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).
Because I have some experience with FOSS, I know you don't get the recognition that you deserve. So on behalf of everyone who's too distracted to say thank you.
Thank you!
Admittedly, it did take a day (less than), but once I got used to the interface Zulip provides. It's better than what I would have asked for! It's phenomenal software! The whole experience is better than anything else that exists. And everyone charging for the same features should feel embarrassed given how much better Zulip is!
Genuinely, it's impressive what y'all have created. So thank you!
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.
But how ntfy does it then? It is one app that allows you to subscribe to multiple different notification endpoints. I have uptime notifications set up this way.
Wouldn't it be possible for Zulip to go this route as well?
The same way that Element does - they host a service for you that relays push notifications their Firebase Cloud Messaging endpoint for Android or iOS Instant Notifications for Apple. I believe ntfy's hosted option is the way they offset the costs of hosting this, even if self-hosted options can take advantage of those servers free of charge.
I think it's reasonable for Zulip to ask for compensation for access to these gateways, since Apple and Google do not make them available to end users free of charge, and the burden of responsibility to ensure that these systems aren't abused is on them. Also, the fact that they offer mobile push notifications for any self hosted server of up to 10 users is pretty generous, and there seems to be a Community plan option for larger servers that includes "groups of friends" as a qualifier. It really seems they're offering quite a bit.
This isn't true, self-hosted Android push notifications in ntfy are provided using a "foreground service" by default (i.e: the app keeps a websocket open and listens), unless you set up firebase for yourself and build a custom version of the app with the cert baked in.
The default behaviour for self-hosted on Android is to have a foreground service which holds a websocket open, so it does get pushed from the server and doesn't rely on your phone being awake.
On Android the OS implementation of "push" notifications is pull/poll based as well. At some interval, the OS polls Google's servers to see if there are any messages available. Firebase essential acts as a message broker, so that it only has to poll a single server, instead of a separate server for every service that wants to send notifications, and there is only a single service polling.
But I really wish Android supported specifying additional servers to poll (and/or replace the default server), so you could use a self-hosted service in addition to or instead of Google's service.
The difference between ntfy and another type of push is that you don't need a server owned by the group that makes the app forwarding messages through apple or Google. You can have your chat server send messages to your ntfy server, which then arrive on your phone.
Yeah. This is exactly my worry: as soon as solutions to technical problems like this start going in the direction of "we'll offer a monolithic solution and charge users for access to it" instead of "we'll make it as generic as possible even if the alternatives for now are flawed", it makes me wonder about the long term trajectory of the project.
I don't mean to cast aspersions on the developers—I respect everybody's right to try to get paid for good work, and this looks like good work. I am just not convinced it's the right option for my specific needs.
Can someone explain to me why we should do engineering work to build features where the stated objective is to help corporations use our product without paying for it?
Remember, self-hosted mobile push notifications already have a free community plan!
> Can someone explain to me why we should do engineering work to build features where the stated objective is to help corporations use our product without paying for it?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I am looking for a replacement for Discord for my small community of friends, and before today I had never heard of Zulip and knew nothing about its pricing or policies or history.
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.
Nothing, but there already exist many other Matrix clients (shitty as they may be at present), as well as (IIUC) an Element PWA that uses web push (which is IIUC supported by Synapse) for notifications. Synapse also (IIUC) can be configured to use an arbitrary push gateway.
This is what I mean by "generic" in the other comment you replied to. I appreciate the value of tightly integrated server and client applications, and fully believe that Zulip's implementation of notifications may be both a) better for usability and b) a lower maintenance burden for the development team than supporting web push in a PWA, but---again---I am looking at this from a certain perspective where the way Matrix is architected and the breadth of the ecosystem imply less long term risk for my use case.
> 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....
> Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account
How does Firebase Cloud Messaging work with Apple without an Apple account, or is that implied in the client generated push token residing in Firebase?
I don't think we've ever charged a friend group or other non-incorporated group of people a dime for self-hosted notifications.
For the community tier, you don't have to do anything up to 10 users.
If your server has more than 10 users, you fill out a brief form (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/main/templates/corporate...). We work hard to consistently process these requests within a couple business days, and the vast majority of communities are approved for full sponsorship without further interaction.
(Large communities managed by a business are quoted nonzero but extremely discounted pricing for self-hosted notifications).
Regarding risk: I certainly won't blame you for feeling risk-averse given the history of the tech industry. I can tell you about some unusual choices we've intentionally made to minimize risk for our users:
- We eschewed VC funding. A big part of my motivation was that I felt that VC funding usually requires eventual enshittification. https://zulip.com/values/ talks more about this.
- Zulip has been 100% FOSS software for more than a decade.
- At the very beginning, we built a complete data import/export system that allows migrating between our Cloud hosting and self-hosting; we put a lot of care into maintaining it well.
I can't promise that we'll never have something to sell for self-hosting communities. For example, I could imagine offering a paid add-on for encrypted backups.
That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.
Thanks for the response. I'll discuss it w/ my users.
> That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.
I think you touched on the sort of thing I'm concerned about with your mention of enshittification, though I think you're probably right that VC funding is involved in most cases. It is good to know that you've been at it for a decade and have (apparently) built a sustainable business selling a product people like.
My concerns (which I hope are understandable) aside, I certainly support your right to charge money for what you've made, as I said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953048).
I'm sorry, would you rather I had framed this post as an aggressive critique of the Zulip developers without addressing my own context? I think anyone who has seriously tried to use Matrix as a chat app rather than a chat app but also an expression of one's principled preferences for federation, decentralization, and e2ee everywhere will know exactly what I'm talking about.
I don't mean to shit on Matrix either. It's a hard set of problems they set out to solve, and Matrix is usable and legitimately self-hostable.
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!
Huh, I have the opposite experience, I love Zulip's UX. The fact that everything is a thread in a channel means I can quickly skip the threads I don't want, and I don't have to mark things as read in an all-or-nothing fashion. Slack doesn't let you do this, if you read a channel, it's now read, and you can't say "actually, keep this thread unread for later".
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.
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)
---
If I want to participate in a conversation
- on Slack I have to keep track of new threads. I have to explicitly open each one. I have to read through to see the convo state
- on Zulip I have to scan the "all recent messages" main screen, form an opinion on what discussion I'm interested in, explicitly open it, start reading last messages (now of the specific topic) again to form opinion again on what the state of convo currently is
- on Discord I can see the channel name to pre-emptively get general theme I'll be in (and I can mute channels I'm completely not interested in), I open it and start acquainting myself with the current convo state right away, learning specific topic from the context
---
I can definitely see how Discord's hard structure-ization can fail on large scale, when there is constant demand to use the rooms.
And I definitely have experienced channel "memory leak" (when they get allocated at one point and stop getting used as activity lowers, necessitating archival or garbage collection)
But I do feel that discord got that perfect middle ground between "everything together" and "everything in separate" extremes that all other options tend to fall into
Your metaphor is slightly insane but I agree with the conclusion 100%. People who try to segregate every single line of text into a completely seperate walled off space is incredibly annoying, if for no other reason than real conversations tend to cover multiple subjects.
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)
Slack depends heavily on the vulture that you build around it. I've been in companies where it was either everything in the specific channel (Discord like)/dm only, and in others, where threads have worked wonders.
What caused this?
Different people at the wheel making decisions on how we will all use it, and encouraging the structure.
What is Zulip's position on speech they/(you?) disagree with -- if someone is paying for non-selfhosted Zulip, are you going to delete/shutdown/dox users/operators that you politically disagree with?
If say the hyprland people were using a Zulip instance and someone astroturfed/brigaded/massreported a campaign to shut them down because they didn't agree to some external code of conduct and external enforcement of such, what would Zulip's response, as a company, be?
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".
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.
Thanks for your work. Moved my company from Slack to self-hosted Zulip after Salesforce unilaterally decided to transfer our account to Alibaba Cloud and the transition has been very smooth. We especially appreciate proper markdown support !
Based on some (admittedly very surface level) research, one spot where Zulip will still struggle to replace Discord is Voice/Video chats and Screensharing - the little I could find about voice chatting in zulip is that it has to be configured to use an external service (jitsi, zoom, etc)
Do you know if migrating from Mattermost to Zulip is remotely possible?
I had been using Mattermost because it's also (mostly) FOSS. However, they've recently been changing their released OSS edition to restrict capabilities... Unfortunately the org I maintain it for is having some issues with it now and I have metaphorical egg on my face.
> 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. :)
Check out https://zulip.com/for/communities/ and some of the linked case studies; they explain it better than I'll be able to in a quick comment.
But the main reason is that the topics-based organization and ability for moderators to move/split conversations means one can read and participate in a community much more fully given a fixed amount of time.
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.
From what I have read (not having actually used Zulip) it always sounded like the chats were threaded in the same way that mailing lists or newsgroups are threaded.
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.
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.
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.
I'm saying this in a jocular tone, because - otherwise - the reality is too depressing. But I know people like this.
Anyone with a large enough social group will have some people like this. These are people who've engaged in football, boxing or contact sports like rugby. Or, people with severe ADHD. Or have had some kind of traumatic brain injury. These are real users and they're my friends.
I won't switch to using your application if they're going to be left out in the cold.
If a messaging application can't be used by that person, then that's a default fail. I'm not going to expose them to it.
But you will expose them to Discord's nagging popups for random quest thingies, animated emojis, disorganised channels, etc.? It sounds like you've already decided it's a foregone conclusion.
I am not arguing from a particular desire to get your jock friends on Zulip. Like I said in another subthread, I consider Zulip to be mainly for people who want to achieve things together, not just hang out. It's a productivity app. I wouldn't recommend it as a social app. Why I'm replying is because I feel your approach to the discussion is a little... uncharitable?
They're already using discord. It's a single click.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not here to argue particulars. I'm sharing my reality as a user. A user who runs multiple communities. Including one for my friends. And my friend group extends to 2k+ people (my friends, their friends, their friend of friends... It adds up).
It's not fair that the CTE friend uses discord out of the box, but that's the power of network effects. Any competing solution needs to be 10x better to incentivise the switch.
I can setup a new discord server in a click. Versus,
Sponsorship and discounts
Contact sales@zulip.com with any questions.
Community plan eligibility
Open-source projects
Research in an academic setting
Academic conferences and other non-profit events
Many education and non-profit organizations
Communities and personal organizations (clubs, groups of friends, volunteer groups, etc.)
Respectfully, I'm not emailing your sales team to create a movie night server. Or one for class / group notes. Actual use cases. https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted
You don't need to email the sales team unless you have questions about the policy. It should be clear that "groups of friends" are eligible from the text you quoted.
You just need to spend 2 minutes filling out a brief form that's integrated in the server setup process if/when you have more than 10 users on your server. We enjoy hearing the brief notes users provide about how they are using Zulip. Is that too much to ask in exchange for reliably delivering you a service that you use every day?
It takes quite a bit longer to install a self-hosted server or configure an organization for thousands of users than to fill out the form -- I'd expect most people to spend more than 2 minutes creating a VM before they even get to running the installer. I'd expect that nicely configuring a Discord server for 2K people takes hours.
Is there something that we could change in the website that would make it obvious this is not an onerous process? The purpose of the section is to make clear that self-hosting Zulip is free for this sort of non-incorporated community use ... but we do need to have some eligibility process where you describe what you are, or it's free for Amazon too.
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.
But reveals it step-by-step. When you click on a Discord link without an account, it says: Hello! What is your name? You check there are no faefolk around, and then type your name. Now you are in the chat room and you can chat to people.
A lot of discords have hoop jumping for rules or explainers. Then Nitro nags almost immediately and periodically thereafter. Server ops beg for Nitro boosts/packs.
I've gotten through a few of these, but they're not trivial.
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.
man, I want to support something like Zulip, I would even want to work on a product like this but one thing I'd say is you have to go back and study why Slack beat Hipchat and others. It's so simple in hindsight but it was the marketing and the UI/UX of Slack that made it so much easier to use. If you'd like, I have a ton of ideas and experience building UIs and would love to give you some of my input. Too much typing for a comment at the moment.
You should stop by #feedback in chat.zulip.org and share your ideas!
Regarding the history: Slack had very effective marketing, powered by a lot of venture capital. And HipChat was a weak product that had an embarrassing total hack, which did not leave customers with confidence that their data was safe there.
Zulip is not venture-funded, so we're reliant on people sharing it with others to get the word out.
As a side note, I don't think Slack could have succeeded if it launched today. Microsoft Teams has far far more users as Slack, and it's slopware. You can thank the end of anti-trust enforcement for that.
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!
----------------------------------------
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.
> Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years
For people looking for a simple chat that stays simple, is this a bad thing? When do we call something feature complete? If a product is free, they no longer need to manufacture new features to justify continued payments. It does look like there were updates 2 months ago. Based on the few number of open issues, and a PR closed last week, it feels like it’s being maintained, even if it’s not getting major new features.
I’m not a Campfire user, so can’t speak to the UX, but I feel like there is a market for actively maintained projects, that are considered feature completely, which aren’t searching for new features to shoehorn in. In the long-term, this need to constantly add features generally gets interpreted as enshitification by users. Avoiding falling victim to this relentless push for “more” can be seen as a feature in itself.
Why is it a major feature omission? Screen sharing isn't an easily solvable problem, there aren't any good FOSS libraries out there (at least that I'm aware of).
Expecting a way way way smaller team that didn't get $1billion in founding, like Discord did, is an extremely poor mindset to have.
All you're proving is the need to implement a tech tax to force companies to fund FOSS at the behest of the federal government, which frankly I'm all for.
It's a major omission because the voice and video integration is one of Discord's killer features. Sorry that it's hard, but something that doesn't integrate those seamlessly isn't a discord alternative
Okay, I'm sure if they got $1billion in funding they could implement the same feature but expecting a way smaller team with way less resources to have parity with such a company is just unrealistic.
* Centralized identity, and participating in multiple communities at once: People sign up once, then navigate to whatever autonomous communities they choose quickly.
* No hosting requirement (good for ease of use): Want a new autonomous space? Create it! Boom! No installation, no hosting, no monetary cost.
* Video streaming: No other chat client does this easily. Not Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or these chat programs.
If you want to defeat Discord, particularly in the gaming server arena, you need to make interacting with multiple servers better and you need screen/video streaming.
Discord's main competitive advantage was getting a cool $1billion in founding and being able to support a massive team without the need to worry about profit for the entirety of its existence.
Hi Tim. For pricing, it would seem that large, public-facing, Discord-style organizations would have to go with the free plan to avoid the pricing being prohibitive. Think something like the new Limewire community on Discord which has 2 million members. Or am I missing something about what a 'user' is considered in terms of being billable or not?
On a related note, I'm gonna check out Zulip for PortableApps.com. Any interest in having the Windows desktop app be portable? (We'd love to do that if we wind up using it)
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.
Jitsi used to be so frictionless, but now that their public instances are a bit more locked-down (understandably...) I wonder if developing a deeper first-party integration would be sensible.
in slack and discord i don't need another app i just hit the huddle button (in slack) and join a voice chat room in discord.
This is the problem with pitching zulip to this audience. The original thing that got gamers to switch to discord, it was their original and probably still is their primary target market, was a single login to a huge universe of voice chat rooms. Before discord gamers were setting up/renting teamspeak and ventrillo services (that were voice chat only). Hell for the first couple of years of using discord with my gaming group the only thing anyone ever posted in text was what time they were going to be on and what game they wanted to play.
very good take. IMO "current events" goes back to The Patriot Act if not further. Aggressive digital surveillance by 3-letter-agencies has been active for 20-60 years
It's kind of weird that e2ee is kind of afterthought everywhere. If I was making a chat system I'd obviously didn't want to keep anything that the users talk about on my servers unencrypted or decryptable. Why would you? If something is supposed to be public then keep it. If not, don't.
The weird "we pinky promise to try to keep it non-public for some time" is a weird idea.
Most consumers don't know the difference between "encryption" and "end-to-end encryption".
Zulip uses standard TLS encryption, where the messages are encrypted in transit, but the server has access to the messages.
The server having access to the messages is extremely useful for many key features. Access control policies. Search. Markdown rendering that can make guarantees to clients about its behavior. Mobile notifications for mentions. And many more. There's options for all of these problems, but it's /hard/ and you end up having a lot of risk of nasty bugs where "all the message history become unreadable" and a lot of performance issues.
This is why why end-to-end encrypted messenger apps like Signal are extremely minimal with basically no chat features, and can take a while to load long conversations ... there's a lot of expensive cryptography happening in the background. AFAIK it's not realistic to use the Signal protocol with the volume of messages people do in high-traffic Discord or Zulip communities.
Some other E2EE chat systems have more features but fail to actually provide end-to-end security. (For example, the server provides the source code for the web app and can freely modify that code to steal all the messages the user can still read, or the server is still in charge of metadata like channel membership ... so a malicious server could just add a fake user to every channel).
You get almost all of the security benefits of these "E2EE" chat systems by having a trusted person self-host the server, and setting a message retention policy if you want messages in certain channels to be automatically be deleted after a period of time.
Our vision for Zulip is not billions of people on our Cloud service. People should own their own communities, not corporations. And in that world, usually the person who runs the community can be trusted to host it.
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.
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.
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.
Understandable, but sometimes there isn't a better alternative that doesn't do user support via Discord. That's why it's important to have alternatives that work, so unrelated companies don't pick centralized platform chat software that happens to be convenient for their immediate needs.
Yes, American Hitler is in fact Hitler perhaps you're cool with:
1. Extrajudicious execution of US citizens
2. Construction of concentration camps
3. Openly saying that you'll interfere with state elections
4. Openly saying you'll take away guns and dimish gun rights
Let's just be honest with ourselves. No one. And I mean no one, can support Donald Trump and be a principled decent human being, conservative or otherwise.
>>Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be
I've been putting my pants on every morning for the last several years, had breakfast, gone to work, and come home without worrying about any current events in the USA and my life seems no different than 50 years ago except I have modern gadgets.
Social media is not the world. In fact, it's 10% of what the real world is like and how the real world thinks. It's why I ignore social media except for HN and one other but I only scan the headlines and rarely pop into comments like this.
And I'm happy.
EDIT: And the comments below are proof why you, too, should ignore all social media and why you, too, will be happier.
Thousands of people have put their pants on, had breakfast, gone to work, and then been intercepted by militarized federal agents, thrown to the ground, locked up in prison camps, then deported overseas.
Those people were people who previously made the decision to illegally immigrate to the US. Lots of people start their day normally and then get arrested by militarized cops because they are wanted for murder or assault or burglary or cryptocurrency fraud. The fact that the US has a criminal justice system including police that arrest people suspected of crimes, isn't new, isn't obviously worse than competing systems (e.g justice via informal militia/lynch mob), and doesn't have any implications for the use of Discord today that it didn't have a decade ago.
> Those people were people who previously made the decision to illegally immigrate to the US.
There are no limits here and there many publicly available proofs of people getting harassed and detained regardless of legal status and deported contrary to court rulings that apply to their situation. You don't need to repeat the current ICE/DOJ lies - they can speak for themselves.
The legal immigrants have it the worst --- they're the ones who got in legitimately, that already being a struggle as it is, only to be cheated by all the ones who didn't.
Except illegally migrate to the US without applying or engaging in human traffic and smuggling.
You may not like it, but the USA is still a nation of laws. It's also a modern nation. Third world shitholes have lots of problems caused by illegal immigration because they don't do enough to enforce the law and restore order for their citizens.
I'm rather glad that US culture hasn't yet turned into another Afghanistan or Pakistan.
No, including illegal immigration. There are people who have immigrated fully legally within the boundaries of the laws of our nation and still gotten targeted, detained, arrested, and even deported.
There are American citizens getting stopped and harassed for their papers.
It's always hilarious hearing the "America can't become one of those shithole countries!" while advocating for policies and attitudes that are pervasive in said shithole countries.
It's not a crime to be an unauthorized resident of the United States; it's a civil offense. Knowingly hiring an ineligible worker is a crime, however. I'm curious why we aren't going after the employers attracting and hiring undocumented residents.
Besides, people were being deported in significant numbers across multiple presidents in both parties without resorting to the strategy and tactics of the current administration.
They should have thought of that before entering this country illegally. Millions more have an opportunity to avoid this risk right now by leaving voluntarily but they choose not to.
Were these thousands of people all legal US citizens?
>Glad things are comfy for you though.
Things for my family, my relatives and me are great! When I was in my early 20s I often went hungry. Now I'm worth a lot of money. Couldn't be happier as a normal, decent, everyday US citizen.
As someone completely unaffected by both the protests and deportations, I still feel quite sad about the current situation.
I feel like we should still have empathy, not only for the people who are completely clean legally, but also for the illegal immigrants. Sure, they made a choice which put them at odds with the legal system, and yet I still don't want them beaten up, stripped of any of their rights (as non-citizens), with their families destroyed.
I keep thinking, if I was in their situation, I could've made that same choice, it's certainly possible, if I was just born somewhere else.
Now I don't think illegal immigrants are guilt-free I suppose, some of them are horrible people I'm sure, and they still deserve humane treatment, I have a lot of faith that that's still one of the most important pillars of a good society.
Obviously we can argue about numbers, maybe abuse doesn't even happen often at all, maybe every single person abused has committed a crime. It could be, and even then we should try to be humane, if we can...
I am always happy to hear when people are doing well though! Most of us won't be directly affected, luckily, and I really hope it will stay that way as well. The less people in duress, the better.
And what exactly is that way? Semi-official paramilitary groups harassing americans? Desperate attempts to demonize minorities? Threats to prevent future elections? Trade wars that fuck over the american economy and moronic foreign policy that pisses away decades of power accumulation? That's all the fault of asking people to be humane?
The erosion of accountability and personal responsibility. If there weren't any illegal immigrants there wouldn't be any need to go looking so invasively for them. This is a very strong course correction after many years of neglecting things.
Wrong question. The right question is, "were any of them US citizens or legal residents?" And the answer is yes, some of them were. For some of them the use of past tense is particularly appropriate because they are no more.
I never liked this quote, because it makes help a matter of anticipated reciprocal help rather than simply a good thing to do. Besides, memories are short.
Are you saying legal US citizens are having a tough time in Minnesota with ICE? My cousins and their families aren't. They're too busy leading their own normal, daily lives.
Yes; my neighbors had trouble going to the grocery store. From appearances, you might think they're on vacation from Mexico. They have been here for generations, and one of their family is a high enough ranking member of the military that I won't say more to avoid the risk of doxxing them.
Have you considered they could maybe just stop interfering with federal law enforcement and let them do their jobs as they have been doing for decades under all sorts of administrations? You'll be hard pressed to find a tear shed for agitators protecting illegal immigrant criminals with deportation orders.
Neither you nor anyone else believes this is how immigration enforcement has been done "for decades under all sorts of administrations."
You can make it appear as if you have a better grasp on reality by just acknowledging that this is a much different enforcement mechanism than we've seen in the past, but you think that's okay.
Anyway there are now several known cases of people being detained or deported without deportation orders. This is another point that you could at least give the appearance of honesty and grasp on reality by acknowledging.
If your eyes are closed, then things look the same whether you're in the middle of a calm meadow or on a highway about to be run over by a truck.
If you prefer not to look, maybe because you're convinced there's no truck, or you don't think it would help avoid the truck if there is one, fair enough. But the fact that your personal experience is unchanged is meaningless.
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.
> That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made.
All forms of debt are money creation. All loans are money creation. Fractional reserve banking is money creation. It doesn't have to be "oh now we are making dollar bills" to count.
The debt cycle causes short term upward and downward inflation spirals, but overall the inflation is caused by total money supply multiplied by the ratio that the debt is allowed to be compounded to. the ratio is determined by both current regulations regarding loaning practices and the interest rate.
Given that these were constant then then inflation is just a ratio of Productivity(how much things cost) to total money supply (money printing).
So if the government just prints a similar amount of cash relative to the supply as the percentage productivity increase then we get a constant value of for the dollar.
In practice though a small amount of inflation is good in a currency as it encourages spending, if you have deflation this can cause people to speculate on holding cash and not engage in commerce which lowers productivity and thus can cause even more inflation itself.
The real problem is that wages are not growing at the same rate as inflation meaning wealth is being transferred from the working class to the owing class as their businesses get more efficient from the cheapened relative labor costs.
> 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.
You hold Enron stock. You’ve been taxed 5% annually on the holdings for the past 5 years. To pay the tax, you decided to take out a loan instead of selling shares to pay the tax (you want to stay invested).
Someone discovers Enron is a fraud, the stock goes to $0 and you go bankrupt because you can’t repay the loans you took out to pay the tax on a (now worthless) asset.
Were you smart, you'd have used your enron stock as the collateral in which case both you and the bank get screwed if the value goes to 0. You default on the loan, you don't have to go bankrupt in this case. Your credit takes a hit for 7 years.
But yeah, if you take out a loan against your home and the housing market collapses and you lose your job (ala 2008) you can end up destitute. The stock market is always a gamble and this doesn't make that better or worse.
>You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
Right, and at this point in the argument it’s also worth asking ”pay taxes with what?” which also quickly makes the idea of taxing valuations obviously absurd.
It would force any value creator to sell his creation, which basically destroys the mechanism from which all welfare for anyone in our societies currently originates.
Yikes. So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet? Is he forced to sell it to pay the 5% if he doesn’t have the cash on hand to pay the tax?
It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
> So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
Generally speaking, that's the point. The wealth tax is trying to combat wealth inequality and the only way for such a policy to be effective is if those with considerable assets wealth decreases with time.
> How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet?
Usually that's handled by having a minimum asset requirement before the wealth tax kicks in. 100M is what I've seen. It'd be a pretty easy tax to make progressive.
> It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
I've given the proposal I've seen in a different comment. Perhaps you didn't see it? But in any case, taxes are always messy. It's not as if you can't refine them with more and more amendments to address different scenarios as they come up. I don't think the "messiness" should be what keeps us from adopting such a tax system. There will almost certainly be a game of cat and mouse between the regulators and the wealthy regardless the proposal.
Switzerland has a wealth tax while people like you wring their hands and the wealthiest see their wealth increase far beyond anyone elses.
In From 1965 to 1995 the richest man in the world had about $30-40b in today's money. This was more than the 1945-1965 era, but way less than the mess pre-war thanks to aggressive action to limit wealth.
Today the richest man in the world has $300b, Rockefeller levels before the 1929 crash.
> Taxing assets is inflationary because it forces sales.
I can see how taxing assets could result in more selling than would have occurred otherwise.
But all else being equal, an increase in selling tends to put downward pressure on prices. So I don't see why an asset tax would be expected to cause inflation.
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.
It wouldn't do that. But even if it did do that, this would not be a good thing.
The majority of leverage (debt) in the stock market is not people making wild bets, its just basic functions from institutions.
But even if we narrow the definition to the boogeyman image you have in your head about "leverage," if you remove it you've just made the market radically less responsive to information and arbitraging prices nearly impossible, and ultimately the economy less efficient in broad strokes.
You'll say "fine, who cares cause it'll stop [insert historical bubble example], and also I saw a reddit comment that said all economists are dumb!"
But most people have no idea how big a role leverage (aka debt) plays in just the basic functioning of the capital markets.
Putting a brake on the market might also sound good to you in theory. But the stock market is how the most important capital flows through the private economy, slowing this down is defacto slowing down the economy. Most people don't understand what slower economic growth means for your quality of life over the long term. Just 1-2% slower growth than the average, and the US's entire system collapses in 15 years (France is currently dealing with this reality in slow motion, their debt is now rated worse than Greek debt).
An easier example to understand: a pie that isn't growing is a zero sum pie. Ambition in a zero-sum world requires violence.
> 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 is not a loophole. When you die your loans get paid off first. The money to pay off these loans would be taxed.
You're missing the loophole, it's the the "step-up basis" rule, which dramatically affects the amount of tax on that liquidate-to-repay event.
1. Repaying 1 day before the owner dies: Liquidate $X, of stock, which 90% of it are capital-gains, heavily taxed.
2. Repaying 1 day after the owner dies: Liquidate $X of stock, which is now considered ZERO gains, almost no tax.
This massive discontinuity also applies when it comes to the transfer of stock to inheritors, and any taxes they might pay for liquidating it. A day before, they get a stock that "has grown X% in Y years." A day later, they get a stock that "has grown 0% in 0 days."
> It could delay paying taxes until you die, but you can't escape it.
But they did escape the taxes, or at least the "gains" portion of them! For decades, the unrealized gains in growing assets were "eventually" going to happen someday... Until, poof, all gains have been forgotten.
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.
Oh well. Maybe if Alice doesn't want that problem she shouldn't accumulate so much of one asset that she'd crash the price trying to pay the taxes on 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.
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.
>People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government.
Hard disagree.
I fully believe that we are collectively responsible for all of our problems because we are a shitfuck tragically tribal species who, in a world of ever expanding tribe sizes, desperately cling onto tribe sizes that our tiny brains can handle, hence becoming tribal about a myriad of trivial and pointless things like sports, racism, which bathroom someone uses or which policy on immigrants one supports. Dunbar's number.
And we're so tied up in these micro tribal problems that we completely ignore the macro tribal problems that affect every single one of us. We're shit out of luck we literally evolved to act like this and there's nothing we can do to stop the behaviour; it's innate.
Global temperatures are still rising and will continue to do so. We can try to stop it but we won't be able to.
There is, it's eugenics. We can absolutely select against psychopath traits and select for altruistic, greater good, communal self-sacrificial traits. We have the science.
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.
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...
There is a trade-off here for sure... I don't agree so much that the goal is to limit power though, but to ensure any power given to leaders is conditional.
I think ideally you want a CEO type leader of a country who has a lot of executive power, but that leader has a board who provides oversight, then ultimately the public are all shareholders who collectively hold the company and it's leaders to account.
I'd argue generally speaking we want to grant more power to our leaders than we do today, but make them much easier to remove and have a well design constitution so certain things are legally impossible in the same way a CEO can't just decide they now have 100% voting rights and no longer need to listen to share holders.
The solution to a bad CEO isn't to have 10 CEOs. The solution is for the shareholders to boot them for a better CEO.
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.
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.
But the thing is your local gov & economic policies (tax codes, bonds, projects, trade) matter to your actual daily life and retirement far more than left v right. They just play that game to keep you enraged and baited. And people do actually care about gas, groceries, and inflation; they just don't vote in their own objective interest
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.
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.
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.
On the immigration front, please note that Obama deported more or about-as-much migrants per year than Trump in 2025. I don't really get why democrats oppose this, while they cheered the same policy a decade ago.
The problem isn't deporting illegal immigrants, the problem is revoking legal status, abusing detainees, hurting people on the street, and the occasional murder.
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.
I don't know if you read your own source but it's incredibly unconvincing "research" slop. In their "case study" they just point to a particular race and the money the candidates received and infer it's bad.
No analysis if the politician was acting against their constituents interests... Pretty embarrassing paper to put their name on. I can see why there's no coauthors.
Also they conflate political ad spending with issue awareness ad spending, which is a borderline malicious.
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".
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.
If that were true, people would be unhappy with their representatives. For the most part they seem pleased with them. They think everyone else's representatives are corrupt, but in fact they are also doing what their constituents have told them to do.
The corrupt ones are us, the voters. We hate each other and send our Congresspeople to do as much damage as they can to the others.
The only thing that changes behavior is consequences.
If there is no justice system enforcing the law and its requisite consequences, then there is no justice. I don't think those in power understand the anarchy that their intentional dismantling of the justice system has and will cause, and how the blowback from that anarchy will be visited upon them.
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.
Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics.
We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.
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.
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)
The US should have direct referendums at the national level, just like most of us have at the state level
Most - maybe all - hot button issues have much more moderate takes than any party national committee positions, in the bluest of blue states and reddest of red states the actual individuals have much more consensus on every issue
Whatever the founder’s initial reasoning or lack of inspiration for national referendums for federal law passage doesn’t seem to be relevant today
>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".
China is so technocratic and efficient that it has been faking growth and population statistics for the last decade, hides youth unemployment numbers, and raids due diligences companies who may provide external investors more realistic data about the economy or local companies.
Also, China has its own real estate bubble, so it is not immune to those issues. At least in the US people have some recourse at the individual level.
There is no such thing as (truly) representative government. To the limited extent that groups of people can at all be represented (which is a whole other questions) - governments are generally not about doing that. Yes, many world states have electoral systems where people can vote for one of several (lists of) candidates or parties, but the claim that in the normal and uncorrupted scenario, the elected properly represent the populace/citizenry - does not, I believe, stand scrutiny.
Which is to say, don't try to "find a way in which candidates aren't corrupt and bought off"; that is in the core of democracies in money/capital-based economies. At best, the elected will act according to some balance of influences by different social forces, some being more popular and some being powerful and moneyed elites or individuals. If you want that to change, the change needs to be structural and quite deep, undermining state sovereignty and exchange-based economy.
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.
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.
They can do this because we crave the dollars they have. If we suddenly, collectively, decided Elon's dollars and Tesla stock were worthless, he'd have to come out and go to the food bank.
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.
I think he's guilty, and even so I don't believe we actually have anything that proves him a pedophile any more than Bill Clinton, for example. Continuing to call him a pedo just looks like more partisan politics, which uninterested people (who still bother to vote) tune out.
Dems need to figure out how to run more interesting candidates. In 2024 they thought everyone wanted status quo, and it turns out that as housing prices go up and up, along with wages staying flat, people want to blow things up. And Trump seems to be that guy for them.
We absolutely have proof that Trump is, in fact, a pedophile. Still doubting that is weirdly delusional, more probably plainly dishonest.
> Continuing to call him a pedo just looks like more partisan politics, which uninterested people (who still bother to vote) tune out.
Exactly the contrary is true. The Epstein stuff has caused an unprecedented dip in Trump's popularity. The more it's talked about the angrier the people get at him and his friends.
> Dems need to figure out how to run more interesting candidates.
Indeed, here's hoping for a true Democratic Tea Party, let progressives run the show. They've proved more than capable of motivating the masses, in New York and other places...
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.
Which part is not working? Do you live here? I’ve been living in the Mission since 2023 and despite some problems, the city, overall, works… pretty well. Really.
“Super Bowl Visitors Find San Francisco Better Than Its Apocalyptic Image. Problems with homelessness and open-air drug use have been widely broadcast, but many visitors this week said they found the city surprisingly pleasant.”
Incidentally, reading some books on the history of SF illuminates that homelessness/poverty and drug use have plagued the city for almost a century, across all manner of governments. There is no easy solution here.
The problem with your accusation is that I am a long ways from conservative, and what I said is a pop culture reference straight from South Park.
> In 2024, it wasn't about politics
It wasn't? The dems took a candidate so weak in charisma [0] that she lost her first primary to another candidate also historically weak in charisma (Biden) who himself tried multiple times to run for president and only won in 2020 because he barely edged out the most historically unpopular president in memory. The cherry on top was that she didn't have to win a single primary to become the nominee, and her party had just spent months insisting that the guy at the helm, who promised to be a one term president, was losing his already unfortunately weak ability to speak clearly before realizing how badly he was going to lose to Trump and just gifting the nomination to his VP. What a shit show.
As a long time democrat I remain astounded at how horridly incompetent the leadership is and the lengths to which rank-and-file supporters will go to make excuses for them. Followed closely by the insistence of democratic voters to focus on narrow cultural priorities that resonate with a small number of people and don't move the needle at all for like 80% of the population. What on God's green earth happened to being, you know, progressive? What about labor, or healthcare, or affordable groceries, housing, etc?
[0] yes, charisma isn't the ideal requirement for a presidential candidate, but failure to recognize that this is basically how all presidents win election just means you are going to lose more often.
Plus, we still have people insisting that Kamala lost because she was a woman. No, she won because she sucks as a political candidate. Hillary had precisely the same issue. There are strong women who communicate well who would perform much better, but they have thus far decided to avoid the circus.
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.
In my case it is a charitable take of someone who appreciates that painting his political opponents as evil incarnate is not going to bring about a political change. There is nuance in how people form their ideological priorities and how they end up making the final decision on who to vote for. Recognizing that is very important if we want to, you know, win any more elections. Trump would be approximately dead last for my vote if you gave me an arbitrarily long list of terrible candidates.
The dems consistently push everyone even a little bit impure from their coalition, which is why they have had difficulties winning slam-dunk elections. And instead of calling everyone who voted from Trump evil or stupid, they refuse to look in the mirror and see if there is anything they could change about their own pitch that would make it more appealing.
No, only one rule - kill internet pseudo anonymity because it’s dangerous in the same way as large gatherings are. The age circus is just convenient pretext / collateral damage depending on perspective
When the Gen Z protests happened and internet was cut…wasn’t to protect innocent from porn
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.
An idea I like to bounce around is that everyone at the highest offices of power (not going to define that here) should be forced to live in monastic conditions during the term in which they hold power.
You are fed, clothed, and housed by the state. You have no luxurious amenities, no exercise of personal wealth, no contact with anyone other than for official business.
If you honorably discharge your duties to the completion of your term of office, you will be compensated for life to such a degree that you will never have to work again.
There's a lot of nuance that I'm glossing over, but the gist is that holding powerful positions ought to require severe personal sacrifice, but you will be handsomely rewarded after-the-fact if you bear that burden with dignity.
The other more important effect is that it neuters any kind of quid pro quo type of corruption, if paired with a big enough stick. It's hard to bribe someone if they will get to live in luxury for the rest of their life anyway, and where discovery of the deal would land them in prison for life.
Look, I would really like to mention everyone every time, but it is so tiresome to be honest, all of these guys are awful and all of them are connected if not through epstein, then through some other private club.
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.
The media has a big hand in steering the vast majority of people away from critical thinking and proper outrage to useless, powerless disaffection that leads to impulse buying and binge-watching.
> 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.
I appreciate the sentiment, but what makes you think that the internet or technology at all can help with this? Judging by the state of the modern internet and WWW, technology seems to be making things worse, not better. The idealistic view of the 1990s that connecting the world would make us more compassionate, tolerant, and rational, hasn't panned out. I don't see a reason to still cling on to that idea.
If you look at almost all "protect the kids" initiatives, they are targeting mostly to deter free speech or cover other shenanigans. Same people who "want to protect kids" have no problem exploiting kids.
General public should be more intelligent and look a bit deeper than a cool title, but I really can't realistically expect that.
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).
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 extremely cynical take: All of this is by design for well-connected billionaire pedophile rings to kill competition from millionaire pedophile rings.
The less cynical take: Billionaire pedophilia is just a really dramatic consequence of us building a society that cannot make billionaires accountable for their crimes. There's not much connection between that and the government overreach being done in an attempt to put regular pedophiles to justice.
Discord is overcompensating for their extremely lax child safety record. It's not terribly difficult to find servers full of child groomers on Discord that are rarely banned. Same thing with Roblox. The business model of social media presumes that the average user is going to require almost no attention from the moderation team. That's why, for example, removing CDA 230 safe harbor provisions in US law would be so catastrophic to online discourse. The only way any company can justify the risk of publishing Someone Else's Speech is if that risk is literally zero.
The same calculus means that when we start requiring social media companies care about children on their platform, they immediately reach for the solutions that are trivially automated: ID and face scans. These companies are shoestring operations for their size, so everything has to "scale" on day one.
The Bible tells us how to pick godly leaders. It also gives many examples of those doing right and wrong. For both, leaders exist today with similar worldviews. So, it's directly applicable.
Thomas Jefferson took inspiration for our system from Jethro's advice to Moses:
Which character traits in the baove passages do you think lead to good leaders? Which do you reject as wicked? I think, and have seen, that they all lead to good outcomes.
You and I commit sins, too. Should everything we've ever said be disregarded?
If you are sharing opinions, you can't possibly believe that. If you expect people to listen to and weigh your comments, we should consider his as well. Especially since they were part of building a great, adaptable system that we are benefiting from now.
God's Word says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That we have choices but all choose evil. We keep choosing evil at times out entire lives. So, all people are to face justice for their evil.
But, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life. Christ took God's jistice upon Himself, serving our sentence for us, to give us a second chance. If people repent and follow Him (God), then He forgives our sins as a gift. Then, begins a process of transforming us from inside out to glorify His name on Earth. Which includes good works He does through us.
People can still choose to sin. We're evil, after all. Yet, we have an Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous, who intercedes for us. He cleans us from all unrighteousness as we confess with true remorse. If we ask, He turns a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. It's a gift He offers out of grace we don't deserve. But, He does discipline unrepentant sin and it does cost us in the long run.
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.
In reality, losing the nsfw content was certain death, but losing the app would have just been a downsizing. Maybe not even a major one - platforms are sticky as hell. I think most people would happily use the browser.
Now if you go out of your way to make your browser experience dogshit, like Patreon... Then yeah, losing the app store is very bad.
"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.
> That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.
You've been brainwashed. How can you seriously make this statement?
Meta has $200 _billion_ revenue.
Amazon employs _1.56 million_ people worldwide.
Meta could absolutely hire a million support workers and handle the appeals. They don't, but they could. Smaller social networks would be ideal, but not the only option. You can legislate a requirement of human support availability for gatekeeper platforms.
I wholeheartedly agree companies are doing so bad on customer support nowadays, but I'd argue that there will slways be more fake users than any size of human customer support can take, especially in the age of AI.
Some part of me deep inside that remembers Paypal in the early 2000s and their Kafka labryrinth systems thinks about Peter Thiel and how he's responsible for both Facebook and Paypal. Maybe coincidence, maybe not
Companies created these traps not to screw customers but to thwart fraudsters. There are SO many worldwide - see annual fraud loss stats.
Paypal and many other companies that trade in valuables have to put up protections because there are almost no reprecussions for perpetrators in certain foreign countries.
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.
I can't speak to the accuracy, but I just integrated stripe's offering for our product (which involves banking). We were small enough for a while not to need it, but eventually the fraudsters find you.
If you don't take these measures, you will lose money to fraud. You may also lose your business because you aren't meeting your AML/anti-terror obligations. (I also just had to take my annual training course).
There are a bunch of mitigations, of which identity verification is just one, and all of them are lousy for our good customers. I wish the banking systems were better and we didn't need to do any of it.
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.
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
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.
They weren't new. They were oldish and had lots of posts, but no real "engagement" from others. No significant comments, and a noticeable pattern in their photos, etc etc. I could go on, but not that interesting.
It's as if all the other problems Facebook has done in the past never mattered. Nobody stops to think about how Facebook's _repeated and exhaustive history of abuse_ might actually impact them. If only there was some evidence of what might happen...
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.
People or organizations using Instagram as their only form of online presence don't have the ability to self-host. Instagram is easy and reaches almost everyone they want.
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.
That happens regularly with various family members who already have IG/FB accounts. I always have to hop on our local Signal group and warn everyone that there's another fake clone account trying to scam people. Some of us try to report the profile, but the process has become increasingly frustrating, and often doesn't even work (sorry, we couldn't blah-blah-blah so we can't/won't do anything about it). Sometimes we just have to let the scammer be, block them, and warn people outside of Signal that there are scammers running around with our family members' names. It's a total shitshow.
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.
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?
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?"
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
We used to have a balance of power between the huge megaplatforms: they were the gatekeepers, but the worst punishment they could impose was forcing you to make a new account. Because they couldn't reliably tell us apart.
This got nuked by the combination of two things:
1. Really good facial recognition
2. Everybody owning a bootloader-locked device with a front-facing camera (so you can't splice in FaceFusion to defeat #1).
This is what made permabans possible. And it has upset the delicate balance that made things tolerable previously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not updating your DL after changing your address is a crime* in all US states. I'm not as familiar with law elsewhere, but would be surprised if that's not true most other places.
*There are exceptions for active duty military personal and other limited exceptions.
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.
> We do not keep any information around like your name
But they might be sending a copy to the NSA, similarly to how Alphabet, Yahoo, Apple, Meta etc. have been doing (PRISM program, part of the Snowden revelation [1]). The US has the legal mechanisms of requiring this to happen, secretly, such as NSLs [2].
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.
This sort of thing is common enough that simply establishing means, motive and opportunity are convincing to me. If not yet then soon. You can't hope for a smoking gun every time.
I also value end user freedom, but I also accept reality. And I guarantee you you have compromised on your freedom/anonymity for convenience online. We all have. And ultimately discord is so turnkey that most people just don’t care
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
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
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.
Y’all forgot that the only reason we’re on Discord was because MS actively killed Skype. Skype was much better software circa 2012 before MS let vulnerabilities run rampant, degraded the UI, and moved off the remarkably robust P2P calling system.
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)...
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...
Unless they're changing things with some sort of automated classification, then it's users who designate which servers and channels have adult content.
In my experience, you run the risk of getting your server shut down in small servers if someone reports it. Or risk losing your community server status in larger public servers until you come back into compliance.
Also in my experience what teenagers are going to do when they hit an age gate is use a fake picture/video. Sometimes they'll get banned for that and then they'll make a new account and do it again.
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.
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.
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.
There is a simple and better way to do this, which is device-wide age status attestation. That is, the whole device or user account has a 'minor' flag set, and passes it on to software, and so on.
Governments are not pushing for this because this is not about protecting children, it is about removing privacy and increasing control.
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”.
And those burnt out parents are the “good” parents who are even trying. There’s a huge cohort of parents that let iPads parent their kid, unsupervised all day. And that’s not illegal.
Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.
Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.
Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.
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?
For a more fair comparison to liquor stores and adult movie theaters: it would be requiring people to be 18 to sign up for internet service, which is how it already works.
Parents are buying the alcohol from the liquor store (internet service, which kids cannot buy themselves) and giving it to their kids.
If you don't approve of the alcohol you're giving to your kids then stop giving it to them (it is legal in my state for parents to buy alcohol for their kids).
So what if other kids are drinking too and it would be socially a pain for the kid? That's always been true of having a parent with stricter rules.
When I was a kid in the 90s my parents limited how much TV we could watch.
I knew other kids who could only use the family computer for a limited time and while their parents were in the room.
I sympathize with parents who do want to provide internet service to their kids and want better parental control software.
But making the internet worse for everyone is not the way. Discord has already had a partner leak IDs before. [1]
I like the alcohol comparison it's interesting in how accurate it is and yet society does it.
I also think it's obvious your comparisons of parents limiting time of things like this in the 90s is not apples to apples.
Being the person to start a new trend (in your local bubble) is non-trivial and hard to explain to a child growing up around nearly all their peers having access.
Doubly so if it's something that (I think science supports this?) is far more addicting than it was in the past.
I'm not saying folks get a free pass but I'm not sure we had a global drug crisis that 90% of the population was participating in before which from your analogy is what's happening.
Thanks again for the alcohol comparison I'm going to phrase it like that in my head to hopefully get all of my brain on board with the seriousness of the topic for my kids :)
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.
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.
Pass a law that requires devices and software to support a per-device or per user account 'child' or 'minor' flag. The flag must be lockable with a password or another account. Pass a law that mandates that websites and content handle the flag appropriately, whether that means denying service or limiting access.
This would protect children while only minimally infringing on privacy.
The mechanism by which we make everyone 'just' is laws. The laws that are being passed are telling of the actual goals.
I too think this is likely the only workable solution. My bias is the OS/ecosystem layer is the right place to handle access to the digital world.
However as digital access becomes more and more essential to doing anything in life, this makes the layer even more load bearing, so I wish to see a legal framework for privacy/security as well as appeals process for the painful edge cases where people get locked out for whatever reason. That problem is even harder.
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.
That article is making quite a stretch from "the laws have exceptions for intelligence agencies, police, and the military" to "EU politicians will use those exceptions for themselves". It does this with zero evidence.
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.
I remember the internet from '99.
Before facebook, before messangers.
People were communicating via usenet mailing groups - think online forum but via mail - and it was quite common that they were not only signing their mails with full name, but often with a home address so others could send them postcards - think patreon for caveman.
IRC users had frequent local meetups and regulars could easily put a face behind a name.
I understand it was different time at different place, but oh boy, it was so much better.
To protect my privacy, I have a photoshopped drivers license with a photo of my dog that I've successfully used for verification (e.g. AirBnB) in the past.
Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.
Huh. Can you do that? I wonder what is legal status of this. I used to make all sorts of fake IDs (pretty good ones!) when I was a teen (you know, for purposes such as going to clubs, buying alcohol), but of course this is literally a crime, and not even a "minor" one. Apparently, back then it didn't bother me much, but with age I became more cowardly, I must admit. So now I use my passport data more often than not, even though I am not really a fan of the idea of giving a scan of your documents to some random guy on AirBnB (although, with some obvious caption photoshopped on top, to make the scan less re-usable). I mean, it's just a matter of fact that everyone requires them, and it also has that weird status of "semi-secret thing" that you are somehow aren't supposed to give to anyone, and I still have close to zero understanding of how that works.
So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious" that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord (a private commercial corporation)?
>>But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)?
The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain some financial gain by providing false information. There is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it probably violates some rules around unathorized access to computer systems.
Youtube flagged one of my accounts as a teenager because I watched a few pop videos (lol) and I was not able to trick it with fake IDs, though I didn't try all that hard.
I've been grabbing music from youtube for years. I don't mean commercial music. I mean talented enthusiast who does not sell their music anywhere. Rest assured, it will absolutely be gone one day, and they way things are going, it feels like it will be sooner rather than later.
I tried to do this when LinkedIn forced me to upload an ID. It didn't work unfortunately. I see the good in this but I know it will be abused. I want to run away but I don't foresee any way that the powers-that-be will let the common person use the Internet without an approved ID in the future.
Well then what was the point? If you gave them an ID that matches your name and DOB, they still got an identity vector that can conclusively match to your physical, government-acknowledged identity.
Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.
There was a story a bit ago about people using video of someone turning their head from side to side to trick these systems. And of course naturally people will easily get past it.
I've flown across the US to meet what will likely be lifelong friends[0], and just went out to dinner and an escape room with some others, all of which I connected with through Bluesky. The worst of social media is terrible, but I would hate to lose the best of it by banning it outright. The really negative parts come are
- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces
- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)
- Waves of unwanted interactions
Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.
[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.
This right here is why we keep having this problem. The benefits (or in more cases) the addictions are too enticing. So we take the good with the bad, except the problem is that the bad far, far outweighs the good.
The thing is that I literally just don't have the bad, that's why I listed those things. Bluesky is chronological by default, and that is what I use exclusively. There is a "Discover" feed, but I straight up removed it from my account. I have a few other user made feeds that I use very sparingly (basically just chronological keyword search feeds). There are powerful tools for blocking brigading (blocks detach quotes, or quotes can be detached without blocking). I am a mentally mature adult capable of dealing with public interactions.
It's wise to limit use under different conditions from these, but these conditions are seriously positive. I've never had such a positive experience with social media before. The fedi came the closest, but my experience was limited to interacting with technically inclined people who weren't the most socially skilled. Bluesky is approachable enough that anyone who can figure out mainstream social media can figure it out, so there is a much more diverse set of people.
More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.
But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!
It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.
If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.
The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.
I don't disagree in general. I wouldn't call 4chan a social media, for example.
What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.
Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.
I agree it has roughly the same inherent design biases as X with a few nuances, though it now has drastically different creator incentives both explicitly and implicitly.
Block lists, starter packs, and quote detaching did not exist on Twitter ten years ago. Person-scale moderation is simply more effective on Bluesky, and that leads to a better experience.
The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used". Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like "a medium being used for social interaction".
OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network -> media shows a useful distinction between what the focal point of activity is.
Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.
Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.
I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)
In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?
> On a network, people interact with each other.
On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.
I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.
Hilariously, the website hosting the post you are currently commenting on is Social Media by almost any definition. Autocracy and autocratic thinking are never the solution. You don’t know what’s best for everyone.
Not really. By a broad definition, yes. But here there is no algorithmic filtering of what you see based on data about you that is tracked and data about you purchased from data brokers. Nor is there a team of psychologists constantly working on ways to hit your dopamine triggers and keep you engaged.
But that isn't the main issue with Discord, either, despite their attempts to add features like the ICYMI tab. The problem of Discord is more in the social than the media.
Social media has none of that. Sometimes it is conflated with that as Facebook was social media for the first five minutes of its life, until they realized you can't make money with social media and quickly pivoted.
Sure, social media is bad for kids. Why can't their parents regulate them though? Isn't keeping kids away from dangerous things a basic requirement of being a parent?
I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".
HN would be improved if the comment section was removed and it was just high quality submissions. All the AI generated engagement bait articles would stop.
The loss of all anonymity and privacy on the internet is much worse than this generation's version of the "won't someone think of the children" scare. It's wild how many people are eating this up.
What if there is simply nothing that can be done? I don't mean to sound defeatist, but what if there are some things that truly are like pandora's box. We can't put the lid back on. All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly
I'd love to arrest billionaires, but can we at least suggest some specific and resonable goals forst? Baby steps.
Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.
Louis Rossmann had a vid about this and it's much more than jut anonimity, it's about protecting yourself from being exploited by algorithms. Can go as far as influencing your political voting, or who knows what else.
Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all day on end?
The one (teenage verification for specific services such as social media) does not require the other (require uploading ids to every site on the internet). For one, the scope is limited and secondly, there must be different schemes possible.
Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.
Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.
I agree that social media is a plague. Unfortunately, the legal definition of "social media" is likely to be so broad that it will include things like Hacker News or even old-school forums. The real plague is the infinite scroll, engagement-farming social media like Twitter, post-newsfeed Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I'm skeptical that laws addressing social media will target the right problem given how rich/powerful a company like Meta is vs. some guy running an Anime forum.
Nope, I want the social media companies to be shut down, I want smart phones to go away permanently, and I don't want kids to be handed laptops or ipads in school.
I mean, yes. Because we don't give kids all their rights yet. That's fair in many regards (not all. Having schools able to silence dissent legally feels all sorts of wrong). It also add protections, like not letting a 12 yo work in a coal mine or be sent to war.
More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.
I’m giving it exactly 2 weeks after implementation for most people to just suck it up and upload their IDs. I can’t think of a single “this new thing will break the service, people will mass quit!” thing every working out. Sure, some users left. But super majority, who has already built communities and are depended on it just keep churning.
Privacy and all that jazz aren’t that important to an average person. Everyone’s IDs are already circulating in a mix of Tinder, AirBnB, Twitter, <any random other app that just requires it>.
But any prominent app will be pressured to have ID verification in the end, no? Also, Discord's roots are very heavy, people are too invested with historical data and etc. I don't even see an alternative to it right now.
I have discord for gaming communities, but also for political communities. Pod Save America has a discord with thousands of users talking political things. While I don't mask my identity there, I sure don't want Discord preemptively linking my state ID to my person. Screw that.
If you're worried about government retaliation they can already figure out who you are from what discord has, especially with a justice department that doesn't really even care about looking like they're following the law
But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.
These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.
I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.
For sure, I'm just saying if you're in a political discord depending on what exactly is being discussed you should really be aware you already are certainly not anonymous to the gov if they don't want you to be
1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;
2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;
3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;
4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.
> A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method.
This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.
How reasonable is this expectation? All you do by intituting these draconian 'wont someone please think of the children' ID laws is make it marginally more difficult to access mainstream services where there's not much crazy bad stuff anyway. The rest of the internet is the wild west, and good luck controlling that.
The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.
All social media websites should require id tbh. This is the new public town square - everyone should have a voice, but nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.
Except that is clearly not how it works. Spend 5 minutes on facebook, and you will quickly realize that people have absolutely no problem spewing the most disgusting racist, xenophobic shit you have ever seen in your life, while their full names and pictures of them hugging their granchildren are there for everyone to see.
Oh yay, the company that told me to "just use your wife's phone" when I couldn't verify my own phone number, instead of even trying to fix the problem, now wants a copy of my face?
Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.
I'm not necessarily opposed to age restrictions, but letting each website figure out its own age verification system is a terrible idea. Uploading your ID to lots of websites opens you up to identity theft.
Any government that demands age verification from websites, should offer an eID system where each site can redirect you for the age verification. That way random sites don't have to worry about handling sensitive data.
Hard to say, I don't really use discord so I think of it as voice chat as a service, and for pure voice chat it is hard to do better than mumble. However from the way people talk about discord, it is also a text chat screen sharing file server. and it is hard to find one product that does all that well.
For video, both video chat and screen sharing I have had a lot of success with Galene, it
offers text chat and file sharing, but they are sort of anemic and bare bones, which could be good or bad based on the needs of your users. https://galene.org/
What I usually do is start with a fossil server, this is trivial and gives you files, a wiki and a forum (none of them super good but like I said trivial to set up) then if I want voice, mumble is my normal route, but galene is growing on me more and more, the web interface makes buy in from the end users trivial and despite it being nice you almost never need the cool room stuff you can do with mumble.
But I am a sys-admin, I like running servers, hell, I find I enjoy running the servers more than I like playing the games. Plus, statistically, I have zero-friends, it is fine to say a server is great when only one other person has used it. That is to say, my results may not be typical.
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."
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.
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.
I think automatic moderation is one of those golden use cases for LLMs. You can use cheaper inference models, and maybe some clever sampling techniques to limit the token expense.
Thinking out loud, I'd be surprised if this isn't a startup already.
What successful mass market service is self hosted[0]? We're in an endless cycle of cool new service suffers enshittification and abandoned. I'd love to break the cycle, but self hosted hasn't had a lot of success.
[0] Self answer: Maybe crypto and email would be the best examples, and neither of them are fantastic examples.
> 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.
I mean, come on, this is, what, a couple hours of vibe coding, max?
Let's go AI bros on HN. Chop. Chop. ... Wait, why am I hearing crickets?
For those who don't get it, yes, I'm being sarcastic. It isn't that easy to code this, but the problem isn't coding or even deploying.
The problem is your manual service. Logins are a pain in the ass and chew up sooooo much of your customer service time. Then there are the griefers. Then there are the spammers. Then there is law enforcement compliance (in spite of what HN says, you DO have to comply with local laws). etc.
All that costs time which equates to money.
I was once talking to someone who made a point that Discord specifically tries to hide IPs so that people playing a game can't DDoS their opponents. o_O! At that moment, I realized that I simply can't imagine all the malevolent behavior that Discord withstands.
Jitsi supports audio, video, or both, in addition to screen sharing.
One use case Jitsi doesn't support that Discord does is "push to talk"; that's something I haven't seen a good alternative for, other than Mumble, which seems much less usable for other purposes. But for other purposes, Jitsi works very well; I've had thousands of hours of calls on it at this point.
In an ideal world, I'd love to see a web standard for a web app to request access to a single (user-determined) key, to allow web apps to do push-to-talk while staying in their sandbox.
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.
I wish there was more info. Who sent the C&D? Did that entity seem likely to have enough money to actually sue, and did they seem immune to the negative press if they did sue? Is that company in an unrelated-enough industry that they could just call it "Revoltchat" or something and be safe? Did they at least show it to a lawyer? Why didn't they publish the C&D?
I'm not a lawyer, but this kind of thing happens enough that I've asked GPT to explain it to me, and I think most people roll over at the first legal demand, no matter how outrageous.
Calling it "stoat" seems like a form of self-destructive protest.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't have an installer or even a starter compose.yml now. Even the much-ridiculed NextCloud has had a turnkey AIO installer for 5 years now. When no one is coming into the shop, maybe check if anyone unlocked the entrance.
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.
Oh please, fix your self-deployment story first. Search "zulip docker" or "zulip self host". It seems like you guys just deleted your compose file right when folks are looking for alternatives. Even before this refactor I gave it a good try for an hour before just moving on to RocketChat/Mattermost. It seems like you just don't try the product as if you're a customer.
The real sin is that if they went with electron, they probably could have gone with a web app, and while web apps have downsides, they make fellow user buy in trivial, instead of "download this client" it's "go to this web page"
I am especially bitter because electron advertises as being "cross platform" by which they mean that it also runs on linux and as a openbsd driver I get to go "cross platform my ass" and then weep because of how close I am, if it were a web app it would probably be trivial for me to to run. What I really want is a method to unelectronify electron apps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
That's a solid no from me. Looks like I'll be moving my gaming friends back to Steam and the others to a secure messaging platform or one I can host myself. Before Discord I was running a Mumble server that everyone could connect to and everyone liked it a lot.
I understand the frustration towards Discord, especially because this is a global rollout of a policy they're only required to enforce in specific countries, but it's IMO misdirected. They're likely trying to get ahead of the legislation. The way the winds are blowing indicates the Western governments that haven't already passed legislation mandating ID verification soon will.
You can move to $ALT_PLATFORM but unless it's self hosted they'll eventually have to enforce the same policy.
Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first. You only have to watch the TikTok CEO's hearing in Congress to see how American politicians don't understand technology.
This. Still canning my nitro sub for now as I do think they should hold off until necessary, but people ignore that the root of this trend of ID verification is governments who are willfully ignorant to having staff who can accurately assess the technological landscape and enforce smart regulation.
I talk to three people on Discord. If I have to choose between A) giving Discord my ID, B) giving Discord a fraudulent ID, or C) just chatting with them on some other program, I'll just go with C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I'd figure out B. May get started with C ahead of time anyway.
It will impact me since I've decided to go with plan C ahead of time. Hard to keep track of everything every company does, but I'd rather not use a service that is unnecessarily aggregating facial scans + IDs of its users.
What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can't send you images flagged as porn?
I'm generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs, content filtering for direct messages from my contacts, unwanted popups (it's already annoying when my friends send me a link to a site I haven't visited from discord before and it "warns" me and you cannot disable this entirely useless popups), and things generally becoming worse.
A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized.
Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.
This is correct. I'm a UK Discord user, so I've been subject to these requirements for ~6 months now. It's basically nothing - I'm in near 50 "servers", of them all I only really can think of one channel in one of them that is flagged "nsfw" and thus blocked to me as I never ID'd myself.
If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.
Whether I have to provide ID myself or not, I prefer to live in a world where when a company even announces that they plan to do facial scanning, they lose most of their customers. Hard to keep track of everything every company is doing of course, but I will try to migrate off of Discord ASAP.
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.
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)
> 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!
Both social media and chats need a truly open decentralized protocol that is accessible and usable by the general public. It feels like with clawbot becoming popular that people are open to the idea of self hosting something if it has an easy enough interface.
The same thing could be done for social media and messaging. People should hold control over their own content and the application layer should just be content organizers and consumers.
I really don't understand the demise of usenet as a way to have a public message board. It worked perfectly well for decades and then died off all at once when the bigtechs did everything in their power to squelch it and instead replace with their walled gardens.
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.
> 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 do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies?
Build and promote alternatives that don't. Fight the political efforts trying to require it, and identify them as the attempts at control they are.
> 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. Support folks trying to fight such efforts politically, where possible.
> Host services elsewhere, and ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders
The moment you want to collect money from people in a country, their laws extend to you. You do not get to export electronics to France and ignore their RF spectrum allocations, for example.
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.
> Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved.
Correct. But more importantly, privacy activists understand that the "problem" governments are trying to solve with "age" verification is people having privacy.
This isn't something we can solve with purely technological solutions. It requires political action to defeat the attempted control, and pushing back on every instance of people trying to paint that attempted control as mere "age verification" and other "think of the children" takes.
> privacy activists understand that the "problem" governments are trying to solve with "age" verification is people having privacy
That is correct. But they refuse to go a level deeper and understand why governments are succeeding at this. Why people are seemingly ok giving up their privacy.
> This isn't something we can solve with purely technological solutions
The solution I proposed wasn't purely technological. It had a substantial legal component and public education component. It satisfies the "save the children" crowd while giving the spooks nothing.
> It requires political action to defeat the attempted control
I see no sign of this "political action", do you? I only see country after country banning minors from social media. This is like the encryption backdoor debate - they only have to win once, we have to win every time. Only in this case, it's possible to keep most kids off social media without screwing everyone else. This issue can go away.
> mere "age verification" and other "think of the children" takes.
Privacy activists have to accept that "think of the children" is a real issue for voters. Your views are valid, but it's equally valid to believe that children should not have unfettered access to the Internet. That social media is as addictive and harmful as tobacco. You may not like it but lots of people believe these things and they tell their lawmakers and vote.
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.
Much like DRM, there is no good option. Its a fundamentally bad thing. If parents want to abdicate their parental responsibilities, their children should bare the cost of that, not millions of strangers.
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.
the middlemen aren't intercompatible. it's like saying anyone can make paypal.
If you try to start your own paypal, no vendors will sign up because you have no clients. No clients will sign up because you have no vendors.
My university forced everyone to use duo mobile for years, with no other option for OTP. That's what this reminds me of. Sure, there is a sense in which the university can choose to use a different 2fa service, but there is nothing forcing them and the consequences are on the user side.
There are multiple credit card companies. They try to attract customers and merchants with promotions and lower fees. Even Paypal has competition.
Companies have cracked the problem of signing up clients and vendors simultaneously in other sectors of the internet economy. This is an annually recurring revenue stream that virtually every adult will spend money on. I'm not super concerned about competition, as long as anti-trust enforcement remains strong.
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.
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.
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.
many countries already have a working system mostly integrated, so yes, i would say it is possible.
the government should issue physical tokens that are sold wherever you can buy booze or smokes. when you login to a service that needs age verification, you type in the code from your age token.
its pretty cheap, its low-tech, we are already accepting of showing id to a store clerk privacy-wise, we generally trust the enforcement mechanisms around smoking/drinking already, it would be easy to expand existing laws to accommodate selling them/punishing misuse.
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.
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.
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.
For the happy-clicky-emoji types one can put TheLounge [1] or Convos [2] or other web front-ends [3] in front of IRC. They don't scale as well but it would allow for those that don't care for the underlying IRC network. If it does not exist yet there is probably a way to write in a voice chat link handler for Mumble. It's a separate app but very low CPU/memory footprint and maybe that could weed out some low quality members.
> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed.
> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
This would, most likely, go hand in hand with “Discord is no longer allowed on rooted devices” and “Discord desktop is disallowed from client-side effort”, given the necessity of attestation to make it viable on mobile and the near-total absence of third parties taking advantage of the necessary protections on desktop.
I doubt it'd work here though. You know you can just print out a fake ID and show it to the camera. I doubt the app will be able to tell. Attestation doesn't really change this.
If it truly never leaves your device, you'd also be able to use the same fake ID for your entire friend group.
The cynical and best-case take is they don't actually care, and it's just a gesture to show to authorities to prevent further regulation. In which case they wouldn't try especially hard, which is a good thing.
The authorities would need to provide the framework for more intensive regulation, which would end up being expensive and also duplicating the work of the post office’s ID verification service, at which point you’re verging on “federal identity verification service”. Which, yes, really ought to exist — we defer that to banks and cell companies today?! — but I somehow doubt it likely to occur under the current structure.
Yes, this shitty world where we can't control our devices we need to have (as they need to work against us) seems to be inevitable.
But I'm actually happy that these "protections" don't yet exist on desktop (albeit DRM already does).
If something really needs to work against my interest (for greater good), be it a smartcard, not my smartphone and definitely not my PC.
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.
Instead of "free communication" I would say "free large public social media", because without going all DPRK, there's no stopping people from using the internet, a means of free communication.
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.
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.
How many times do we need to praise the simple XMPP server? It does everything you need it to do, has done so since the 90s, and doesn't require any PII, ever. I remember 20 years ago MS trying to cram Lync down our throats. That pile of crap was inferior in every way, yet it still succeeded. Does anyone remember it? No. So don't jump to another platform. Stick with the original solution and hold onto it for the rest of your life. https://xmpp.org/
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 and I are not the same. If a platform asks for more than I'm willing to give it, it's time to leave. I've done this enough times that it's simply routine. If it means I suffer "defacto social isolation", whatever that is, so beit. I'm old and I've cultivated a group of close nit friends that live nearby most of the year, we'll manage just fine without discord.
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.
Acquiescence is your solution whether you care or not. Your feelings are irrelevant to the matter. It's a binary decision in the end, you either play ball or walk out.
>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 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.
If anything I'm more 'radical' pushing 50 than I was at 20. That "everyone gets more conservative as you age" adage is not universal.
For me I was 'radicalized' by raising children to adulthood and seeing the broken world we're leaving to them. Living in the US, my eldest daughter has less rights than her mother did growing up. Capitulating to the demands of fascists is not the way to a better future. Complacency has a high cost, regardless of whether it affects you personally.
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.
My doctor’s office has my email
and knows to use it. Half of the time I’m not even in the country where that phone number works.
I just buy 90 day prepaid SIM cards. At the end of the 90 days I’m usually in another country.
My Google Voice number is sufficient for authing to Signal, but I don’t give it out to vendors/services or use it for phone calls.
I never receive any voice calls to my SIM card itself. Anyone who would want to call me knows to reach me on Signal. Anyone else, I don’t need to speak to them.
Most of the time my voice conversations are in Google Meet calls, anyway. It’s almost always for clients who don’t like to type and would prefer to be synchronous instead of using their device’s built in dictation software.
I have a lot of medical records, in three different countries. All in the same name, which is the name on my passport and birth certificate and TSA precheck.
I’m not exactly sure where you went off the rails here.
Phone numbers and email addresses are used by data brokers and apps to track you across different accounts, services, and devices.
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.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. I moved off of Discord about a year and a half ago, after they started gating long-time free features behind Nitro. Then later, I find out that nothing is encrypted in transit on their application. I haven't had much luck moving friends off of the platform and on to things like Matrix, or Signal yet... but I'm trying all the time.
This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.
When you try to use the law (or the threat of legal action) to force people to "do something" about anonymous, unsupervised kids on the public internet using their free platform, this is the type of solution you're going to get: the cheapest, most scalable one they can get away with.
Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.
Which goes to show that lawmakers probably should be working more hand-in-hand with technical experts before making such laws. A regulation that provides a good technical solution would be more useful, especially if lawmakers could have helped work on ways to prove a person's age cohort estimation without say checking an entire physical ID (and all of the identity theft that can enable), or yes relying on "AI detection" that is quite game-able (literally so as reports are Death Stranding's Photo Mode is a reliable workaround for Discord's primary AI scanning vendor k-ID).
My understanding is non-stage voice channels are E2E encrypted, and Discord retains no recordings, whereas stage channels are not. Is this a liability thing—Discord not wanting to have voice recordings of non-adults?
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.
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.
Bleh. I still get through for now. I'll be sorry when I need to go find an alternative, because I don't know of another that works as reliably as archive[.ph|.is|.today] for me currently
So many comments but i dont see anyone mentioning llm to replicate Discord, or others Twitter, Facebook. If claude can create a C compiler this would be trivial. And demonstrate the actual real world benefits of AI.
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.
Hey our small company is making a privacy focused alternative to discord, it launches on Sunday and if you’re interested you can join the waitlist here
Even if you don't want to use the beta, your support to show it's a valuable use of our time would be great
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 :)
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)
Sad to see we're going with a "child by default" internet. It'd be so easy for device and OS makers to align on an API that could tell the browser/app whether the user is under 18 or not.
The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.
Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.
Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.
I'm being completely serious, but what is the current fav open source forum software these days? I'd love to host a forum for a small community I'm involved in. Not a stranger to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I'm not particular about technology used.
Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.
I work at Discourse. As a regular user, if you want to prevent these new user badges (and notifications), head to /u/yourusername/preferences/interface and check "Skip new user onboarding tips and badges".
It is in our plans to eventually rework how this new user education and notification system works, and I suppose eventually with https://id.discourse.com/ the intent would be that your preferences follow you to every Discourse site you sign up for, so you could just set it once.
As an admin, badges can be disabled entirely, or individually.
I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.
Seconding campfire. Straightforward, easy to host, easy to backup, no monetization strategy. Most self-hosted alternatives have complicated deployments to enable scaling to >1,000s of users which I will never, ever need.
TeamSpeak and Ventrillo still work great. It was a monumental mistake to switch to these 3rd party services that are bugged by every intelligence apparatus on earth.
I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade) because they added a trialware system that required getting approval/serial code from the company every month to continue operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to force them to TS4/5/etc. Have they stopped this or walked it back?
And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible, but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.
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 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 don't think there is anything anyone can do about this trend, other than come up with viable age-verification schemes that preserve privacy, and don't require things like scanning your face or sending random companies your ID.
There are plenty of approaches to this, and I won't spam this comment with all the thoughts I have on the subject. But my frustration is people want things like "cancel your nitro subscription" well I don't have one. What else? It's just small things that will not impact anything. Every service out there will require this sort of verification soon. Being angry doesn't stop it. Even voting doesn't seem effective to me. But better solutions might.
If they could verify your age as accurately as a store attendant a physical store could, what else could they want? And if that could be done without giving random websites any identifying information about yourself, wouldn't that be better than this mess? Two things can be done, you can resist this nonsense while supporting alternatives to it.
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.
> Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users
Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?
> use facial age estimation
Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?
> submit a form of identification
If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.
On-device doesn't have to mean on "your" device - they might refer to smartphones with remote attestation (like AVF pKVM) which of course are not really controlled by you..
It's a relief to finally read that Discord is indirectly shutting down and getting rid of it's users. It was inevitable but dragged out far too long with all the VC money to burn. Hopefully everyone can figure out how to use XMPP and/or get back on IRC. It is a genuine shame how much culture and information will be lost inside their walled garden though.
XMPP and IRC are great and all but a massive part of what people use Discord for is group voice calls with screen-sharing. I'm not sure what the alternative is for that. TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it's not a 1:1 replacement for a number of reasons.
it's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the chat client interface such that it can track who is in which jitsi room, etc...
IRC is a much more impoverished chat experience than Discord/Slack in a bunch of ways. Suggesting that people "get back on IRC" is not a serious proposal for making it possible for groups of people to chat online without being subject to identity verification or censorship.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 was speaking of the “face scan” option listed as #1 option on Discord’s “How To Complete Age Assurance”. It’s well known minors are using and/or gaming the face scanning on other platforms. Some adults are even having their accounts downgraded to a minor level restricted account based on their face scan. All around it’s a terrible implementation for age verification.
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.
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.
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 am not one for conspiracy theories but I notice a pattern... Did you know Chrome now offers to save your passport and other ID data in their keychain? Why, after so many years, do they now offer to save this information that, if leaked or backdoored, will easily bind login information with their owners?
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?
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..
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.
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.
It's been around for 11. However, you can reasonably assume that kids aren't registering accounts below the age at which kids are generally literate; if we spitball an age of five this means old accounts cannot be younger than 16.
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 ;)
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.
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.
Thank you to Discord for making it easy to cancel my Nitro subscription from the mobile app. I've had Discord Nitro since it started being offered, buh-bye.
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.
They’ve been rolling out a bunch of stuff like this in Australia and the UK. As an Australian I’m fairly certain I was made to do some sort of facial recognition some time ago.
I kind of hate it, but honestly it’s had minimal impact on me and my usage of these services if I’m being real.
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.
I'm based in Australia and had to do this early shortly before the teen social media ban came into place here.
I chose the face scan option as I simply don't trust most providers when it comes to uploading my ID. Countless data breaches have happened over the years where driver's license and passport details have been stolen from databases.
For those unaware, a driver's license is often referred to as the "golden ticket" for identity thieves. A single license usually contains all the information needed to open credit in that person's name.
Yes, they will claim their process is super secure, and they take security seriously. But then again, they all say that.
We're going to need decentralized open source alternatives with E2EE for any major communication services, unfortunately. It's just too temping of a target for Governments. They're never going to give up trying to destroy anonymity online.
They already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly.
Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM
> 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.
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).
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.
It's bad enough that Discord seems to be vulnerable to attack. But now they want to hold on face scans and ID's that directly tie to their accounts? It's already not smart, but especially dangerous for public figures like streamers and vtubers. Not only can it dox their appearance (if they are hiding it) but also give the insane stalkers direct ways to harass them or assault them at home.
However I think Discord is far too embedded for communities. Whether that be social or development. So I don't think we'll see a big exodus. Having teen mode be the default will just mean that NSFW flags on channels or content will be a death sentence for that board or community. Similar to how Reddits big push to shove NSFW into a corner has gone. There are obvious examples like adult content that are NSFW intentionally. But things like art or cosplay can easily be twisted as NSFW and it just shuts down the reach of these kinds of artists.
Unfortunately most people are dug in now and it takes absolute extreme actions to get people to move. The fact that X is still around should be clear evidence of that. It's draining over time but that kind of universal community has not be replicated. Just a couple different echo chambers.
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.
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.
The endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie, Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as they are private companies. This really should be a service that the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future we're speeding towards.
Sorry if I was inexact in my wording. It's settling on the existence of your bank account proving who you are. The ID services require you to give them your bank login credentials (ie, Plaid). So there are two levels of denial, at Plaid (and related ID services) themselves and the banks deciding weather or not they want to allow it (work with Plaid, or Plaid with them, etc) and if they want to give you a bank account.
I work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of age verification in Australia, so TIL.)
I almost swore here but I think that'd not get my message across. So I'll be calm. You're a liar (edit: or ignorant). I tried with Plaid. Plaid explicitly required my bank login credentials. I went in physically and talked face to face to my US bank's employee that handled Plaid.
Plaid does have products that do request bank credentials, but those products are not used for age verification. It's very common that a given customer-facing flow will use multiple Plaid products together to handle multiple different customer needs, so it's likely that the flow you were working with was using multiple Plaid products and requesting bank credentials, but for a different reason than to perform age verification (for example, KYC + bank account ownership verification or KYC + bank account validity verification).
Right. This boils down to you saying you were wrong but trying to avoid saying it directly. Basically,
>"Requiring a bank account credentials is common and yes, Plaid does it, despite what I said before, when the company buying Plaid services wants even more legal butt covering as is common in the wild."
They sold the kids' souls to the algorithm. They caused the Mental health crisis. They caused Dysphoria. The Depression. The "Ghost" we fight against—they fed it.
Now that the governments are scared to deal with it, the Governments are scrambling. They are slapping a "Band-Aid" on a gunshot wound and it's all bullshit.
Kids lie. They fake the age. They use VPNs.
The Corporate Reality is that Meta, X, TikTok want them to.
Somewhat related: I created an HN users Signal group, following the massive success and utility of creating a friends-and-associates Signal groupchat (that ends up discussing privacy/security/AI/etc).
Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults.
Hey folks –
I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news.
I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.
And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.)
Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence.
Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details.
And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!
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.
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.
I’m always amazed that despite decades of evidence… there are people that not only don’t know that you can do anything if you say “it’s for the children” but they’ll actively support it.
Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.
Empower parents. Parental controls are a minefield - especially with competing companies (ea, microsoft, steam, nintendo, apple) all doing their best to get you to turn them off so they can push lootboxes and other junk more easily.
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.
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.
By Discord's own ToS you can't use Discord if you are under 13, so this change is just to make sure users that are 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 years old are appropriately labelled.
Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the service?
> When big tech tosses money at Republicans and the Trump inauguration, they get what they paid for.
This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data.
Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them.
Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children".
Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.
Many EU countries provide digital frameworks for privacy preserving age verification. Yet, Discord made an active choice to avoid using them and is asking the users to upload their photos and ids.
This will be expanded to cover everything on the service soon enough. The time to cancel Nitro and move to other platforms that respect user privacy is now.
I don't see why it would. If Discord sees its primary audience as teens (i.e. the people who by design can't verify) why would it extend the verify-only parts of the service?
Only that I don't understand why everyone here is talking as if they had just been forced at gun point to age verify. Just... don't verify until you need it?
Also pedophiles do exist (see Epstein and friends) and bad neighborhoods on the internet do exist. This is currently a problem on the internet that needs to be solved. No one here is giving any suggestions how to solve it, but we sure are quick to shot down any solutions that people are trying.
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."
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.
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.
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