Comment by safety1st
18 days ago
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.
I don't use it, but it doesn't start or stop at Discord. Age checking is already implemented as live face video & ID uploads and already deployed by every large tech company all over the world. They just have to flip a switch in our market.
To use my phone, Google wants me to verify my identity and age[1][2].
They're boiling the frog, give it a few years, and if you want to use any internet connected device at all, you'll need to sacrifice your face and ID as tribute. If you want to talk to someone else, you'll need to identify yourself with the platform or network on which you communicate. If you want to run an app that serves you any user generated content in any capacity, you'll need to identify yourself first.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-play-users-are-starting...
[2] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/10071085?hl=en
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.
First it was “just extreme porn”, then “just porn”, then “anywhere that could potentially contain adult content”, then VPNs, now all social media, all in about a year. You’re claiming slippery slopes aren’t real while in the gift shop at Splash Mountain.
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Outside of formal logic an argument does not need to be logically sound to have merit. You are extrapolating from "logical fallacy" to (something approximating) "invalid line of reasoning in most or all cases" which is simply not correct.
There are many potentially slippery slopes in politics. The extent to which they prove to be a problem in practice depends entirely on context. Approximately none of those cases will involve formal logic.
You're displaying the fallacy fallacy[1], the assumption that because an argument contains a logical fallacy, it must be false.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Taking away porn access would be great except you can't do it at scale without with eliminating porn from the Internet altogether and prosecuting anyone who shares any, or by eliminating privacy and anonymity from the Internet altogether.
I agree with your take on the damage of porn to the youth but don't yet agree that asking the government to watch every conversation is worth it. (That's what you're enabling long term)
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Why do you want the children to grow up in an Orwellian dystopia?