Element was a bit too raw for me - mobile wasn’t great either. Ymmv
Ideal Solution (that has existed for a very long time): Legislate the requirements for most clients used by young children to look for the RTA server header and trigger parental controls if the parent thinks they should be enabled. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes thus feeding the prison industrial complex. Parents are already legally responsible for their offspring. If parents are having difficulty with raising their children that is a different problem and would require a different solution after significant critical thinking.
Less Than Ideal solution: Create a maintain multiple deny-lists of domains that are using 3rd party age verification or gathering personal data in any way shape or form. Incorporate the deny-lists into uBlock and related add-ons.
Non starters: Anything that suggests the 3rd party verification is anonymous and includes cryptographic terminology. It may start off anonymous and with time the verification will include a unique code that can be reversed through some obfuscated method. Anything involving a 3rd party whether directly or indirectly must be entirely rejected.
Previous Discussion: [2]
How do you think EU and UK came to this idea ? Google was pushing it from some time but they needed a "legal framework".
In the future they will not need your phone anymore for border or house searches.
Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.
The CCP has technology that dwarfs Palantir, but a ton of people in this thread use TikTok, because they don't recognize fascism unless it's perpetrated by somebody that looks like the Nazis they see in movies.
I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. I hated it. Everything was this moralistic condemnation and guilt by association game, played by people who had absolutely no sense of perspective and had zero interactions outside of there group think circles. Constantly condemning people they don't know and have never met and don't understand.
I've been on HN for 13 years now. It looks more and more like that every day.
This comment will be down voted without any substantive critique other than "I guess you're a fascist too."
Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.
Don't such absolute statements (everyone, everything) remind you of religion as well?
> Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.
I imagine it might be as true as:
- most people in this thread also using Discord, despite criticizing it and
- most people using Meta criticize its products.
That is, You can use something and criticize it, and it probably happens both with Discord and e.g. Facebook.
> The CCP[…]
I'm happy to see in the political threads there's very often in the very least a significant presence of critique against China and maybe even overwhelming the defenders of the regime.
> I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. […] moralistic condemnation […] [HN] looks more and more like that every day.
I think it's good religious zealots don't have the monopoly on moralistic condemnation. Just because A is bad, and B has feature x just like A, doesn't mean the feature x is bad.
> Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.
Discord is not going to delete users, and few people care to request their account to be deleted. If Discord asked me to provide ID, I'd probably at least try to resist by not using it and maybe eventually succumb by providing a fake ID - but as far as I know, Discord will just set my account to a teenager mode, so instead of speaking about a drop in user numbers, we should speak about a drop of activity in adult interactions (or interactions/activity in general) on Discord.
Every single thing you ever put into discord via text or voice has already and was already being sold to advertisers. If you were ever logged into Google simultaneously while on Discord it's already linked up to the real information they have about you.
I've just seen numerous things I've talked about or typed about with friends promptly appear on my YouTube feeds.
So like.. ?
2. Already collecting a lot of data is not a reason to collect even more sensitive data. Plenty of people use Discord differently than you do. Anonymously participating in projects that use Discord and never saying anything personal over it, for example. This would possibly remove the ability to do so, for example if Discord's secretive AI decided that an LGBTQ+ project's Discord should be age restricted, and you would be forced to submit enough information to be fully identified and deanonymized, and now some foreign government could build a database that includes your full identity and your affiliation to such project
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/10/german-v...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237420/economic-damage-c...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/one-de...
And then there was the morroco, greek and italian floods.
Its expected to hit mountanous areas the hardest, devaluing cities in valleys like they are in a warzone. And this is the smallest, obvious event series kept on the downlow, because society already falls apart, loosing its structure.
The panopticon is a desperate attempt to controll the only thing controllable in situations to come.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
Gamergate directly brought the shitty 4chan kind of toxicity and harassment to the national stage. No we didn't have this kind of "trolling" by a major political party and the POTUS himself. To pretend otherwise is either being intentionally dense or merely ignorant.
Now, there is no digital dual. https://www.roughtype.com/?p=2090
And worse here, the very worst have figured out how to keep making reality pay attention to the absolute garbage misery show. A newsgroup dust-up might have caught some small coverage, but the way the troll-forces of the world have mobilized and radicalized their shitizens at scale, and the stochastic terror they have focused on creating: it keeps the rest of reality all too glued to the sick farce programming the aggressor forces against the world anti-campaign on.
Anyway, people are free not to use Discord if they don't like their age verification feature. It is one chat service amongst many, not a monopoly.