| And they _definitely_ look at the comments.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really
| have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%?
| 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really
| that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.
|
| People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just
| on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never
| will. But, there are enough of them and their
| billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to
| mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if
| you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large
| followings. This is widespread behavior and not about
| wanting to be a startup founder.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a good question. Probably a low percentage but
| with the amount of people on HN that still adds up to a
| sizeable number of participants.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| >They're not so much offended by it as that they would
| like to join the billionaire class
|
| Same thing happened in WWII Nazi Germany. This timeline
| has an eerie similar feeling as the masses line up to the
| slaughter.
| e2le wrote:
| Some might even agree with their dystopic vision of the
| future.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting
| direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and
| crass and uninteresting these assholes are.
|
| They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats.
| They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish
| are and how that is definitely why they are starving.
| They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe
| themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two
| sentences about _high school level_ philosophy topics,
| and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to
| questions that really shouldn 't even have wrong answers.
| All the while, they misspell everything because
| apparently they are outright illiterate too.
|
| Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are
| too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't
| do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.
|
| And yet, still some morons all over the US think they
| must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a
| literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an
| absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so
| bad people will still insist you must be magically genius
| and only pretending to be stupid.
|
| Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape
| of a little girl please" emails?
| edgyquant wrote:
| For me it's because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-
| transhumanism etc and he wasn't stumped by the question
| he's repeatedly answered it. Anyone who's worldview is
| shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can
| clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at
| least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The list is getting longer and longer, but a good
| touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to
| the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in
| scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip
| maximizers we were warned about.
| johndhi wrote:
| Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
|
| Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why?
| They are obviously all quite competitive in business but
| the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for
| example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars.
| What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if
| he's doing that?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Because it's about power, control, and influence. The
| wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie
| Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just
| status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on.
| There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am
| not too concerned about broad support for them in a world
| with 8-10 billion people.
|
| "Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom
| during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is
| not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its
| easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But
| do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to
| their power.
|
| "Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want
| to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all
| indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as
| a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have
| no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic
| to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a
| high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know
| what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of
| predator.
|
| > Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
|
| https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-
| socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/
| bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/amer
| ica... | https://archive.today/nLx78
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=billionaires+sociopaths
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
|
| By thinking.
| shimman wrote:
| Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout
| our entire history of a species that tales of "excess
| greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins
| society throughout the entire world.
| triceratops wrote:
| > the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy
|
| If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming
| billionaire living standards) were the only things super-
| rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately
| they use it to directly influence politics and society.
|
| Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
| cratermoon wrote:
| If you gave away as much money proportionately, you'd
| have about 75 fewer dollars in your pocket.
|
| Tell me again how generous billionaires are.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| My working class family members always gave 10% to
| charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US
| for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of
| the money it takes for them to live a very basic life.
| Compare that to billionaires who have more money than
| they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:
|
| Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5%
| Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/
| ame...
| sznio wrote:
| I thought about the same recently, in the context of the
| Epstein files.
|
| You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time
| you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost
| opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller
| things, then your standards slide more and more, until
| you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't
| anything for you to do except make more money.
|
| Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's
| island not because they like diddling kids, but because
| they needed to network with Epstein to make more money.
| How many actively participated just to be in his in-
| group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so
| corrupt that they would do anything for business.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga:
| _so many people knew about this_. And yet, the mutually
| assured destruction of having been associated with
| Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of
| silence on all of them.
| frm88 wrote:
| Have you ever heard of the Bohemian Grove? The birthplace
| of the Heritage Foundation? There you have them all, in
| one club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove
| savanaly wrote:
| Can't you also make money by making a good decision that
| benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all
| the time, just on a relatively small scale.
| troosevelt wrote:
| Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even
| here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is
| to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's
| all utilitarian.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
|
| I'm calling this out.
|
| That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world
| this way. Some of us believe that some things are
| objective and deontological.
|
| IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created
| the corrupt conditions we are living in
| cootsnuck wrote:
| "Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation
| requires working with other people. No one is an island.
| And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types
| of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign
| nations.
| ambicapter wrote:
| "relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this
| sentence, no?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, _some_ of
| their money comes from positive contributions to society.
| But you don 't get to be a billionaire if you restrict
| yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the
| MOST money.
| keybored wrote:
| Someone further down[1] talked about how "normal people"
| don't realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But
| I think it's rather the tech people here that don't fully
| realize it.
|
| > I feel like I do this all the time, just on a
| relatively small scale.
|
| Yeah, _scale_. Scale is obviously important.
|
| The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558
| mystraline wrote:
| Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard
| work.
|
| It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of
| workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is
| their hard work, not the billionaires.
|
| Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the
| discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
|
| Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of
| the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when
| every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7
| year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy
| treats workers poorly.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of
| workers
|
| Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire
| without _directly_ doing this. I think it was said
| somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage
| billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
|
| But loosening the statement a little, if the person
| themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that
| have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the
| companies paying for the ads).
|
| Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still
| leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral
| dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a
| billionaire.
|
| It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or
| "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-
| competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
| troosevelt wrote:
| Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality?
|
| I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral
| person who intentionally did wrong things, though his
| company certainly has. You don't just become a
| billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that
| justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse
| yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with
| things outside of your scope because a single person
| can't handle that much authority without delegating to
| people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't
| start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to
| sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.
|
| I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with
| Epstein did it just to make connections and they made
| excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone
| immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a
| billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral
| instead of their actions misses why people do what they
| do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but
| many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions.
| Does that make sense?
|
| If you want to get people top stop doing things like
| this, you have to attack the actions, not the person,
| because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it
| gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason
| to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious
| person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower
| levels?
| shevy-java wrote:
| > I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted
| with Epstein did it just to make connections and they
| made excuses, eg, Gates.
|
| I am not sure about that.
|
| Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word
| "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into
| the "just to make connections". The superrich don't
| really need to "make connections" on an island where
| underage girls party.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > on an island where underage girls party
|
| on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape
| them.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Thank you for making that clarification. It seems like
| the parent was trying to normalize the "underage" and
| "party" part.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > an island where underage girls party.
|
| What an absolutely gross mischaracterization of what
| happens there.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > slave morality
|
| I think if you're saying: _" These billionaires are bad
| because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their
| capacity for harm much worse."_
|
| That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily,
| because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed
| using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality
| when you abbreviate the above to: _" These billionaires
| are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."_
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yeah but I don't think this is being said here.
|
| Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being
| said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of
| these responses.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing
| anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen
| plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't
| think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that
| having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have
| gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of
| what the individual actually did or is doing.
| bityard wrote:
| If making increasingly immoral decisions is all it takes
| to be a billionaire... then man, I have truly been
| wasting my life's potential
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You also have to be lucky. Have you tried being more
| lucky?
| overfeed wrote:
| Necessary - but not adequate.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Oh yeah, plenty of that, even scientists and thinkers
| were tempted, we had plenty of details even before the
| 'files', thanks to Maxwell's phone book :
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-
| everyo...
| EQmWgw87pw wrote:
| So someone is evil because they answer questions by
| thinking through them? There are no questions in the
| universe that can't be stopped and pondered over. In fact,
| it's dangerous to even suggest that, that's the exact
| mechanism that propaganda runs on.
| pfraze wrote:
| Ah yes, the real danger to the world isn't a powerful man
| feeling ambivalent about our survival. The real danger is
| society using that moment as propaganda.
|
| This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to
| make a "Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist" meme stick.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close
| ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he
| didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone
| who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions
| him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.
| EQmWgw87pw wrote:
| Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is
| not being "ambivalent". He literally says "there's
| multiple questions implicit here" in response to the
| question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you
| making sweeping assumptions about others are way more
| dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or
| analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| You pair that with his behavior and you can see pretty
| clearly the guy does wants to control the world. Stop
| trying to see this in isolation of that one event.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Question 1: If a human modifies with themselves with
| enough sci-fi tier technology are they still "Human"?
| (And therefore if humans "ascend" past their biology,
| humanity technically wouldn't survive)
|
| Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st
| question is an interesting question, with multiple
| nuances, are they basically an idiot?
| monocasa wrote:
| The question wasn't "should all humans not modify
| themselves", but "should humanity survive".
|
| We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact
| civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason
| that regardless of what some people choose, other people
| will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity"
| will survive regardless of what technology occurs or
| where your definition ends.
|
| Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires
| get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most
| using servitors and decraniated as robots.
| Spivak wrote:
| Actually evil, no. Forever changed by their enormous
| wealth which messes you up mentally in a lots of fun
| unique ways, changes the nature of every relationship
| you'll have post wealth, and feeds into your ego and all
| your latent neurosis further and further alienating you
| from and believing yourself above your fellow man, yes.
|
| Evil is just a shorthand.
| EQmWgw87pw wrote:
| What you're saying isn't necessarily wrong, I just don't
| think it adds up cleanly to "evil". Skipping nuance is
| bad, I think
| rurp wrote:
| A frustrating aspect of the AI debates has been the number
| of people who believe people like Sam Altman who say that
| the immense wealth created by AGI would be distributed to
| the masses to improve their lives. The notion that the mega
| wealthy Elon/Sams/Bezos elites are going to willingly give
| up unprecedented wealth because millions of people have
| become unemployed and impoverished is so wildly out of step
| with how those people have behaved their entire lives.
| Someone who says they have enough billions and want to
| improve millions of lives don't make it to those positions.
|
| The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented
| government coercion or worse.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks
| like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's
| because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning
| orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either
| way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it
| asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you
| softball interviews, you just don't get to interview
| anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize
| are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a
| backboard for "interviews".
|
| It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal
| responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a
| responsible person to explain themselves and their
| actions.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's beyond naive. But there are also still people
| believing Elon Musk is going to put humanity on Mars for
| keeps and out of altruism.
| rurp wrote:
| For sure, I've been rolling my eyes at the Mars colony
| stuff for probably a decade or more now. I get that it's
| a fun futuristic thought experiment for nerds but the
| idea that Elon's going to send up some modern day
| Mayflower in the near future that builds a thriving
| settlement is obvious nonsense.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Well, the average person is so utterly illiterate in
| physics, science, and math that no, it's not _obvious_
| nonsense to them.
|
| They don't really think through anything at all, because
| the human brain is hyperoptimized to _not_ think, as
| thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that
| optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just
| not using it, the brain still consumes a significant
| fraction of a human 's energy budget.
|
| We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to
| think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your
| beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for
| granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring
| something you shouldn't and missing something important.
|
| I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing
| some rough calculations about things. However, I've
| recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy
| recreational math more than the average person. But I'm
| frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in
| math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now
| going through their lives with zero literacy in math.
|
| You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could
| you squander that?! What else were you doing with that
| time? You were required to go to school for about 16
| years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most
| of that time?!
|
| It hurts me how _willfully_ ignorant people can be.
| simianwords wrote:
| This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of
| wealth.
|
| Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam
| Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth -
| increasing the pie.
|
| Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting
| them.
|
| Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just
| the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase
| it and use it is enough to improve people's lives.
| Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other
| than transfer power.
|
| Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change
| anything about prosperity or poverty.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Claiming that wealth isn't zero sum, and demanding people
| have faith in the US system of capitalism, is not
| reassuring.
| axus wrote:
| So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the
| pie available is scarcer.
|
| I am looking forward to the day where more electricity,
| electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI;
| but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would
| do more to bring the price back down.
| simianwords wrote:
| Qualitatively, I now have access to ChatGPT.
|
| How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool
| in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| For how much longer?
| simianwords wrote:
| its only going to get cheaper.
| axus wrote:
| While ChatGPT is a partial substitution for a college
| education, it doesn't satisfy the other needs I listed. I
| do think in the long term we'll get there, but the
| current situation matters.
| rurp wrote:
| You're talking about normal technological developments
| that yes generally follow Econ 101 patterns. But AGI
| isn't like that. If AGI or something like it comes about
| it won't be a normal technology. The upside case for
| investors is that frontier models eliminate millions of
| jobs and remain controlled by a small group of owners.
| That's why they are investing sums unprecedented in human
| history. If all white collar work and an increasing
| amount of blue collar work is supplanted by AI how do
| those masses of newly unemployed folks make a living
| without wealth redistribution?
|
| If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal
| technological development then I agree with you that it
| will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the
| scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the
| industry are warning that's not the most likely path at
| this point.
| simianwords wrote:
| I might agree with you on this edge case. I don't believe
| we will reach that soon.
|
| But interestingly, people who are against AI tend to also
| believe that they genuinely can't replace anyone.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of
| wealth.
|
| As long as we're in a capitalist society, wealth is
| certainly zero-sum.
|
| Every technological advancement that made jobs easier
| just allows corporations to increase their margins or
| increase the workload. If I automate some of my work and
| now only need to work 20 hours/week, I don't get 20 more
| hours/week of free time, I'm just given more work to do.
|
| If someone gets completely automated out of their job,
| they don't get to relax and enjoy free time. They have to
| find a new job to pay the bills. With more and more
| people getting automated out of a job, UBI will become a
| necessity. We will need to increase taxes on corporations
| to fund it.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| The only non-evil Billionaire I know are the South park
| creators although they aren't tech Billionaires. I consider
| everyone else for the most part to not-be-good people.
|
| Because south park decided to personally say essentially
| bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company
| which gave them a billion dollars.
|
| So they took a billion dollars and they were still
| consistent with how they've been for decades at this point.
| All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we
| live in.
| AceyMan wrote:
| I'd think that original creators such as J.K. Rowling,
| Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen & Taylor Swift (among
| others) would be other members of the !evil bucket.
| ufo wrote:
| J.K. Rowling is now infamous for using her vast wealth to
| lobby against transgender rights.
| AceyMan wrote:
| Oof.
| andigh wrote:
| She's promoting women's rights actually.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Taylor swift does seem to be using AI or something. I
| mean she's nice but not as nice as South park creators
| imo.
|
| I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must
| admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it
| does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy,
| though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on
| internet but South park is infamous with controversies as
| well.
|
| There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many
| many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few
| good billionaires that you can count them on your
| fingers.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > It was always difficult to get normal people to
| understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
|
| This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING
| usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin
| to question what they see.
|
| There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal
| favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch
| the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really
| grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick
| ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to
| see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then
| begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps
| they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent
| (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it
| boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health
| was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where
| people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of
| the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not
| exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich
| in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| That is my favorite film :D
| simianwords wrote:
| It's very naive to think this is the interpretation.
|
| That humanity should survive is a deeper question than it
| looks. Ask any transhumanist.
| e2le wrote:
| People aught to be questioning more the future vision of
| those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with
| such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously
| building the tools of a surveillance state probably should
| not be one of the individuals driving our future.
|
| It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing
| like theirs.
| dijit wrote:
| It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who
| have influence over us are there by some right of some
| kind.
|
| Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have
| completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and
| ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)
|
| or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.
|
| It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're
| just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people
| who have access to different information than we do and
| have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they
| more than a single standard deviation from the norm in
| intelligence.
|
| They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated,
| easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable
| and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded
| by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear
| (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a
| warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.
|
| I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to
| believe that you would be insulated from all direct
| criticism while being told that everything you do is the
| right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your
| own fucking reflection in that situation.
|
| But we do that to people, people who have enormous
| influence over us, and they get confused when we don't
| like them, and we get confused about how they can be so
| out of touch and unlikable.
|
| But they're just people.
| nailer wrote:
| > It was always difficult to get normal people to
| understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel
| gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should
| humanity survive" question.
|
| He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart
| enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting
| his words.
|
| > folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers
|
| On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into
| oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts
| by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed
| the site for the worse.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Ah, _clearly_ he was thinking about transhumanism! That
| thing all normal people understand and agree with.
| nailer wrote:
| Nobody was suggesting normal people understand or agree
| with transhumanism.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Actually It woke people up to the fact that there is
| clearly bad things going on. The people that take the
| politically correct standpoint have a lot to learn.
| Talking about things that are going wrong in society is
| important. If you don't like that, go live on an island
| somewhere where you can cut yourself off from humanity.
|
| Discourse is good for society, unless you think that
| society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...
| trinsic2 wrote:
| That guy has a strong Nazi feel. I'd stay far, far away
| from anything he creates
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > It was always difficult to get normal people to
| understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel
| gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should
| humanity survive" question.
|
| One "good" thing that came out of that thing.
|
| I think main problem is that many people just think of them
| as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get
| to that level of power by staying normal.
|
| Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going
| "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to
| good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long
| history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs
| soopypoos wrote:
| _it 's all a fuckin' joke_
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains
| (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its
| merging with the state behind much of this). We can't
| centralize our communications without major concessions in
| significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big
| news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats,
| and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?"
| Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go
| places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or
| your loved ones.
|
| Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no
| need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank."
| Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces.
| Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep
| falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
|
| The difference between then and now is that for a long time
| there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone
| to call someone. The phone company and whatever government
| tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other
| ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit
| centralized services.
|
| I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things
| similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter
| exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that
| will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its
| own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with
| federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to
| the server operator, but at least that could be someone you
| trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options
| are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
|
| I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted
| teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think
| we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains.
| Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I
| also really want to start moving away from things like reddit,
| bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes
| there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
|
| I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the
| wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the
| 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its
| worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies,
| and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think
| people need to get over the convivence of the current system
| and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to
| migrate to services built with that in mind.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Everyone needs to cut ties with those companies. Not just with
| Persona but any service linked to Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale,
| Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. The entire MAGA
| cultist ecosystem.
|
| Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and
| won't care. It'll be up to other companies and consumers to
| punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you
| quickly check if you should or shouldn't use some service based
| on the investors.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm getting there. Just a few more. I've found myself kicking
| my not so distant past self for not listening better to my
| even further distant past self...
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Which is pretty much everything at this point... God help us.
| lokar wrote:
| I always explain it to recruiters contacting me from one of his
| companies.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I used to get the occasional recruiter cold-calling me and
| hyping up the chance to work for some Musk- or Bezos-
| associated entity, and for me it's not as appealing as they
| think it is. But I politely decline without pointing out
| their fallacy.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I think it's a bad trend. It's kind of a meta version of an ad
| hominem attack. The headline contained no information about why
| Discord is making the decision, only that there's a bad name
| associated with the company. The name of the company isn't even
| mentioned in the headline. This is prioritizing hate over
| information.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Having the name associated with the company says a lot,
| actually. The man is the Forrest Gump of backing creepy
| companies.
| ducktastic wrote:
| The (PTB) Peter Theil Be
| rapnie wrote:
| Peter Thiel Integration (PTI) halted
| rvz wrote:
| Do not believe them.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Everyday someone cuts ties with Palentier's Peter Thiel (or the
| rest of the digital mafia), it's a good day for society as a
| whole.
| Devasta wrote:
| They really should be a proscribed organization.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This name is turning radioactive. Not a bad thing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Discord? Or Thiel? Or both?
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Thiel.
| dgares wrote:
| At this rate, both.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Who IS still using this verification software?
| jkestner wrote:
| Good question. Quite a few, publicly.
| https://withpersona.com/customers
| outside1234 wrote:
| Ooof. So no more OpenAI, Twilio, Lime, Square, ...
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of
| goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while
| they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now
| because of this whole thing.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Discord is a cancer on the open internet anyway.
|
| Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and
| wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a
| disaster for information discovery.
|
| Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to
| open forums and wikis!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes. And likewise for all those other walled gardens. I
| shouldn't need a Facebook or a Twitter account to read what
| some politician wrote.
| ronsor wrote:
| The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people
| have to create an account for each forum. Most people are
| using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of
| rich text chat wins out.
| bsza wrote:
| I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age,
| when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms
| like Stack Overflow.
|
| We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and
| open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently
| secure alternative might be.)
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| AI is what??
| bsza wrote:
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/godot-game-engine-is-drowning-
| in-...
|
| https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/overrun-with-ai-
| slo...
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Human-In-The-Loop
|
| https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-
| piece-on...
|
| Just off the top of my head, I bet a lot of other repos
| are going through the same.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| why use that specific word though?
| kbelder wrote:
| Don't be surprised or shocked to encounter metaphors and
| hyperbole as you read. It's part of standard English
| communication.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Do you really think Discord is not scrapping all the
| traffic that goes through its service for either their own
| purposes or to sell data for profit.
|
| And if its not doing it now, it will certainly happen
| once/if it goes bust.
| bsza wrote:
| Have you read my comment?
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| You have a point, I've seen a fair share of Github projects
| where they asked you to join their Discord if you wanted
| documentation/support/tips etc.
| fullshark wrote:
| These communities don't owe the world their information, and
| attention/adverisement economics destroyed the open internet
| on its own.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| So they "owe it" to Discord. Got it.
| fullshark wrote:
| That's not what I said or implied.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first
| place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
|
| I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack
| for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-
| seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to
| seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
|
| Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a
| solution.
|
| Why did the internet en masse fall for it again?
| verdverm wrote:
| Slack sold out, changed the deal, and threw every small group
| under the bus. Most of those people ended up on Discord
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Discord doesn't delete history so you
| can join an older discord and scroll back. 99.99% of slacks
| that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe
| (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days). Plus
| you can connect Discord to your Steam/Playstation/Xbox
| account, which gamers like.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some
| arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I
| think its 90 days)._
|
| This is _exactly_ the reason cited for several non-gaming
| discords I 'm in.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Relatedly, the "gamer-oriented" business model of sell
| cosmetics and subscriptions to every user individually
| rather than the Slack big enterprise-oriented business
| model of a central admin paying an entire per-user cost out
| of pocket was a factor in many of my communities moving
| from Slack or skipping Slack. It's a lot easier for a small
| community admin to start for free and find enough "Boosts"
| from community membership for the nice-to-have server
| features that cost a bit extra than to foot the entire bill
| themselves in the hopes that enough users will eventually
| reimburse them. (It also allows for a hybrid where a
| community admin centrally pays for _some_ amount of boosts,
| but doesn 't have to pay for all of them.)
| takoid wrote:
| To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to
| replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers.
| Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were
| floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of
| which were that great. Discord captured the market because it
| was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to
| make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable
| without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That's really
| it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a
| Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90%
| of their target audience already had the client running in
| the background.
| fernandopj wrote:
| That is also why I think it "won" over Slack. Discord
| solved audio comms for gamers, period. It got so good, that
| SMB and startups started to migrate for stuff like easy
| pair-programming, open meetings etc.
|
| Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2)
| full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
| lunar_rover wrote:
| For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market
| initially it's likely network effect in action.
|
| Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial
| polish.
|
| Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation,
| FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior
| products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed
| independent forums.
|
| If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised
| services competing and advocating freedom until a new
| centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like
| Mastodon and Bluesky.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| > Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the
| first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
|
| It won by simply building a vastly superior product during
| its growth phase.
|
| For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid
| alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a
| frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and
| modern UX.
|
| It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers
| inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a
| better, free version of Slack for community building.
|
| But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the
| classic enshittification phase.
|
| Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you
| something. I still use it, but the product development focus
| seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky
| bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but
| it's exhausting.
|
| Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was
| undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It
| was just relentlessly good for the user.
|
| Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of
| turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be
| seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still
| pretty good... (=
| m4rtink wrote:
| Basically dumping - they made an objectively superior product
| that was completely free to users, funded by investor money
| without any plans for immediate profitability and long term
| sustainability.
|
| That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't
| got like this for ever - and here we are.
| bardak wrote:
| Their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a
| better term, that no one was asking for and at least
| monthly Nitro beg screen is pretty indicative that they are
| having issues making revue and are desperately throwing
| things at the wall to see what sticks.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yeah I was concerned back when it first started rolling out.
| Years later the gaming community embraced like it was the
| second coming of Christ. Nobody looks at the people and
| organization supporting these platforms. If I remember
| correctly, wasnt funded by major conglomerates in the
| entertainment industry?
|
| I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the
| place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the
| Highguard scandal.
| baq wrote:
| > Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust.
|
| ...not here, they never had any. it is good tech, but so is the
| w80 nuclear warhead, the tiger iv (for its time) and the j-35.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I've exported any servers that I run as backups and plan to
| uninstall if I get an age verification prompt personally.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think they have been steadily losing their years of goodwill
| and trust over time. Their client is becoming worse and worse
| every release, introduced ads, etc... Typical enshittification,
| it could be worse, but Discord already went from being cool to
| being tolerable. The age verification thing is just another
| step on the way down.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Isn't it a good thing ? It makes clearly marks companies like
| Persona dangerous and toxic enough to hopefully makes an
| example that prevents others from working with them.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > politically exposed persons
|
| I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern
| trend of calling inmates "justice involved individuals"?
| parrellel wrote:
| Translate: People who are likely to be attacked by
| (Putin|Orban|Erdogan|Trump) or similar.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Apparently that's not what Wikipedia defines it as. More like
| potentially shady high level government official.
| parrellel wrote:
| Interesting, I've mostly heard it referring to individuals
| like Navalny or the mayor of Istanbul. I suppose it makes
| sense for it to refer to any random political critter.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| its not some new/modern trend just because you have not seen
| the term. its been a term for nearly 3 decades.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_exposed_person
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I mean today I am one of the 10,000 people learning this for
| the first time. But it does seem like an awkward term which
| seems to mean "high level government official who is likely
| to be corrupt" or just "politician". Don't really see the
| need for this wordplay to be honest.
| krunger wrote:
| They sacrificed one, but was it to save the rest? Surely Theil
| didn't act alone or in a vacuum
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| discord already had 70k government IDs breached through age
| verification last year. their fix was handing the next batch to a
| vendor with 2500 files sitting on a government endpoint.
| motbus3 wrote:
| They should never even started doing businesses with that labeled
| figure.
|
| Like ring recently, they just try to see it the thing sticks and
| that pisses me off. They should have that as a starting point.
| kittikitti wrote:
| There were a few popular Discord channels where moderators would
| regularly suspend or ban me. They were toxic communities that
| advocated for doxxing for mundane reasons. The idea that Discord
| moderators (even worse than Reddit mods) could have access to
| verified identities from Palantir related databases sounds so
| atrocious. Who exactly in their right minds thought this was a
| good idea in the first place?
| istillcantcode wrote:
| These guys need to spend a few million on helping them be cool
| because its fucking their money up. Zuck was headed in the right
| direction for a minute there. Thiel and Altman are still too
| weird for most people. Karp is probably in the middle to me.
| Tasteless, sauceless, billionaires.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am not convinced.
|
| Teter Piel (don't want to use the other name) kind of purchased a
| LOT of influence power via lobbyists. One lobbyist is Sebastian
| Lurz (also not going to use the real name here; the letter "l" is
| an in-country humourous take on Lussel, Lasser and so forth - ex-
| politicians). The superrich buy influence and worsen the
| situation for the rest of us. This has to stop. The USA is
| currently under direct control of them - this also has to stop. I
| do not buy into Discord's attempt here though - they 100% knew
| what they were doing. The only reason they respond in this way is
| because they alienated and scared their user base with their idea
| to sniff-invade everyone. It was never about protecting kids in
| the first place - it was to spy.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| This refusal to use people's names comes across as childish and
| distracts from your intended point.
| amingilani wrote:
| To me it feels pragmatic.
|
| I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to
| the point where someone can't safely express their frankly-
| not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the
| subject's name.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| So you think that the state has massive surveillance
| systems (definitely) that it is willing to use maliciously
| (maybe), but in the age of LLMs is fooled by swapping some
| letters around? Seems like the threat model is unlikely to
| line up with reality.
| distortionfield wrote:
| It's not a "maybe". This administration was collecting
| lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from
| social media like a week ago. you really think they're
| going to send them gift baskets or something?
| john_strinlai wrote:
| the point rogerrogerr is making is that a government is
| not going to be tripped up by "teter piel", just like you
| werent.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| SOTA LLMs couldn't even correctly answer whether a person
| should drive a car to the car wash or walk there
| themselves just a week ago, so it's plausible the
| government's tech might be tripped up here. Costs nothing
| to try it, at least!
| john_strinlai wrote:
| this isnt particularly against you, knowing your comment
| is mostly in jest, but: not everything needs to be, or
| should be, thought about in an "llm-first" way.
|
| a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated"
| comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst
| to read.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| No worries, I didn't take it that way. I lean anti- llm-
| first myself. I was actually going to make joke about
| levenshtein distance but figured since we're on HN, I'd
| lean into the LLM zeitgeist that everyone can't stop
| talking about here =P
| rurp wrote:
| You think Teter Piel is going to fool Palantir spyware?
| Freedom2 wrote:
| > This administration was collecting lists of people who
| spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week
| ago.
|
| Source for this? This goes against many values of the US,
| so I'm surprised to see this statement thrown out so
| nonchalantly.
| amingilani wrote:
| I didn't say it was state sponsored mass surveillance,
| nor did I say the method of obfuscation was good.
|
| Just that it's a pragmatic approach (no matter how flawed
| in practice) and concerning that it needs to be done.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It hasn't come to that though, you can freely express that
| persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not
| getting a check one day from the person you hate
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the
| themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could
| arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be
| punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to
| be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in
| its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE
| collecting the identities of people who criticize them is
| the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary
| punishment from 1984 possible.
| convolvatron wrote:
| its important to point out that its not about being a
| thorn in the government's side. you just have to not
| submit fully. in fact, even if everyone did submit
| completely, a fair number of people would still need to
| be rounded up and tortured just to keep the fear alive.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| I'm happy to name Peter Thiel in a comment here. What's he
| going to do, come and drip forehead sweat at me?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| And it diminishes search accuracy. You can publish a
| reasonable criticism, but if people don't see it, you're not
| changing minds.
| gib444 wrote:
| It's a useful deterrent against defenders (actual or bots)
| coming and drowning people out
| trinsic2 wrote:
| That is a good idea. Yeah I often wonder if people that
| actually are not apart of this community just troll by
| searches.
| gib444 wrote:
| I'm sure there are whole companies that do that kind of
| "reputation management". Modern tech savvy PR firms etc
|
| I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out
| quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in
| replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or
| H/S/2 was stark
| cratermoon wrote:
| Remember the good ol' days of the last century when we worried
| about Big Government spying on us?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| What is he? Voldemort?
| vultour wrote:
| Considering the things he is directly responsible for, he
| might as well be.
| ethin wrote:
| what is such a shame is, well, two things: first, that these
| companies even do this kind of thing at all (i.e., age
| verification); and second, that it takes the kind of backlash
| this event has generated for them to cut ties with these
| companies. Apparently, it is too much to ask for any corporation
| to even give a damn about who runs or backs another corporation
| that they want to associate themselves with these days.
| CivBase wrote:
| The bigger shame is that it took Peter Theil's name to get
| people's outraged about this. Discord handed over their users'
| identifications to a third party without regard for how it
| would be used or secured. I don't care if it was backed by
| Peter Theil or Mother Theresa - it's a huge problem either way.
|
| And they'll do it again too. They'll find a new partner - one
| with less baggage - to do the exact same thing and few people
| will bat an eye.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Early 2024 if you had speculated about this about Persona's
| broader goals you would have been called nuts. It has become
| increasingly obvious though.
| aylmao wrote:
| For anyone interested, they published the post-mortem of the
| referenced incident:
|
| https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
| literallyroy wrote:
| Thanks. I was curious if someone was going to address the weird
| use of "CATASTROPHIC" to describe source maps being available
| for front-end code. It's already public. Minified is better for
| the regular user, and should be in production, but it's like by
| far the least problematic thing in this article.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Right, and in June they'll try it again. Small setbafk
| nottorp wrote:
| So what? They'll just outsource it to somewhere else.
|
| Only question is who's going to lose the data first, Discord or
| the subcontractors?
| Bender wrote:
| Does cutting ties with Persona actually take them out of the
| picture? Whomever they move to can then relay or sell data to
| Persona. Third party turtles all the way down. _inb4 but they
| pinky promised..._
|
| The appropriate solution would be to send an RTA header [1] from
| the servers and the client _must_ check to see if parental
| controls are enabled on the device or in the application. Not
| perfect, but likely sufficient to protect small children assuming
| the account is a child account and the parent enabled parental
| controls. Teens will always be able to bypass controls whether
| local or third party. Teens can share porn, warez, movies and
| more in rated-G video games with one another _and small
| children_. Or over SFTP /FTP/P2P/S3/HTTPS. Or a million other
| ways. Have fun playing whack-a-mole.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Matrix works. You don't need Discord.
| tempodox wrote:
| What the hell does Discord need identity verification for in the
| first place?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| "For The Children"!
| Duplicake wrote:
| Finally
| squigz wrote:
| Why was the title changed from its original that mentioned it's
| owned by Peter Thiel?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Is there a problem with Peter Thiel or is their problem that
| somebody accidentally leaked the front end source code? The first
| I would understand, though I would find it silly. The second I
| don't understand. Front end code is neither meant to be secret
| nor meant to be trusted. Who the hell cares if your users can see
| it?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-24 23:01 UTC)