Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won’t be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it’s a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, said in an interview with The Verge that those servers will be “obfuscated” with a black screen until the user verifies they’re an adult. Users also won’t be able to join any new age-restricted servers without verifying their age.
The German
passportID card (and I’m sure many others) has a NFC chip in it and you can use it with an open source app to securely prove your identity online. In cases like this, the only information pulled from your ID would be “over 18” or “not over 18”.It’s one of the few things my government did right in the digital space. And yet almost nobody in the private sector uses this. I’m tired of being asked to upload a photo of my ID for age verification.
Always hated discord mostly as a technology, now i just hate it as is.
Badalich also says after the October data breach, Discord “immediately stopped doing any sort of age verification flows with that vendor” and is now using a different third-party vendor.
Oh thanks, it’s fixed
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.
Suure
Oh yeah it’s totally deleted from that one server! Of course all information is kept for “quality and training purposes” and to hand over to palantir and whoever is willing to pay.
Now what sort of unethical corporate greed machine would do that?
. . . All of them?
Oh. Oh dear.
“we use industry standard privacy practices”
e.g. your privacy is our payday.
I usually just roll my eyes when I see that corpospeak, but now I’m going to translate it as “payday.” Thanks!
Just like they deleted it from the last provider
And for advertising so that they can bucket you accordingly.
Gotta juice the B2B spigot for the upcoming IPO
Of course, but they also derive demographic information from all the texts, links, communities you interact with.
Now they’ll have verifiable racial characteristics to target you with customized ads that look like you. It’s definitely more effective.
It’s a horrible company that preys on youth.
Well, you need to understand, Palantir needs a library for their facial recognition software. What if those young people refused to take advantage of the smartphone biometrics? Don’t they know it is for their security??? /s
If this was true, then they would have no problem with agreeing to paying us $50 mil each in the event of a data breach, since it could never happen, right?
Ok. Well I will delete my account then.
This kind of enshittification is intolerable. The reason this exists is solely to tie your online behaviour to your real life identity.
“They” want to control people’s conversations in the digital third spaces. And to find ways to punish you for the thoughts they disapprove of. Discord is happy to sell that data to whomever is buying it.
Oh well. More fediverse, please!
Discord leaked my email. How do I know it was Discord? Because that email address was specifically for Discord. Anyways, now that email is full of spam. Anyways anyways, no way I am letting them leak my face
None of the companies pulling this shit are offering a good enough product to be worth it.
Minecraft, though…
And no, VoxelLibre is not a good replacement. They need to fix their UI first so it doesn’t look like a 2004 app
Minecraft Java is (now) a source available (I dont know if thats the right term, but new java edition versions are now completely deobfuscated.) game where anyone can either play offline or spin up their own server to play multiplayer, even with no connection to mojang’s servers. I dont think its a big concern. There’s already a mod for Java to just remove the age verification.
Also, there isnt really an alternative for a game. There are only other similiar in genre games.
I just bought keys for my tiny kids and hosted a world for us. It was no problem except for the Microsoft part I Hated that part but once set up now it’s no problem
I’ve had some difficulty with the parental controls preventing my kid from joining my server on the same network. Microsoft’s parental controls are so overly granular yet incredibly unclear in the specifics, there isn’t feature parity between the mobile app and the web interface forcing one to download their shitty app to toggle certain settings, and it seems like even their documentation authors and support are unclear on how to set it up exactly
Yeah, its on the web, but very insanely badly ux. Xbox something something… but we are playing five people on the same ip with no issue
Oh yeah I’m sure if I struggled through I’d eventually find the value to toggle, it’s just a royal pain and I don’t wanna!
Vintage Story, soon Hytale bit for bit. Also there are just mods for Minecraft to circumvent chat blocks
U can pirate Minecraft in this case just easy I think it justifies
Yeah, but you can’t play on whitelisted servers if you pirate Minecraft
Yeah true but if u wanna play with friends on own server it not problem
People love sharing porn in discord tho. That’s why this is happening.
No. That’s the excuse for why it’s happening.
Ok, let’s say it is. They just want to invade our privacy. Now set that aside.
On a separate topic: What’s an alternative solution for the “there’s porn on the playground” problem that discord has? They are participants in it, they are facilitators. They shouldn’t be immune. Giving platforms a pass on things like this is pernicious. Giving platforms a pass is why Elon Musk thinks he can get away with CSAM generators.
I’m sorry are we putting aside biometric infomation being aggregated across multiple platforms and assigned to browsing habits so that governments know exactly where you’re browsing at any single moment?
Are we just putting that aside???
If discord can’t handle it don’t blame me. I mean what even is this point???
I’m not putting it aside to dismiss the idea that it’s bad. I was doing so just for the sake of conversation. You’re really overreacting to conversation.
This age verification stuff is an invasion of privacy, and we should have a better answer to the claims that it is the only way to put in protection on the platform side. “Parents” is not the answer to the platform’s responsibility here as a facilitator who profits from facilitating.
Age verification systems are invasive and harm privacy AND it’s weird that we think platforms should be all ages with no serious/effective barriers. It’s weird that we just act like there is no solution, and bemoan parents.
I was quite clear about switching the topic focus.
the better solution is to ban porn from the platform. that’s it. there are some people who won’t like it, but they will find another porn platform.
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Any kind of required age verification has significant privacy and security implications. Honestly I think the best approach is the pinky promise we’ve generally had until now, where by default the platform will not display explicit content until the user actively consents and asserts that they are of legal age.
Why exactly do we need to be verifying age? Any kind of legal/government documents and agreements are already covered by purjory laws, physical deliveries and purchases are already handled by photo ID checks, and porn is of course harmful to teens/preteens but they’ve always been finding ways to access porn even before the home computer era (and honestly this would be better handled through education by schools and parents than forceful legislation)
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Is preventing teens’ access to pornography worth sacrificing the ability for every adult to have privacy online?
This is a society level value judgement that has to be made, I’m not necessarily looking for hard answers
I don’t disagree. We need better tools for this.
The problem is making sure these tools are not used as tools of the state for tracking.
Are platforms responsible for the content their users post? No. Rules for unusual situations (CSAM, terrorism, copyright, etc) have been established for probably decades by this point.
An online chat/message board is not comparable to an image generator because the company is not creating potentially harmful content.
I think it has become increasingly clear that letting platforms off the hook has been really bad for society across the world across many dimensions. We need something in the middle of zero responsibility and full responsibility.
Yet Pirate bay is…?
These are actually separate issues. TPB isn’t legally responsible for theft if someone leaks an unreleased song. But, the publishing company can sue them for damages related to lost income based on TPB’s distribution of content.
But, the publishing company can sue them for damages related to lost income based on TPB’s distribution of content.
Wasn’t the argument supposed to be that because they only link to torrents but don’t host the content that the torrents link to themselves they’re not a disributor just a link aggregator?
But we have established, for centuries, that platform owners are not liable for what their users publish…?
Boycott the platform. No one’s gonna rescue the end user anymore. There’s no more oversight. Remove yourself from the ecosystem and encourage healthier alternatives.
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Parents should try parenting for once instead of relying on the government to (use them as a thinly veiled excuse to) implement draconian monitoring on their populace.
Why do that when government and corporations can do it for them? It’s going to be their kids / property anyway.
Right, it’s weird that parents let kids play on platforms that have porn on them. Something needs to be done, maybe we should go after the parents instead.
Or is the answer just saying parents should do something and then do nothing? We need a clever solution that does not involve sharing proof of identity… any ideas? Banning adult content completely would work too.
Never let kids access this site, littered with porn access
Why doesn’t twitter have to do this?
Because Elon Musk loves mixing kids and porn.
Edit: it’s so fucking stupid and contradictory that this comment has upvotes and my other comments in this thread don’t.
They all say the same thing. Mixing kids and porn is weird. Discord mixes kids and porn too. Elon just enjoys it.
And he’s politically connected enough to get away with it. Discord isn’t
He likes his Twitter users how he likes his scotch.
Russian, computerized, and fake?
12 years old and mixed up with coke.
Discord is not needed. Quit. Kill it. Watch them BEG to get us back, then say no.
The day an app/service (be it Discord or anything else) asks me to upload my ID, is the day my account gets deleted.
Time for me to review Revolt Chat again to see what has updated.
Wow, apparently they change their name entirely. I am way behind
It’s Stoat now! https://stoat.chat/
I recently joined! It’s very close to Discord.
No VOIP? That’s the only reason I ever use discord, when my friends force me to so I can talk while we play games. Guess teamspeak is still king
No video call or screen share either from what I can tell, which is uhhh pretty major to day the least. That said, it’s not like I need only use one platform at a time. I’ll probably get on that and start using it and hope that they add those things in the future. But yeah, I’m not sure if I would call it close to Discord right now.
They have voice chat channels in Stoat, or are you wanting p2p calls?
No just voice channels, I’m glad they have them but it was completely missing from their marketing on the website. Just says “text channels done right” and there isn’t a single line about voice support
Edit, found a reddit post from about a month ago which is copied below. So it looks like it barely supports voice so far.
"Apparently The voice chat feature has been brought back in stoat
It only works in the desktop version though. Mobile devices you’re going to have to wait a bit longer though.
Otherwise the quality of it is really really good but you will experience a massive delay in your voice being sent through the voice medium. It’s about 800 millisecond delay even with the fastest speeds. But at least it’s something. "
Ah, I could see that being confusing.
I will say compared to discord the voice channels sound rough and I’m not sure I remember that many options to customize the experience
I’ll take rough around the edges over potential ID theft tbh
If you don’t care about audio on screenshare you could use matrix, that’s what I do.
There’s rocketchat, too, which bills itself more corporately
Anyone else not receiving the verification email? Doesn’t seem to work for me.
I think it took a long time for me the first time. They seem way smaller than Discord, so I imagine they don’t have the fastest infrastructure. Also, I signed up with a non-gmail account and their verification email did make it through eventually.
Wow! I had checked these guys out a long while ago. It seems they’ve gotten a fresh coat of paint. I should revisit it. Maybe convince my friends to switch…
Reposting my reply from another thread, just to keep people informed:
Keep in mind everyone that Stoat still doesn’t currently protect it’s users information and is centralized. It doesn’t use encryption but it is very seamless. You can host your own Stoat instance but it doesn’t communicate with the main one. The devs have said they plan to add more security features in the future yet still don’t make it a priority. The host of Stoat should be able to see everyone’s messages, including in DM’s, due to the lack of E2E encryption. Once they add more security features I imagine they will be much more popular in general.
Do you have any sources to share regarding their security posture? https://openalternative.co/stoat says it’s “privacy oriented”, GDPR compliant, “secure and confidential”, etc.
GitHub reply from a Stoat Dev 2025: https://github.com/orgs/stoatchat/discussions/951
I’ve also personally spoken with Stoat community members who were more educated about the project than me. As well as a friend who is very involved in tech projects
It’s dead. The development has been as fraught as Tox and it has no feature parity. Not sure it’s worth forking.
Right now your best options are jitsi for video or good old mumble for voice and simplex or matrix for text chat.
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Tired of so many discussions being locked away in Discord, so hopefully they ramp this up and require identification to do anything so everyone will move to a more open platform.
Discord and github are the two platforms barely anyone dares to speak about. The Foss community barely mentions the usage of such platforms, despite nearly all of projects use discord as the support line.
It is really such a shame, since those projects make a significant contribution to open source software in one area. but just shits itself in the other.
What discussions happen on discord? I’m late 20s and play video games regularly and I have never used it. Thought it was where people streamed themselves playing video games or selling bathwater or whatever. Back in the day my home boys and I used to chat on teamspeak while gaming, but who has time for that shit anymore? My gaming is almost all single player or with the wifey 3 feet to my left lol.
Yeah, I’m not doing that.
Month after they’ll need a semen sample and hat size.
And people will do it.
Fucking seriously? One of the last places I still have a fucking community and now I’m going to get kicked from it cause corporate assholes can’t learn to respect fucking privacy?
Fuck discord. From now I am in matrix.
Time to use generative AI to make a fake picture… Might as well pollute their database if they make these demands.
No like fake generated ID. This is decent for face scans tho
You can use this site which was made as a protest against the age verification in the UK.
This doesn’t work for age verification and is a relatively small pool of photos
You can use this site which was made as a protest against the age verification in the UK.
I been hearing the Dr.Breen model in Gmod is the gold standard because you can pose the face.
Could be decent money for a small time 3d modeling guy to make a huge assortment of fake faces with animations
Most of the age verification things I’ve seen are wise to that and require a video camera, not a still one.
Put a tablet in front of the camera playing an AI video?
Or use a virtual camera with a preset video
