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 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.
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.
I understand that (IIUC in Matrix the client decides what push gateway to use, and the Element client just hardcodes matrix.org and lets anyone use it for free), but it doesn't really do much for my practical concerns. I'm looking for something my users can tolerate (which means no monthly fee) and that I can be reasonably confident won't rugpull us or vanish in the next ~10 years.
> 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....
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!
Discord server is a flat. It's full of predetermined brick-walled rooms (channels) that have titles on the doors. You look at the titles, you choose the closest to the topic you want to talk about, you walk in.
Slack server is a meeting place. It has rooms, rooms have titles... but you can't talk in them. If you start a conversation there, you're encouraged to "go outside" (to a thread) with whoever joins you to solve the problem. If you walk into the room, you'll only see pointers to "meeting places outside" (also sometimes you can't even discover that room exists without a pointer?)
And Zulip is a warehouse (or a blimp hangar) - it's one open space with no walls. When you come in you hear everyone echoing off the walls. To not get lost, there are markings on the ground that color-code which parts of the space are for what category. And people are standing in groups, so you can come closer and concentrate on one topic at a time
---
If I want to ask a question,
- on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)
- on Zulip I have to navigate the cacophony of main screen, stand in the open and scream my question, hoping that people approach and form a group around me (I feel both open and alone)
- while on Discord I walk into a room that's "close enough", maybe look at conversation that happened right before to get a feel, and ask away (I feel like I'm in a lived-in space and can navigate the tone)
I agree with most of what you said, apart from Slack in practice.
> on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)
It completely depends on the community / people. I'm in multiple slack servers where the threads are an exception for things that would otherwise really pollute the discussion. But otherwise, everyone just chats mostly in #general (or different rooms if the community is really large)
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.
You don't have to click into topics. Zulip has a "channel view" which lets you see all messages in a channel, chronologically, just like Slack or Discord or IRC. That's actually the default experience when you click on a channel in the sidebar.
It also has an "entire server" view if you want to see everything in one stream.
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.
(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications).
Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0.
Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience.
But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.
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.
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".
> 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. :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah Google Meet doesn't have an API to just create a call; several people have tried to hook together the Calendar APIs to make a reasonable similar integration and failed.
I assume this API omission is intentional on Google's part but don't understand the motivation.
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.
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!
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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.
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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!).
I think the single most convincing feature that I would like in a conversation app is for there to essentially be two companies with a public benefit charter that said that they cannot have common ownership or management, yet provided the same paid service, developed a common product though open source and had an etremely easy migration between them.
Ideally migration should be easy enough that it would be easy enough to automate a mobious strip subscription where it seamlessly alternated between providers.
If that structure existed it would be nearly impossible for a single provider to enshittify. The sad fact is that no matter how many assurances (often sincerely delivered) have been made, we have all seen instances where buyouts, management changes, or just someone in control going nuts, have turned platforms sour.
Open source is great but as this thread shows, just being open source does not mean functional or maintained.
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!
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.
That sounds great! I literally just wrote the initial skeleton last night so there's lots of work to do so any help is greatly appreciated! I'm hoping to have something somewhat usable by the end of the month.
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:
> 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. :)
> 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??
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?
They were needlessly inflammatory, but none of that changes the fact that something requiring you to watch a 2-min video to get started does not pass the [non-inflammatory term for non-technical person but you know what I mean]-test.
It's not required. It's just there if you want it. Zulip is easy enough to jump into, especially if you have friends who actually care to onboard you into a community.
Adminning a Zulip for a small community group, I've actually found I have better tools to help with this. E.g. in Slack, we had constant nags to "please reply in the thread!" In Zulip, I can just move messages where they belong, and either leave the automated notes there to show where the messages went, or DM the person to let them know what I did.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The built-in Jitsi integration lets you create a voice chat call via a single button click. You can also put those call links in a channel description if you like.
We do have plans to make the integration offer some additional ways to jump into a call, and have been talking about adding video chat. But our focus has been on building the best text chat possible, given there are multiple actively developed FOSS video call systems that we can integrate with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Fun small print. As though that's not the exact mechanism of the brutal inflation the US has suffered the past 5-6 years. The US money supply says it all. There are no other serious buyers for $20 trillion in new garbage paper debt every ten years. It's inflation by currency destruction plain and simple and there are no other paths. It's also why gold is $5,000 instead of $500.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
That's capital gains, which we currently recognize on realization events (selling the asset or trading it). With current capital gains, if you sold in 2025 you'd pay the taxes on 40k at ~15% (depending) so 6k. If you repurchased it at $100k and then sold at $60k, you can claim the losses.
People advocating for a wealth tax aren't pushing for a tax on gains and losses but rather the total asset value. I've seen 1% and 2% bandied about.
So in 2024, you'd pay $1.2k in taxes (at 2%). In 2025, you'd pay $2k. And in 2026 you'd pay $1.2k
Though, usually, there's also a minimum wealth paired with the tax. Again, I usually only see it for things like individuals with over $100M in assets.
For options, it'd still be the same thing. If the strike price is $1 and the actual price is $60 and the option is vested then you'd be taxed on the $59 per option you hold.
This only gets difficult if you are talking about options in a privately held company. But, again, that's not really the case for a lot of the most wealthy who the wealth tax is targeting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
France had it for a very long time, it was very costly to recover, incentivized a lot of tax-evading behaviors, and mainly benefited tax specialists. Overall it was another useless, populist measure that did more harm than good.
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.
> 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
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.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers but according to OECD, the per capita spending in the US is 13k. That's public and private spending. I don't think your 12k per capita number is just public spending.
This can be a problem, especially for the elderly. In France the retired (pensions are publicly funded) save 25% of their income on average, and earn more than the workers. France is also the most taxed country in the OECD and most voters are either retired or will retire next decade. It's just another clientelism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
must be pretty upsetting that sitting president Trump has tens of billions in 2 dark money shitcoins and owns a majority stake in crypto company World Liberty Financial. Just 0.001% of the total sum Hunter Biden was allegedly corrupt over (no evidence).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First, republicans blocked everything including formarly own proposals when Obama adopted it ... ever since Obama. It is other way round, the republican party is getting what it worked for, because democrats are weak opposition.
> Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.
It is impossible. Will they give reparations to blue cities? From what money?
Likewise institutions - it is easier to corrupt and destroy them then to build them anew.
Amd crutially, the right wing supreme court needs ro be enlarged or new constitution written for the bad precedents to be changed.
> token deportation effort,
The whole thing is bigger size then most militaries.
> no material change on mass legal immigration,
The whole classes of legal immigrants were suddenly ruled illegal and are violently mistreated.
> nothing happening on the voter ID front.
Republicans are trying to make voting for blie places harder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.
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.
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.
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)
>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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
> 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).
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'.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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?
>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?"
Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
I’m actually excited for it. We have a lot of infrastructure already in place so I’m looking forward to the internet being a deanonymized space where people watch what they say and there’s accountability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Have to get your vehicle registered in your new state as well (if you own one) as well as your driver’s license. God help you if your vehicle is towed and your license/vehicle is not registered in the current state. Absolute mess.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sigh, I guess it's time to move platforms again or get your identity stolen. The more a company makes a fuss about trusting users, the more likely they store all of their shit in plaintext with vibe coded server security.
*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.
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.
Youtube routinely asks for ID on accounts that are already of drinking age, they dgaf they want document scans they can use for profiling and to likely sell to 3rd parties.
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)...
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.
Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.
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.
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”.
Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?
Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.
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?
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.
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.
Are parents also supposed to be blamed if society as a whole would let thrive streets with permanent civil war, drug barrons, organized child prostitution networks and so on?
Of course parents must take care of their children. And of themselves. But they are only fragile humans and can bear only that much of a load in a day. Certainly there are people that drawn in negligent or even mistreating behaviors. That's not a valid reason to blame individual in general and abstract the societal constraints they all have to deal with. That's actually nothing special to parents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
... 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 related to age, used to apply 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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...
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!
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.)
Sorry, the era of free communication is fading. Across middle powers, developed countries, and increasingly North America, governments are tightening the rules around online speech—and often jawboning platforms into going further than the law strictly requires. The list of examples is so long I can’t even begin to type them all.
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).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
If that's the case, you need to grow the representatives you want. Many of the people voted into mayor or governor didn't pop up out of the ether. They were working in local boards or as comptrollers or even business owners.
That's why local elections are so important, despite the dreadfully low turnout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
How well has that worked? Social media and messaging apps have network effects.
> Host services elsewhere, ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.
That doesn't help the French or the Finns. Unless they use a VPN. And access the fragmented, lightly-used alternative services from the IPs of the fewer and fewer countries that don't pass such laws.
Your vision leads to a world where the privacy-conscious 1% congregate in echo chambers on Mastodon instances hosted in international waters. Everyone else uploads their passport to FaceSnapTok.
That's not a real solution. It's a cope. That's my opinion and I have no illusions I've changed your mind about anything. I already alluded to that in my original post. Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved. By maintaining that belief they're ceding ground to bad actors who will "solve" it in a maximally privacy-invading fashion. This will leave the vast majority of internet users worse off.
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.
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.
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".
It's already happening. What's your alternative? Not VPNs because every jurisdiction and website will eventually have equivalent laws or terms of service.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like this a lot. That being said my response to this whole biometric/ID push is going to be to leave every space that asks for it. I don’t think I’m going to miss these all that much.
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.
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)
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.
So now all the open source projects that use this walled off closed platform (even though scores of people complained and warned about it) can go back to hopefully using something open and searchable.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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,”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
I understand that (IIUC in Matrix the client decides what push gateway to use, and the Element client just hardcodes matrix.org and lets anyone use it for free), but it doesn't really do much for my practical concerns. I'm looking for something my users can tolerate (which means no monthly fee) and that I can be reasonably confident won't rugpull us or vanish in the next ~10 years.
The solution for this is to install the self-hosted Zulip as a PWA, but unfortunately they don't support web push.
> 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....
i would read that write-up!
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!
> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"
my experience is exact opposite
How so? I haven’t used Zulip but am curious to hear why
Imagine communication server as... a house
Discord server is a flat. It's full of predetermined brick-walled rooms (channels) that have titles on the doors. You look at the titles, you choose the closest to the topic you want to talk about, you walk in.
Slack server is a meeting place. It has rooms, rooms have titles... but you can't talk in them. If you start a conversation there, you're encouraged to "go outside" (to a thread) with whoever joins you to solve the problem. If you walk into the room, you'll only see pointers to "meeting places outside" (also sometimes you can't even discover that room exists without a pointer?)
And Zulip is a warehouse (or a blimp hangar) - it's one open space with no walls. When you come in you hear everyone echoing off the walls. To not get lost, there are markings on the ground that color-code which parts of the space are for what category. And people are standing in groups, so you can come closer and concentrate on one topic at a time
---
If I want to ask a question,
- on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)
- on Zulip I have to navigate the cacophony of main screen, stand in the open and scream my question, hoping that people approach and form a group around me (I feel both open and alone)
- while on Discord I walk into a room that's "close enough", maybe look at conversation that happened right before to get a feel, and ask away (I feel like I'm in a lived-in space and can navigate the tone)
I agree with most of what you said, apart from Slack in practice.
> on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)
It completely depends on the community / people. I'm in multiple slack servers where the threads are an exception for things that would otherwise really pollute the discussion. But otherwise, everyone just chats mostly in #general (or different rooms if the community is really large)
This experience sounds very formed by the particular communities you've interacted with on each platform?
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.
You don't have to click into topics. Zulip has a "channel view" which lets you see all messages in a channel, chronologically, just like Slack or Discord or IRC. That's actually the default experience when you click on a channel in the sidebar.
It also has an "entire server" view if you want to see everything in one stream.
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.
(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications).
Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0.
Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience.
But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.
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.
Thanks so much for sharing the story!
> hangringing
I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree
I believe it was actually meant to be haranguing
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangui...
> 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".
> Given current events in the USA,
This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.
PTT = push to talk (at least that seems the most probable match on Wikipedia)
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.
Yeah Google Meet doesn't have an API to just create a call; several people have tried to hook together the Calendar APIs to make a reasonable similar integration and failed.
I assume this API omission is intentional on Google's part but don't understand the motivation.
How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?
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!).
I think the single most convincing feature that I would like in a conversation app is for there to essentially be two companies with a public benefit charter that said that they cannot have common ownership or management, yet provided the same paid service, developed a common product though open source and had an etremely easy migration between them.
Ideally migration should be easy enough that it would be easy enough to automate a mobious strip subscription where it seamlessly alternated between providers.
If that structure existed it would be nearly impossible for a single provider to enshittify. The sad fact is that no matter how many assurances (often sincerely delivered) have been made, we have all seen instances where buyouts, management changes, or just someone in control going nuts, have turned platforms sour.
Open source is great but as this thread shows, just being open source does not mean functional or maintained.
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...
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.
That sounds great! I literally just wrote the initial skeleton last night so there's lots of work to do so any help is greatly appreciated! I'm hoping to have something somewhat usable by the end of the month.
What is the video calling and screen share experience like?
Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.
I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it means splitting things across multiple apps.
No different to ising Slack and Zoom which is a very common combination.
Why are you still on X?
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?
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. :)
That's an automatic fail.
Tbf, Discord takes way more than 2 minutes to understand.
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?
They were needlessly inflammatory, but none of that changes the fact that something requiring you to watch a 2-min video to get started does not pass the [non-inflammatory term for non-technical person but you know what I mean]-test.
It's not required. It's just there if you want it. Zulip is easy enough to jump into, especially if you have friends who actually care to onboard you into a community.
Adminning a Zulip for a small community group, I've actually found I have better tools to help with this. E.g. in Slack, we had constant nags to "please reply in the thread!" In Zulip, I can just move messages where they belong, and either leave the automated notes there to show where the messages went, or DM the person to let them know what I did.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Thank you! Zulip is a great project.
What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip?
(Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)
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.
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.
Can you give more specific feedback -- what specifically are you looking at, and what specifically do you think contributes to it being noisy?
> 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
Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.
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.
Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?
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.
Channels + topics >>> just channels
1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected
Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3
Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.
The built-in Jitsi integration lets you create a voice chat call via a single button click. You can also put those call links in a channel description if you like.
We do have plans to make the integration offer some additional ways to jump into a call, and have been talking about adding video chat. But our focus has been on building the best text chat possible, given there are multiple actively developed FOSS video call systems that we can integrate with.
Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi
Sold
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
Fun small print. As though that's not the exact mechanism of the brutal inflation the US has suffered the past 5-6 years. The US money supply says it all. There are no other serious buyers for $20 trillion in new garbage paper debt every ten years. It's inflation by currency destruction plain and simple and there are no other paths. It's also why gold is $5,000 instead of $500.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
That's capital gains, which we currently recognize on realization events (selling the asset or trading it). With current capital gains, if you sold in 2025 you'd pay the taxes on 40k at ~15% (depending) so 6k. If you repurchased it at $100k and then sold at $60k, you can claim the losses.
People advocating for a wealth tax aren't pushing for a tax on gains and losses but rather the total asset value. I've seen 1% and 2% bandied about.
So in 2024, you'd pay $1.2k in taxes (at 2%). In 2025, you'd pay $2k. And in 2026 you'd pay $1.2k
Though, usually, there's also a minimum wealth paired with the tax. Again, I usually only see it for things like individuals with over $100M in assets.
For options, it'd still be the same thing. If the strike price is $1 and the actual price is $60 and the option is vested then you'd be taxed on the $59 per option you hold.
This only gets difficult if you are talking about options in a privately held company. But, again, that's not really the case for a lot of the most wealthy who the wealth tax is targeting.
A wealth tax would be like 5% of the $100k, nothing to do with the gains.
> 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.
Shouldn't sales reduce inflation because they increase supply?
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.
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.
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.
That would instantly wipe out most leverage from the stock market, and from a casual bystander perspective, it would be a great thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.
How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.
So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see that as a win/win.
Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.
Many countries have figured out a wealth tax, so this isn't an impossible problem.
France had it for a very long time, it was very costly to recover, incentivized a lot of tax-evading behaviors, and mainly benefited tax specialists. Overall it was another useless, populist measure that did more harm than good.
you can tax stock without taxing inventory.
Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting
> you can tax stock without taxing inventory.
How? What is the difference between "stock" and "inventory"?
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
Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.
With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/
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.
> 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
Oh we spend that money, just on weapons or handouts to the welfare class known as the ultrawealthy.
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...
But that's mostly people/companies spending on health care, not as much the government (because that'd be socialism, apparently)
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%.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers but according to OECD, the per capita spending in the US is 13k. That's public and private spending. I don't think your 12k per capita number is just public spending.
The welfare classes that the government hands money to are elderly people and children.
This can be a problem, especially for the elderly. In France the retired (pensions are publicly funded) save 25% of their income on average, and earn more than the workers. France is also the most taxed country in the OECD and most voters are either retired or will retire next decade. It's just another clientelism.
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.
> 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
This wouldn't stop the AMA from controlling medicine.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country
must be pretty upsetting that sitting president Trump has tens of billions in 2 dark money shitcoins and owns a majority stake in crypto company World Liberty Financial. Just 0.001% of the total sum Hunter Biden was allegedly corrupt over (no evidence).
who could have seen this coming.. twice.
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.
What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?
Bundling would get around that to some extent
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power
Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.
Let's start with your private property.
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.
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.
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.
> white color workers need representation [...]
Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"
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.
First, republicans blocked everything including formarly own proposals when Obama adopted it ... ever since Obama. It is other way round, the republican party is getting what it worked for, because democrats are weak opposition.
> Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.
It is impossible. Will they give reparations to blue cities? From what money?
Likewise institutions - it is easier to corrupt and destroy them then to build them anew.
Amd crutially, the right wing supreme court needs ro be enlarged or new constitution written for the bad precedents to be changed.
> token deportation effort,
The whole thing is bigger size then most militaries.
> no material change on mass legal immigration,
The whole classes of legal immigrants were suddenly ruled illegal and are violently mistreated.
> nothing happening on the voter ID front.
Republicans are trying to make voting for blie places harder.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
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.
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)
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.
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...
> FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done.
Because congress and senate in America are soooo active ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is straightforward, and very predictable. Bad actors, aren't an anomaly.
> 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.
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.
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.
In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.
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.
It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.
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.
Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United
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.
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.
No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.
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.
We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.
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.
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)
>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.
>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.
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.
> 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_United...
[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.
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.
They are not more effective. They basically always end up as highly currupt ineffective mess.
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.
> 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?"
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".
Term limits for congress.
And age limits for congress.
Sortation.
Sortition?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.
Moo.
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.
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?
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/
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.
If we repeal the income tax, virtue will return to the wealthy.
Is that something you believe?
Improbable. It's hard to un-ring a bell once rung. Was adding critical context to the Carnegie citation.
Are you really asking this? For real?
You're shooting the messenger.
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?
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.
It's all about the kids when you need a certain segment of the population to vote a certain way.
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.
Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.
This is a completely useless statistic, and I'm not even close to being a Trump fan.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They will have that exception on their phones.
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.
He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create child porn with grok on X.
Funny how all of you guys focus on Musk but no mention of Reid Hoffman anywhere who was far more involved with Epstein.
It's far easier to control and prosecute communication when an identity is attached.
> 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".
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.
Peter Mandelson was pushing very hard for digital ID cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
I'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really keep it to adults and be safe.
'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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You're really pulling your punches there.
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".
the "protect da kids" narrative is just a veil to make us give up more privacy and freedom for "security"
it has never been about children.
do as we say, not as we do
I think it's wild you would make that connection for this topic
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.
it's just sarcasm.
It's useful to point out hypocrisy, but are you suggesting we shouldn't try to protect kids because of Jeffrey Epstein?
and they keep protecting the pedos from prosecution. lol.
> 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.
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'.
Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that, though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+
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.
I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.
The owners of Tumblr thought being banned from the app store was certain death, but losing the nsfw content was only possible death.
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.
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.
It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of personally identifying information.
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...
Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at "14-28 year olds".
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?
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.
good call! hadn't read that.
He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted procuring a child for prostitution.
> 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.
He pled to Procuring Person under 18 for Prostitution.
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.
Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when you see a few of them committing crimes!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Can you elaborate on this and tells us which banks?
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.
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.
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.
`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.
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.
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
No, FB has their own shadowban system
Reddit and HN.
Since when does HN have shadowbans?
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
I always assumed that those were posts that got flagged too often.
"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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.)
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?
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.
>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?
> 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.
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?
>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?"
Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
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.
The fediverse already exists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
I’m actually excited for it. We have a lot of infrastructure already in place so I’m looking forward to the internet being a deanonymized space where people watch what they say and there’s accountability.
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.
> it's hard not to think we're living the last decades of American economic hegemony
Bit of a stretch to correlate this with Instagram suspending some guy
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many times it's used to permaban you later.
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.
Do you not buy/sell on marketplace? I guess this might be a wrong website to ask such questions.
I browsed for a while but didn’t see anything worthwhile.
I’ve had friends coordinate for me in the past for a couple things but honestly eBay is still my go to.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.
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.
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.
Since when the city one lives in is mentioned in the birth certificate?
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.
None of those documents reliably state my city of residence. At best they document where I once lived, but not even that is guaranteed.
You are legally required to update those within 10 days of moving.
What kind of tyranny do you live in? None of the documents I have on me say where I live.
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...
Which parts of Europe have a town of where the person lives on their driving license? And what do you mean by “us”?
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)
Have to get your vehicle registered in your new state as well (if you own one) as well as your driver’s license. God help you if your vehicle is towed and your license/vehicle is not registered in the current state. Absolute mess.
I ask you about drivers license, you tell me about the national ID.
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.
Australia and UK goes the full distance. Your full address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_licences_in_Austral...
> 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.
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.
I believe the original finding was that they were not deleting IDs that were involved in disputes.
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.
Why should we suspect the age verification and age-related appeals would involve different teams or processes?
Age verification is done by an iframe to k-id.com.
Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.
Appeals are like escalations. They bypass automations and move to manual review.
This is corporate cover speak for “we keep all data”
And do they really actually delete it this time?
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.
> The ID is immediately deleted.
I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.
"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.
They wouldn't _have to_, audit checks if you stick to law, your own policies and such, but I think they will.
So how do they prove they actually checked someone's age?
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.
How does shop clerk proves they checked someone's age before selling them alcohol?
>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.
Ah sorry our contractor did all that highly illegal stuff. Too bad we can't pierce the corporate veil anymore... shucks.
Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.
rogue engineer
How convenient.
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.
Sigh, I guess it's time to move platforms again or get your identity stolen. The more a company makes a fuss about trusting users, the more likely they store all of their shit in plaintext with vibe coded server security.
Compliance
Liars…
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.
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.
they don't do this for age verification, they do this to build dataset to sell.
Yeah because they don’t haha. It boggles the mind because the headline is clickbait.
Youtube routinely asks for ID on accounts that are already of drinking age, they dgaf they want document scans they can use for profiling and to likely sell to 3rd parties.
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)...
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.
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.
"easier" - what really matters is end user freedom, the rest is just decoration
> 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)
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
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.
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).
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.
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
Dude, Slack deletes everything almost immediately unless you have a paid version which isn't cheap.
How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?
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.
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...
Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature
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.
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.
Cancelled
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" ?
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.
This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.
Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.
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.
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”.
> 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.
Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?
Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.
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?
Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.
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.
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.
Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.
Are parents also supposed to be blamed if society as a whole would let thrive streets with permanent civil war, drug barrons, organized child prostitution networks and so on?
Of course parents must take care of their children. And of themselves. But they are only fragile humans and can bear only that much of a load in a day. Certainly there are people that drawn in negligent or even mistreating behaviors. That's not a valid reason to blame individual in general and abstract the societal constraints they all have to deal with. That's actually nothing special to parents.
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.
As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.
Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.
> 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.
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.
What's ruined by this? Honestly asking
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.
You don't have to ID after this, you just won't be able to access NSFW discord servers.
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.
+1.
It's a push out.
That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I uninstalled it from my phone entirely. Definitely helped curb my usage.
For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.
Hah I did the same thing. I only ever interact with it now when it appears in search results.
That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people went to mastadon/bluesky.
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.
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.
Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/
https://stoat.chat/
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 related to age, used to apply 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
discord being a closed, unsearchable platform is one of its main features.
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?
So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?
Maybe time for a Usenet renaissance?
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.
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?
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.
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.
atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue
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
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.
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.
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...
Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313
According to the last comment in the issue it is already available for self hosted clients.
Jitsi does that well
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.
This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
(Not affiliated)
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."
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.
> 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?
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.
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...
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.
Jitsi handles this very well.
I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.
Which of these has been around for over three decades?
That would be my answer.
Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.
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.
Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.
I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS
Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.
Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.
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 .
"[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.
It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.
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.
Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client
Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.
Zulip?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Kids these days...
Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?
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.
> 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...
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!
It will be easy to check with devtools when the update is released
They could use AVF pKVM for this (which'd require a partnership with Google) but that of course requires locked bootloader + remote attestation..
So actually, I hope they're just lying..
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.)
Future? Just look at China. They do all this already.
Sorry, the era of free communication is fading. Across middle powers, developed countries, and increasingly North America, governments are tightening the rules around online speech—and often jawboning platforms into going further than the law strictly requires. The list of examples is so long I can’t even begin to type them all.
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.
And websites that are not SPAs in disguise.
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).
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.
They don't have to comply in advance.
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".
> panic at losing years of history
I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.
Yeah. You male new friends and find new experiences. Or maybe you don't. That's the cost of freedom, I suppose.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
How do I know that this message isn't divisive propaganda posted by a bot?
Because it's not posted by a Russian/Indian account, duh!
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.
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.
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-...
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... )
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
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).
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
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.
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.
Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.
If you're in a democracy, that's the call to pay attention and vote in helpful representatives.
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.
If that's the case, you need to grow the representatives you want. Many of the people voted into mayor or governor didn't pop up out of the ether. They were working in local boards or as comptrollers or even business owners.
That's why local elections are so important, despite the dreadfully low turnout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
that's true, guilds moved to discord because it was easier to use than teamspeak
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.
Or, as has always been my experience, gives it a cursory glance without scanning or recording it.
> 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
> 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.
> Build and promote alternatives that don't.
How well has that worked? Social media and messaging apps have network effects.
> Host services elsewhere, ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.
That doesn't help the French or the Finns. Unless they use a VPN. And access the fragmented, lightly-used alternative services from the IPs of the fewer and fewer countries that don't pass such laws.
Your vision leads to a world where the privacy-conscious 1% congregate in echo chambers on Mastodon instances hosted in international waters. Everyone else uploads their passport to FaceSnapTok.
That's not a real solution. It's a cope. That's my opinion and I have no illusions I've changed your mind about anything. I already alluded to that in my original post. Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved. By maintaining that belief they're ceding ground to bad actors who will "solve" it in a maximally privacy-invading fashion. This will leave the vast majority of internet users worse off.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
It's already happening. What's your alternative? Not VPNs because every jurisdiction and website will eventually have equivalent laws or terms of service.
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.
So VPN in from Panama to access shady sites no one else frequents? That's your solution?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's possible to (cryptpgraphically verifiably) split up the age verification and the knowledge of what the verification is for.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
To be fair, the terms and conditions probably say that they can do whatever they want with that data :-).
Don’t forget all the government creeps snooping on the wires.
Until the current administration, I was much more bothered by private misuse/abuse of date than the government. Now I worry about both.
Good. Being OK with authoritarianism because they are on your side is never good.
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
Why? People who volunteer to work for these government drag nets must be total psychos.
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.
We gave those brogrammers the keys to the machine when we made programming more accessible.
Pretty much every non-E2EE platform is scanning every uploaded image for CSAM at least, that's a baseline ass-covering measure.
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.
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.
They have to at least for CSAM.
Everything that is not end-to-end encrypted understandably has to do it.
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.
F** that, guess I'm leaving that platform too now...
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.
Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't assume others will falter in the same fashion.
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.
>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.
"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."
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.
I have a spouse and kids. I still stick to my guns. Both literally and figuratively. Speak for yourself.
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.
Your solution is subservience.
Read again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't care.
>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.
I don’t sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile number every 90 days.
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.
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.
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.
I truly do hope this sinks Discord. It's a dreadful platform and an information black hole.
Are they going to leak IDs of minors again like they did last time? Who does this protect exactly?
It protects the investors so they can IPO
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.
This age verification thing is being overblown if you understand how they're implementing it. You still shouldn't use Discord, but this isn't why.
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.
I like this a lot. That being said my response to this whole biometric/ID push is going to be to leave every space that asks for it. I don’t think I’m going to miss these all that much.
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.
It looks interesting but no source availability is a red flag for me.
Is it open source?
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
In case anyone else can’t read it: https://archive.is/PvpAx
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...
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.
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.
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.
So now all the open source projects that use this walled off closed platform (even though scores of people complained and warned about it) can go back to hopefully using something open and searchable.
meh, discord hasn't done anything interesting in years. i'm mostly on Sup these days https://sup.net/i/rgc-fnqc43h
Great news, there’s finally going to be sufficient motivation for people to both build out and use open source alternatives.
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 :)
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.
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.
IRC is still a thing
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.
FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/
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...
Why does the idea of collecting millions of images of minors not sit right? Roblox, Character.ai, Discord…
Why would minors need to provide photos? The point of this is to verify adult users.
Good riddance Discord. Any alternative for the masses?
They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.
Why would Slack not be affected by the same stupid laws?
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.
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
Good. Maybe then we'll stop having Open Source projects using it as their only store of knowledge :)
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.
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.
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?
Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!
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?
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.
It is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.
to everyone that tried to persuade me to move my projects from forums to discord :
phpBB never made me scan my face.
I guesa i dont need to use discord anymore
So a good EU OpenSource alternative : https://stoat.chat/ formerly known as Revolt.
Good, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".
Jump here, you can see Lucca (as we say in Italy, more or less..)
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
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?
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.
Discord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying. Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.
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.
it’s not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be where everyone already is, even if there’s less privacy
IRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make discord enjoyable.
If you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this enough.
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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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?
> 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...
OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Is this the final straw that kills their platform?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Privacy preserving between you and the third party, but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using.
> 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.
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?
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.
Goodbye Discord.
“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.
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
Discord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.
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.
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.
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.
Genuine question, what is stopping users from using AI to generate a fake face or ID to bypass this restriction?
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.
> prior fakes
But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!
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.
Good to reduce fraud, isn't this zero trust in practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The entire point is that it's not dumbing down the entire world. It's dumbing it down for kids that fail age verification.
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.
You are not going to be liable if your information is leaked. They will be.
The solution is parents! Stop making your bad parenting my problem!
How has it become your "problem"? Do you believe everyone should be able to get into any location anywhere worldwide without screening?
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.
Be responsible for your spawn and don't be a weenie about asserting boundaries for them.
I foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents from the likes of Ben Dover
Dingle Dongle
Hot Ta Tas
When the openclaw/moltbook fad dies, those Mac mini's could be repurposed for a p2p forum network.
Actively withdrawing from all US proprietary software and subscriptions ...
Good bye. Discord is not trustworthy with this kind of data. As proven recently.
So glad I never put my eggs in the discord basket
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..
Delete!
Curious how this will affect midjourney's earnings
what is the relation?
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.
I'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.
Based. Kids should start gamefaqs again!
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?
I seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.
Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I'll have to revisit it.
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.
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.
And I'll be uninstalling and looking for an alternative
> 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-...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
They'll now have kompromat associated with a name, address, and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your country calls it)
Glad I left months ago
Glad I never signed up to begin with
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.
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.
This is such a huge mistake, Discord. Hopefully enough people put a lot of pressure on them to reverse this.
Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.
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,”
I'm curious to know what this "model" actually means. A real-time AI monitoring for conversations?
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.
So then it's REASONABLY not the corporation's fault if that user sees explicit content.
How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?
They need to have an always-on camera looking at the person using the device. No camera, no discord.
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.
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.
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.
Just remember that the Terms of Service you agreed to are about as firm as explosive diarrhea.
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.
Then why could they not also legally get away with using account age as a proxy?
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.
Has discord even been around for 18 years?
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 ;)
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
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).
ENOPE.
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.
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?
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.
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
Calling it right now. There will be a data breach and we’ll find out they in fact did not delete the ID data.
The CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini. He's from McKinsey. So that tracks.
How else would you fight growing antisemitism on Discord?
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.
No thanks
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.)
What are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?
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...
can't wait to beat it with a face-swap or some random driving license found on the internet
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.
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.
no more discord GenZ
Yeah good fucking luck with that. Time for the "discord alternatives" search on Google.
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.
Source: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
Looks like it might be opt-in by server.
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.
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
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
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?
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?
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...
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.
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?
No thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.
Right, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I forgot.
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?
HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2 things are bad.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>valuable posts on Reddit
[removed]
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There's this thing called the Wayback Machine, but I lol'd at your response. It's not untrue. xD
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
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.
You're wrong. I and the FLCCC disagree with you
This is not OK.
Reminder: “age verification” is just another way of spelling “every single user of the service must provide a government ID to use it”.
right now someone is vibecoding a locally hostable discord clone.
Finally the kids will be safe. We did it everyone! /s
another one bites the dust.
No thank you, get fucked
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."