Comment by anon_cow1111
17 days ago
It should go without saying but,
*CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason)
This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.
It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.
from the article:
`For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process`
they don't do this for age verification, they do this to build dataset to sell.
> Key privacy protections of Discord’s age-assurance approach include:
> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
> Straightforward verification: In most cases, users complete the process once and their Discord experience adapts to their verified age group. Users may be asked to use multiple methods only when more information is needed to assign an age group.
> Private status: A user’s age verification status cannot be seen by other users.
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Yeah because they don’t haha. It boggles the mind because the headline is clickbait.
Youtube routinely asks for ID on accounts that are already of drinking age, they dgaf they want document scans they can use for profiling and to likely sell to 3rd parties.
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Discord has been immensely hostile to the public in general since forever, and people love to flock to it and throw money at the company behind it.
I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.
It's not incomprehensible. Discord makes it so much easier to organize communities than most other platforms.
Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe, nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does.
No, Discord/Slack is a mess. Interesting topics got buried in an IRC-style chat. Threaded BBS are much better for organizing communities, like Discourse. And it is open source, so no vendor lock-in with stupid age verification.
How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?
> nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does
Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for voice channels much of the time)
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"easier" - what really matters is end user freedom, the rest is just decoration
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Honestly... People deserve this. They deserve the consequences. They were warned. They chose this.
They also don't care. But I do care, chose the opposite, and will still bear the consequences, once a sizable population does certain things.
Ok, do your worst. I got on Discord cause they offered the best free service, I'll just as easily leave if that ever stops being the case. "Teen mode" seems not bad, I need something worse.
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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.
I never had a Skype call work properly on the first try, even before Microsoft broke it
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Discord used to be better, but then they got popular, got incredibly picked up and now are probably being controlled by some very shady people.
If you look up the founder he has a bit of history of shady shiz with his past companies.
It isn't surprising to me they are going scorched earth now bending to the will of the fascist government.
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)...
>I only really cared about ... the HD screen-sharing
I bought and canceled nitro in a single day because it's a bad product.
They promise HD screen-sharing, but it's only for _my_ screen. When I hopped into a call, the other user's screen share is illegible. Higher quality is still locked behind a "Buy Nitro" message.
If I'm paying for an improved experience, I should be able to get it.
I think there are actually discord client mods which let you stream in high quality anyway.
WebRTC is ridiculously easy.
Cancelled. Was a right job trying to get in as it just refreshed everytime I tried on mobile. When I went to the site separately after clicking subscribe it magically let me in.
The cancel login flow didn't inform me that it found my login suspicious but the subscribe one did
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.
Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature
They should disable ads and algorithms from social media by default and give those only for verified adults!
I'll reply for both you and GPP,
I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device"
...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.
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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.
Cancelled
Just did.
And the community im interacting with is looking into self-hosted options.
why in gods name would you ever pay for discord.
Bragging to software developers about freeloading their software?
Freeloading? Bad word. There are plenty of free/open source alternatives like Discourse, Zulip, Matrix, so why would anybody pay for something which should be free to use and respect user privacy?
cancelled. thanks for suggesting
I bet they expect the canceled payments. Management will push through.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I read the announcement and other than the risk of a slippery slope into more invasive ID demands, I'm not sure I have a huge problem with it.
The default experience will be the "teen" experience - they list what that entails - stuff that's flagged as adult/NSFW/etc. is blurred out until your age is verified, which for most(?) people will require ID or face scan. DMs/friend requests from people you don't know take some extra clicks to view. Fine.
It depends on how broad the definition of adult content ends up being I guess, but I'm simply not convinced that requiring ID to view "adult" content is the end of the world. If that means porn, I'm 100% OK with it, put porn behind gates. It has become far too easy to access. It's 2026 and we now have a generation of gooning addicts out there who never have actual sex and it's basically a guarantee that they won't find partners or start families any time soon, exacerbating an already problematic decline in the birth rate. This is not a version of society or anyone's "rights" that I care to defend. You want to goon, show ID. That's how it was before the Internet anyway.
On the other hand if it means any speech that the platform deems to be "controversial" will be blurred out then my response will not be to submit ID, I'll simply limit how I use the platform. Anonymous speech continues to matter and needs protection. But Discord was never the entity that was going to provide that protection.
I mean Discord is a gaming chat room. Expectations should be set by that fact. I don't need a gaming chat room to be NSFW, or even host i.e. political speech really. I get that people have used it for more than gaming, but it was always pretty clear what it was. If people don't like that this gaming chat room no longer supports other uses, they should switch to an alternative.
We're all going to have to scan our faces and upload our IDs just to use the internet because of your weird obsession with birth rates? Wonderful.
> we're all
Speak for yourself, I didn't touch discord for 3 years.
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Clearly the outrage is about the slippery slope and the current techno-fascism gripping the US. I'm not being sarcastic.
You do it for the children now, you poo-poo concerns because "who uses discord for non gaming anyway" and you're just letting the foxes in the henhouse.
Twelve months from now and they'll want it for every chat.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it's a fallacy. That is the origin of the term, it describes a type of argument that's logically invalid. Yeah I am concerned that things could get worse and this might be the first step to broader censorship that we don't want, but a fallacious argument alone is unpersuasive to anyone who tries to form opinions rationally. Specific evidence needs to exist for the claim for it to be convincing.
Since slippery slopes are invalid by nature they're a type of argument that can be made for pretty much anything. If the case here is that a slippery slope is being used to defend pornographers and the "right to goon," I'm not on board. I think we have a long way to go to roll back porn's grip on teens and adults alike and reduce the harm it does to relationships, and this is just the beginning. Take for instance how Instagram at this point is basically a lead generation service for fraudulent OnlyFans businesses that sell parasocial relationships with a porn model's image where the customers aren't actually talking to her, they're talking to a team of guys in a basement in Eastern Europe somewhere. I think you shut down OnlyFans, you prosecute Meta, and to the extent where Discord is doing the same thing IG is, you prosecute Discord too. There's a long long list of things that needs to happen and shutting down the porn pipeline for teens on Discord is just the beginning.
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Why do you want the children to grow up in an Orwellian dystopia?
I canceled that shit years ago.
Why should we send a message?