Never really used discord in the first place. I tried to join a few support threads for random gizmos that had no forums but realized that its a terrible place for support compared to forums. The whole UI was just chaotic to me as well.
Until they walk back the walkback.
Bro it might even be worse because they gotta watch your every move to implement this shit. I'm moving to fluxer.app
hold up.
so y'all took the two hottest takes in online culture right now and decided to do both of them?
what the actual fuck is wrong with people these days. it's almost like everyone in silicon valley is fucking delusional.
so we're going to invade your right to privacy and scan your identity then sell it to 3rd parties. oh, that's not acceptable? well I guess we could have AI profile you and then we still sell your identity to 3rd parties. fuck me you say? shockedpikachu.jpg
So they haven't walked anything back, they're just adding in a motherfucking clanker as a middleman. What could go wrong?
Big corporations have absolutely laid waste to the internet. There's nothing left unspoiled at this point.
DIscord: GUYs! You'll NEVER BELIEVE THIS!!! Instead of invasively reading out every one of your personal identifications and selling the data on your likes/dislikes, we can ACTUALLY just use an AI to tell if you're a child by how your interact with people!!!
Us: Maybe you could have the AI just stop the stalkers.
Discord:
They still have the AI shit that looks at your posts to try and determine if you are an adult.
Fuck that.
Like everything else everyone has ever posted outside the fediverse?
There's shitloads of AIs reading the fediverse, too. Absolutely doing the same infomining as the discord age bot - but it's not the moderators doing it, at least.
nods I suspected as much.
Never seen any search results through :)
They had it way before they announced, apparently. Because I ate a ban for apparently saying I'm 9 somewhere (I don't actually remember posting that, I suspect a certain someone got to my account to get me banned).
The cat has been let out of the bag. I'm still moving somewhere else once I figured out where with friends.
The company's deploying AI-powered inference to estimate user ages based on behavioral patterns, account history, and other signals already in its systems. Only when that automated prediction fails or flags uncertainty will users face requests for manual verification through ID uploads or facial scanning.
Oh, so it's even easier to game it and pretend to be "an adult". Simply avoid any minecraft and roblox communities to be an instant adult.
Discord didn't specify exactly what percentage constitutes a "vast majority," nor did it detail which signals feed into its age prediction models. That lack of transparency could become its own issue as regulators increasingly scrutinize how platforms handle youth safety versus privacy rights.
Big brother is watching you masturbate, for your own good, of course.
For the subset of users who do get flagged for manual verification, Discord says it's partnering with third-party services that specialize in age verification tech. These vendors typically process ID documents or facial scans without permanently storing biometric data, though implementation details remain vague.
It's not permanent storage if they delete after safely selling to interested buys!
As lawmakers ramp up age verification requirements globally, expect more platforms to walk this tightrope between compliance and community trust.
I wonder if this is what might actually push more people into "host your own shit" that's easy to shut down and migrate as needed.
They will never delete it anyway. They might park it in a different spot, sell it as well, then delete where they originally stored it. The new spot they part it might even have a degree of separation or so from the company. But they never delete information, don't ever trust they do.
Not enough for me, I deleted my Discord account yesterday and what they're saying isn't enough to get me to cancel the deletion. I already hate using Discord enough as is, I don't want this Nazi bullshit to ruin it even more.
migrate to matrix.
Already done.
?? You don't get to walk back my fears. You can walk back the source, but you don't get to say "nevermind, you're not worried about this".
They haven't though.
They've just restated the exact same thing but then added on hollow empty promises of "this time we'll be better, I swear!"
I don't believe them lol.
What happens when the lie? Nothing. If they say they will delete something, but they keep it, nothing will happen to them. So of course they will keep all the information. Maybe shuffle it from here to there and then delete here.
Like all other social media sites, they'll postpone it and bring it back when all the uproar settles.
I'll be honest, The UK introduced these age verification and ID issues and many places were forced to follow suit. Discord being one of them and I'm sure at somepoint it did pop up but I've never signed up for it and I've continued to use the software without issue.
My Xbox demands to see my ID so I cancelled my Subscription. If discord starts demanding it I'll be moving back to Teamspeak or Mumble.
Wait what? Xbox needs a subscription? To play the games you own? They are forcing you to prove your age to play adult video games now? Jesus Christ. We need to find workarounds for all of this, it's a privacy issue, and a property rights issue. We bought this stuff, it's ours. We can't be forced to ask for permission to use our own shit.
Xbox needs a subscription? To play the games you own?
No, you don't. You can play the games you own just fine without one. They probably mean either the gamepass subscription or xbox live subscription.
People need to realize that this isn't JUST a Discord issue. This is a policy issue AS WELL. Fucking pay attention to the politics around you. And this isn't just a United States issue as well.
Does Discord even have an community relations department, because they suck. Seriously what a stupid decision to just announce age verification and then provide no additional details or context.
This ~~clarification~~ pathetic attempt at backpedalling, isn't much better either, they've still provided essentially no information on exactly what the process is going to be, and exactly how it is going to work. I also do not like the fact that they're basically just giving up on any attempts to implement this themselves, and are going with third party solutions. We all know that "third party solutions" means the lowest bidder, so this will be implemented poorly with no operational security, and absolutely will result in a data breach.
I created my account at least 15 years ago so if they require age verification from me they're idiots.
Lmaoooo
Have you SEEN their UI? You know how over the past ten years we've been like "aaaaanny day now they'll fix it so it isn't awful..." And they didn't. And instead, we just sorta... got used to it?
Pffft.. like they listen to anything anybody else says. Community relations dept. Ha!
Discord's mobile app is the worst one I've regularly used. I've never had an app that crashes from 2 gifs.
Or couldn't accept keyboard input from the stock keyboard.
Or wouldn't let me use the touch interface to move around because the UI got stuck, so I can't read any channel until I restart the app.
Or wouldn't notify you for people responding in DMs randomly.
Or have a hard time displaying videos that were uploaded to their servers.
Or keep saved and embedded gifs cached, so you didn't have to reload them every time, wasting data and time.
Or didn't randomly play audio from videos whenever you swiped away.
Or had the context menu require an internet connection, so if you have low data, good luck editing your messages!
I discordially invited my account to go and delete itself.
same , never really used it but deleted it.
This is misleading. Discord is not reversing course. It was in their original announcement that they would try to automatically determine everyone’s age and “most” people won’t need to do any sort of verification. A lot of people and journalists didn’t read that far apparently.
Agree headline is misleading. "Walking Back" implies reversing course, that is not happening.
Plus we all know how great AI age verification is. Big empty "reassurance" there.
Decentralize and federate or die.
Piggybacking off this:
XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated, encrypted communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use the Movim Client.
Movim can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs! And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community. It's currently our best option to shift to, and due to being FLOSS, will only ever improve (we'll never need to worry about investment capital enshittification), so it's not just kicking the can down the road, it's a long-term, almost permanent solution.
Movim looks very promising and I haven't heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.
We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that's accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you'd like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It's mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you're not familiar with it 😅)
They didn't walk back shit, they upped the stakes by saying they use your chats to analyse your age. That's just as bad.
it is admittedly going to be a bit funny if some immature 45 year old man child gets flagged as a teen
If Discord cared about this, they’d use the same identity platforms governments use. For example, in the US, id.me is a requirement for many federal services. While it does deanonymize me and there are privacy concerns expanding this tech beyond government services, I trust id.me to take my data security seriously. It has to have federal security requirements. If their data is breached, there will be repercussions and reparations.
Discord, on the other hand, uses random vendors. There were no repercussions or reparations for the previous leak. Discord said moving forward they’d require SOC2 Type II or ISO 27001 for vendors. Crucially, neither of these certifications matter a fucking iota for personally identifiable information and Discord itself will not be completely them so even if the vendors were PII secure Discord will not hold itself to the same standards. Discord does not care about its users; Discord only cares about the ad revenue this will open up.
I don’t even trust Id.me. If the government needs to securely identify someone they should be setting it up themselves instead of us trusting some random company that used to provide coupons to soldiers.
So they're going to scan everything you do with AI to figure out how old you are instead. Not really better.
I left as soon as I saw something asking for age verification in the client.
Deleting posts is just setting visibility to 0. They still exist, and you should assume they exist forever.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
