Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month | Hacker News Reader

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

theverge.com

2,046 pointsx012,041 comments

https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-exp...

Here's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

> 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.

Why they didn't do that the first time?

And do they really actually delete it this time?

I have it on good authority that they really truly delete it this time, super duper pinky promise

Once it's out there the only assumption that holds is no trust, and therefore all bets are off.

>Why they didn't do that the first time?

The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.

Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.

rogue engineer

How convenient.

Ah sorry our contractor did all that highly illegal stuff. Too bad we can't pierce the corporate veil anymore... shucks.

> 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.

What are the non-most cases?

Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.

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.

It was this deep into the thread when I decided I don’t think I need internet service this bad, let alone Discord. I think I’m out. Let us know how it goes!

All of these types of developments, of the trap door starting to close, really do totally depend on the addiction, the dependency that was created to make sure the people would be unable to withdraw themselves. We now have some generations of people who have only been online and in a fantasy world of games and “TV”. It seems the system has calculated that we have crossed the threshold after which the system is self-reinforcing and there is very little chance of effective resistance, let alone reversal.

I think you may be attributing far too much malice of forethought to any them that may be conspiring to design the 'system'

Everyone thought that we were designing the system, but it's really been the system designing us.

(Only half joking; the medium is the message, and changes us as much as we change it)

malice aforethought

I’m not sure how to really get this point across, but you would be very incorrect believing that and I have first hand knowledge of that.

Yes, it’s not a waterfall methodology/system like some Soviet central committee planned economy, but what else do you call things like the kill list board meetings of the Obama administration, if not malicious and with forethought? They had lists, they decided on who to murder, they broke to accomplish their weekly objectives and then they reported on their progress every week. And that’s just a tiny snowflake on top of the iceberg of what is available for anyone in the public all around the world to know, even without any kind of special access other than an open mind willing to accept reality that is not what one was told it is from childhood on. You know, when people are the most vulnerable and easily manipulated, the MO of the people like Epstein.

Is not even that the information needed to understand these things are not all there in public agreed caps leaks and releases, it’s just that most people seem to just want to accept that 2+2=5 and in exchange live a life they believe is a good deal from the devil.

You seem to represent one of those people who has no idea what you are a part of, similar to how an animal born into a zoo is quite content since all his needs are met. That animal cannot understand any bigger context, because all it’s ever known is that cage it’s always been in all your conscious existence.

All the information you need is publicly available to you even without any clearances, on the internet (for the time being). What is your excuse for not knowing, e.g., that effectively all NGOs are a tool of the CIA? Or what else would you call the Obama kill list meetings where, just like how you may have weekly sprints, they picked from a backlog and then killed them and reported back on progress; if not malicious and with forethought?

Reality simply is that the majority of people are like those peasant masses that applauded Obama at the Winter Olympics; the same malicious, deliberate murderer with forethought and with a kill list that we know he was. What are you?

> write a mildly unhinged internet comment that tries to shame people for not knowing the true conspiracy all around them. Use themes like sheeple and kill squads. Explicitly call out Obama and only Obama and make sure you repeat one claim about Obama at least three times.

> 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.

Not to nitpick, but in this case they'd be collecting data they already own.

The feds don't own state IDs in the US, at least.

1. Foreign state actors

2. Inter-hostile agencies within the u.s.

In addition to the sibling comments, even if they do own the ID itself, they do not own the association with Discord users, and the ID might also be faked.

For state actors - they frequently have issues "connecting the dots". Or heck - maybe connecting the dots is easy but it's a manual process that introduces too much friction for them to do casually. Maybe some of the data they connect it with is not trustworthy.

If the dots already come pre-connected, it makes the job easier.

Not to mention its value as blackmail material shoots up because it comes pre-associated with your government ID and/or a scan of your face because fewer sources/methods need to be risked.

I am pretty sure US gov doesn't have my id.

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.

Under GDPR they need to be listed.

GDPR isn't a cookie law — it's a PII law. They need to tell you all parties that get your ID picture, or they're in breach.

GDPR is not a PII law. The term is not mentioned once in GDPR. GDPR speaks of "personal data", which as Wikipedia puts it "is significantly broader".

Doesn't PII, mean personal information which is is another term for personal data?

Personally Identifiable Information is about data that can identify you personally. Personal data might be something you don't want to share but is not necessarily identifying you

"We delete them immediately after we have sold them to our 579 parters"

Vendors like that would be in deep GDPR shit if they claim to not store highly sensitive data and then do in fact store highly sensitive data.

Generally the GDPR is not rigorously enforced, but when it comes to sensitive data like face scans, IDs, medical data etc. the hammer comes down a lot swifter and harder.

GDPR does not stop a breach.

Discord already lost user IDs. Will GDPR delete them from the darknet?

> Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.

This really is the issue. Of the 5 or so data breach notifications I received last year, none are from an entity I have a direct relationship with. They're all from a vendor used directly or indirectly by these entities.

The real answer is more serious penalties for having data breaches. Having 6 concurrent "identity monitoring" services is of zero value to me.

Since when the city one lives in is mentioned in the birth certificate?

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.

None of those documents reliably state my city of residence. At best they document where I once lived, but not even that is guaranteed.

You are legally required to update those within 10 days of moving.

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.

That's pathetic. It would mean you can't live anywhere without a street address, such as a camp site or a ship. You also can't be a nomad.

So much for "land of the free".

Unless you’re wild camping, campsites have addresses. So do marinas where a ship would need to be docked more or less regularly to establish residency.

As for being a nomad, you don’t need a driver’s license or any kind of ID to wander if you’re willing to sleep rough. If you want to drive on public roadways though, you better have a primary address where the courts can send someone if you kill someone in a traffic accident and bail.

Docking is expensive, so no. It's also only needed once per 5 years or so for maintenance.

Government fining you a ticket doesn't mean your address has to be on the drivers license. They could register the number plate to an SSN for instance.

Did you skip my last sentence? A traffic ticket is not the worst thing you can do in an automobile. And not everyone eligible for a drivers license will have an SSN.

Bailing from a traffic incident is a crime itself. Good luck getting away with that.

And why would someone not get their SSN if they're old enough to drive?

- some resident aliens (if not authorized to work), B-1/B-2 Visitors, WB/WT (Visa Waiver Program), nonresident aliens

- their spouses and dependents e.g. F-2 Dependents, J-2 Dependents, H-4 Dependents: of H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, or H-3 visa holders.

- Undocumented immigrants: Individuals without lawful status who have a US tax filing requirement.

Read "Who's eligible for an ITIN" https://www.irs.gov/tin/itin/individual-taxpayer-identificat...

In some places in the U.S. it is (or at least was until recently) illegal to be healthy and unemployed.

For most situations where you don't have a permanent address, your address is either the place where you receive mail or the courthouse.

And if you don't have a place to receive mail?

Receiving mail is a requirement for participating in the legal system, which is a requirement for citizens.

Laws of the government can't override laws of physics. If you don't have a place where you can receive mail, do they just arrest you or what? Do they assign a PO box to you?

If you fail to comply with legally delivered court messages (to your registered mail address), then yes the police is going to fetch you.

America is one of the least free countries — they think they're free because the guns=free principle is drilled into them since birth, but it's a lie.

It is a law but rarely enforced, also some places like Washington are primarily digital meaning you update your DL address online but they don’t print a new ID unless you request it or your DL is expired

Well since you have these IDs, for national security (AML, criminals and whatnot), we will need you to keep them if our endpoint says so, here's the endpoint

    https://.gov/print?text=true

>"Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners"..

Yeah, say goodbye to those the privacy and safety of those documents.

How can we even confirm that they are actually deleting them. Trust me bro vibe

Imagine the neural network you could train over such a large dataset of ID's so when you pay your bills or do the flight check-in you avoid the hassle of manually inputting the data yourself? Ah, yes, we have that already.

> The ID is immediately deleted.

I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.

"delete" doesn't mean delete anymore, like you say, there are always audit logs, and there is "soft" deleting.

Expect any claims that things are being deleted to be a bold faced lie.

We deleted it from someplace. It's not our fault we have more places!

They wouldn't _have to_, audit checks if you stick to law, your own policies and such, but I think they will.

So how do they prove they actually checked someone's age?

How does shop clerk proves they checked someone's age before selling them alcohol?

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.

I believe the original finding was that they were not deleting IDs that were involved in disputes.

They explained it in their announcement at https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...

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.

Why should we suspect the age verification and age-related appeals would involve different teams or processes?

Age verification is done by an iframe to k-id.com.

Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.

Appeals are like escalations. They bypass automations and move to manual review.

This is corporate cover speak for “we keep all data”

Yeaaah, nope.

GDPR is no joke and storing people’s actual ID card photos is a gigantic liability. Companies treat that stuff like it’s toxic waste, they want to get rid of it as fast as possible and permanently.

We’re talking about Discord. The same people who put everyone’s “server” as a chat room on WebRTC.

They don’t share your same sense of toxicity.

How come they didn’t do that the first time? There’s really no guarantee this time will be different or that the 3rd party is any better.

Maybe that's generally true but you're saying that about a company that has leaked 70,000 IDs that were supposed to not exist just last October.

And yet...

So Discord only just survived financially because of heavy fines imposed from their earlier breach of trust? All their C-suite were fined commensurate with their remunerations+wealth?

Uh... EVERYONE with a Discord account has to go through age-related appeals now. That's what the announcement is.

Compliance

Liars…

> 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.

In case someone is unaware, 641A and Utah and both references to the US mass surveillance systems in this context. Specifically interceptors that a company wouldn't be able to prevent from saving your data for the few seconds they need to process and delete it

I might be misremembering, but AFAIK, that kind of surveillance mostly worked because many companies didn't bother encrypting datacenter-to-datacenter traffic, thinking that those networks are trusted. That mistake has since been rectified though.

With almost everything going over TLS these days and HTTPS being the norm, even for server-to-server APIs, it's much harder to snoop on traffic without the collaboration of one of the endpoints, and the more companies you ask for that kind of collaboration, the higher your risk of an unhappy employee becoming a whistleblower.

That's also about US companies that can't refuse or can't bother to challenge that a dragnet is set up in their process.

ISPs themselves didn't save any data. However, they gave interception rooms to the NSA (which is indeed technically not them).

Nowadays ISPs aren't the right scale to do it for the reasons you mentioned. But the USA lowkey moved the dragnet to the main datacenters with prism, then made it mandatory for all with the CLOUD act.

And if the threat is not coming from the USA, but some other country starts to ask Discord to BCC them the IDs of their citizens, we can do the odds on whether Discord will challenge it or not.

Now I want to ask Discord who is their third party provider ? Why don't they process IDs themselves ?

edit : I didn't expect for links between that third party provider and Palantir to be exposed within a week

I lost all trust in discord

> it's much harder to snoop on traffic

Unless you have a master key which decrypts all traffic.

That is not possible with modern TLS 1.3, which mandates perfect forward secrecy.

Unless you use Cloudflare (or roughly any other DDOS protection system), in which case you're letting those companies MITM all requests on purpose. Protected between you and Cloudflare by PFS and any other acronym you like.

I think the odds that Cloudflare hasn't been forced into data snooping by the government are approximately zero. It's the by far the biggest, juiciest target.

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.

Humm yeah, like a government digital ID of some sort. Except people go mental about that, so sending scanned copies of my personal ID documents to every bank/solicitor/estate agent/mortgage broker/random internet service it is then...

Or if they don't need your ID.

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.

> 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].

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

I bet the NSA does not even require their cooperation. They are probably already inside their systems.

Deleted from some location or purged from their entire system?

> We do not keep any information around

... "around"

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.

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...

Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature

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.

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.

They should disable ads and algorithms from social media by default and give those only for verified adults!

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

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

It is not, you just aren't the customer but the product sold.

free as in beer is clearly what they mean. They are a non-profit talking about pricing.

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.

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).

Dude, Slack deletes everything almost immediately unless you have a paid version which isn't cheap.

reliable message delivery, lol. slack drops messages silently. it is not fit for purpose.

How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?

"easier" - what really matters is end user freedom, the rest is just decoration

Apparently not because they have 200mill users.

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

I'm in a Signal chat for a bar trivia group for some reason. I've missed invitations a few times cause it silently got out of date. But at least Obama can't read my messages.

You compromised your freedom, then. Signal is a central–server network with a license that means you can't legally modify the client and use it on the network, and it identifies people by their phone numbers.

The two nice features it has. I don't need bots to exist.

There is no binary version of how everyone is compromised. Because I refuse a bunch of applications like Discord I can assure you my footprint is lesser than those who use it.

I agree completely. My point is that people simply will do that though, so instead of approaching it with hostility and judgment you should approach it with understanding and, if they’re willing to hear it, maybe as an opportunity to educate. Proud proclamations and judgment won’t get people to see how important this is.

It’s not just “window dressing.” UX matters. So you need to talk to people in a way that acknowledges why they want those conveniences in the first place. It’s the same reason I recommend Plex to some people and Jellyfin to others.

Wrong. What really matters is delivering dopamine reward signals in the user's brain. Everything else is just a mechanism.

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.

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

I too remember Skype's universal salute: "do you hear me?"

That's known as the millennial pause. Older generations like millennials want to ensure a communication is working before committing information, while GenZ and Alpha just start talking.

It's named after the pause after pressing the record button while you check it changes shape, but "can you hear me?" is the same thing.

I'm gen Z. You had to start Skype with "can you hear me" because the answer was usually no (via text). I now do that with phone calls because forced bluetooth has made headsets less reliable than before.

On the contrary, older people properly announce themself on the phone, while younger people often don't answer at all, and let there be silence, until the other gives up, and asks who has picked up the phone.

I hear people saying that every day in Slack and Teams

Teams is broken too

I must be a lucky one because calls always worked for me on teams. On the other hand, everything else is a dumpster fire.

Honestly... People deserve this. They deserve the consequences. They were warned. They chose this.

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.

You will not leave easily. There's no point to you leaving if all your friends remain. Chances are they could not care less about these issues and would rather leave you instead of mass switching to a less convenient alternative.

Ha ha joke’s on you! I’d need to have friends in the first place!

Yeah, we've seen time and time again that the network effect of social media makes it next to impossible to actually move to a different service. The Discord feature set is great and all, but it's the fact that your communities are there that keeps everyone on it. I'm hoping they get enough backlash / canceled Nitro from this because I don't want to lose the communities I'm in. Already did that with Facebook/Instagram/etc and it sucks.

I'd leave with or without them if it sucked. They can and will text me instead, just like they do since I left WhatsApp (because it sucked). The communities of randoms I don't even know irl can't, but that's exactly why it doesn't matter so much.

That and my friends probably care the same or more than me about privacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)...

WebRTC is ridiculously easy.

I think there are actually discord client mods which let you stream in high quality anyway.

>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.

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.

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.

> and to likely sell to 3rd parties.

Can you provide literally any evidence that would suggest this is the case?

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.

Give it a couple years for the inevitable data breach to leak all the details

Since selling PII is a common practice in the US industry, I believe the onus is reversed, they need to prove that they delete/keep-private.

Yep, that's my reasoning too.

Given how YouTube makes money from advertising, I suspect it's more profitable for them to keep the data to themselves and use it for targeting. I would not be surprised if they also share it with Adsense & other Alphabet entities (and presumably with government agencies), but am doubtful beyond that.

Not that this is much better than directly selling to third parties.

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.

Yes, I definitely trust the multi-billion dollar corporation regarding my data

Discord is an app that's so routinely reverse-engineered there are projects with a million+ users designed around patching changes to it, straight in the binary.

https://betterdiscord.app/

Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data. What you should worry about is incompetence

Not even 6 months ago a third party they used for ID verification got breached

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

Do you think they reverse engineer the server side?

Oh hey Direwolf I've contributed some stuff to your mods.

You mean if they lied about just the IDs but not the faces? The paragraph quoted mentions that the verification is done client side, "never leaves your device".

If we admit that they're saying they won't store it, then secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

There's similar debates with Whatsapp and their E2E encryption. Read this

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/02/02/whatsapp...

> If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data.

Oh you naive child. /s

If they tell you they are not selling your data, its because they have a license agreement with another company which is selling your data. 'They' very specifically arent selling it, however they are very much profitting from other companies using it.

> Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

???? Yes? Companies nuke their core product all the time for the sake of a big IPO number.

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

I really hope I misread sarcasm in that statement. Because of course there is a lot of money in that

How much? 2 bucks per user?

Their paid users shell out 3 a month...

And then you think of the real world

> secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

How many users are paying? a few million? How many use the service for "free"? A few hundred million? Are you stupid?

>How many users are paying?

7.3 million paying every month

>How many use the service for "free"?

143 million times maybe 2 bucks once. Most likely five cents once.

>Are you stupid?

Flagged

While what GP said was not worded how the site rules say it should be, your original point is very tedious and can only be read charitably if we assume you never read any news or barely retain anything. We are currently on a news website. I think if you want non-commenting readers to see your point and have charitable thoughts of you it would help to explain why you're ignoring reality for whatever it is you are positing (consumer protections because of subscriptions? really? for this corporation?).

What you're saying in this post essentially just underlines GPs point, which I imagine isn't what you're trying to communicate. You have to help a reader understand your point of view, especially if it's far removed from objective reality (which is that a corporate entity will betray you for money, regardless of whether that makes sense long-term).

Nope, when corporate overlords sell your data they say it in their terms of use and privacy policies because no one is that stupid. If Discord says they're not selling that data, they're not selling that data. The day they'll start doing it, they'll put it in their policy.

You're making up a reality that doesn't exist in your head and claiming it's the truth.

You have in your head examples like facebook or spotify. Spoiler: They tell you exactly with what sauce you're gonna be eaten

Discord had a scandal not too long ago where pictures of people/passports were stolen. There they said that they delete those files immediately after processing them. This proves your statement as false.

You got that fact from my own comment a few ones above this

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

It was a 3rd party

Are you saying that corporations respect the letter of the law when it comes to privacy? They don't, they can just drop some lunch money when caught red-handed [0]

Even when they write in their privacy policy that they collect private data and sell them to third parties, unlawfully, that does not make it any better. Cambridge Analytica was operating with respect to Facebook policies. Would you say that people that took an IQ test and were manipulated into voting pro-Brexit were well-aware of the sauce they were eaten with?

Discord is unfortunately no different, they're profit-driven and likely to sell user data already or in the future, because it's incredibly easy and profitable to do so. Why would a chat app try and predict its users' gender? [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices [1] https://x.com/DiscordPreviews/status/1790065494432608432

Of course discord has no track record of overextending their privacy policy and selling data you would not expect (sarcasm).

For example but not limited to "programs you run and other system specific information". I believe I read a while back they recorded titles of all opened windows but I can't seem to find a reference for that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_...

I'm not saying they won't ever start collecting it and selling it. I'm saying the day they do, it will be laid out in their privacy policy. Right now they're making statements that they're not even collecting it.

Right, because that never happened to discord or any other multibillion VC fueled company that offers its services for free. See also meta repeatedly lying about absolutely anything that has to do with privacy.

Vencord is more patching Discord: https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord

BetterDiscord is more... client modding to enable userscripts. Vencord is actually running find-and-replace on Discord's Webpack modules to implement deeper integrations. They're far more reverse-engineering than BetterDiscord's monkey-patching.

I think selling it to state actors lined could definitely be a big boon. I'll never trust them, I'd rather delete my account

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`

Cancelled

cancelled. thanks for suggesting

Why should we send a message?

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.

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.

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)

In order to make sure businesses aren't giving porn to teens, you can require they do meaningful age verification at the time they want to provide the porn. You can impose criminal penalties on a domestic business which doesn't do this, and other penalties on foreign businesses (such as locking them out of the payments network). You don't need to get 100%, even partial success will act as a deterrent. This is how the world worked before the Internet, you needed to show ID to buy porn, and public opinion is in favor of the world working this way again. Crucially, penalties on businesses (not consumers, and starting with the biggest ones) are the way you need to go because this is the only way this can feasibly be enforced.

The libertarian concerns around privacy, freedom of expression and surveillance are all valid, but they're downstream. We have hard evidence that porn damages sexual health and relationships, and it has basically zero value to society; it's like digital cigarettes in this sense. We can't allow ourselves to be paralyzed on this issues because of a theoretical slippery slope. Whether Discord is going about this the right way is open for debate, and whether legislation solves the porn problem without introducing surveillance risks is also a good discussion to have. But the porn as well as the fraud and exploitation which always seem to accompany that industry need to go. Libertarians would be wise not to conflate the endorsement of privacy with an endorsement of porn -- most people support the former to some degree, but when people come forward with enthusiastic support for the latter, more often than not their motivation is addiction or profit, not a crowd the defenders of privacy want to be lumped in with.

I don't care what degenerate stuff you look at as you are free to do so.

Privacy is a fundamental right, at that my opinion one of the more important ones, as when the right to privacy is removed the other ones are impossible to keep.

To give up the right to privacy because you don't want kids looking at degenerate stuff on the internet is stupid, additionally the kids will work around your barriers.

How about we teach kids (and adults) the dangers, putting the responsibility on the consumer instead of micromanaging/censoring everyone's information intake.

If a minor drives in a car without a license we also don't require the car brand to install license & age verification in each car. We punish the kid that did it.

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.

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.

In Russia none of that slippery slope stuff happened. Just they murdered journalists and opposition, installed TPUs at every ISP and passed a law making any VPN related advice illegal. And people are fine with that apparently

In Thailand porn was straight up illegal for ages and everything else was sane and open... until new government decided to kill freedom of speech.

So slippery slope is illusion. If government is bad it don't need to try to be so complicated and gradual. It can't even think so far ahead, they will no longer be elected when that times comes.

As for social media banning for teens that's just common sense. Social media is fuming pile of garbage designed to make people feel miserable so that corporate overlords make $$$ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58570353.amp

There’s a trivial way of fixing social media without mass surveillance or free speech restrictions: Just put a punitive tax on advertising revenue. People can say whatever they want, but the incentives behind social media disappear. This won’t be implemented because this was never about making society a better place.

And your examples only show that where there’s no safeguards, governments don’t need to be subtle, but in semi-functional democracies, they still need to at least pretend to be electable.

No, it started with "protecting the children" around 2010, and followed the bit-by-bit step-by-step boiling the frog approach for years, until the grip on the internet (as well as offline publications) became strong enough to do you know what to you know whom.

pls explain how 2010 is related to current censorship

it's not slippery slope when it's things that happened at different times. there are examples where x did not lead to y as well as where y happened without x happening before it.

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

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

Why do you want the children to grow up in an Orwellian dystopia?

I canceled that shit years ago.

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

I bet they expect the canceled payments. Management will push through.

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?

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).

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?

Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that.

I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.

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.

I've only rarely used it for voice, so I think I'm not in the right demographic. But I find its text/chat UI janky as hell.

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:

https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/

> 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. :)

> start on desktop

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)

> People who are serious about achieving something will use a laptop.

That really depends on what that "something" is.

That's true, and there are also people - like my partner - who only own a mobile device. She unfortunately wouldn't be able to have what I regard as the ideal experience joining a Zulip.

> People who are serious about achieving something will use a laptop

Two decades ago it was said "People who are serious about achieving something will use a desktop" in response to laptops being underpowered.

    > 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??

That's an automatic fail.

Tbf, Discord takes way more than 2 minutes to understand.

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.

But the friend group server won't have hoops, and the other nags while annoying don't act as a barrier to basic use.

discord lost me at having to use task manager to shut it down on Windows.

I am using it every day but never saw the need to download it.

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.

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.

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

That's a huge friends group! :)

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.

Not the original commenter, but I have faced similar friction from people who are not grandmas or quarterbacks. I don't particularly agree with its tone, but I agree with the original commenter's general message.

I won't be so confident to identify what it is, but there is something that causes "end users" to bristle at Zulip.

Where I'm coming from, everyone uses Slack. I spearheaded an effort to switch to Zulip because our Slack server is on a free plan and our messages get sucked into the void after 60 days now. Everyone agrees that this is bad, and that we don't have the money for Slack premium (we're an academic organization, so AFAICT we wouldn't even have to self-host to avoid paying), and yet so many people do not want to switch. Here are some common responses I've gotten:

* I refuse to use another messaging app and Slack is nonnegotiable for some of my collaborators.

* I don't want to learn a new UI.

* I don't want to learn a new UI that isn't basically the same as Slack.

* I will only switch if everyone else switches.

This is half a social problem ("I will only be receptive if everyone is using this"), but I do think there is some legitimate friction in Zulip's UI. I am fairly confident that we could successfully switch to Zulip if the Slack dissenters could be convinced to use Zulip --- or if Zulip could somehow be coerced into being more Slack-like.

As the "agent of change" at my organization, I felt like the resources Zulip provides are lacking in what I really need. Like I know there are technical details on how to move to Slack (https://zulip.com/help/moving-from-slack), but what I really need is help with the above: convincing people to try and acclimate to the UI. And yeah, I kind of agree that a 2 minute video on how to use Zulip is not the resource I need since it presupposes a degree of openness and cooperation that I don't have access to.

These are somewhat disorganized thoughts, but happy to expand upon anything if you're interested. I really do want to successfully move our org to Zulip since I'm tired of our messages disappearing.

Rather than getting outraged about prejudices that you don't want to be true, try to see the point of the response you are replying to: if you need to watch a two minute video to understand a chat application then it does not have a good user experience.

I use it for a non-it non-engineer group and everyone is happy with browser experience.

The mobile app is worse as it only allows writing in a few views that are not easy to access, and is becoming slower over time.

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!

> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"

my experience is exact opposite

How so? I haven’t used Zulip but am curious to hear why

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.

I see thank you!

I think it depends on how you're interacting with the instance/server. I find the rust zulip much easier to follow than the k8s slack (or the lancer discord). I can see on a (much) quieter instance where it's a group of friends you want to see most messages where a single channel is a better option.

I agree with this. We use Slack at work, where we have a small team, and most of us are reading most messages in realtime. It works*

Contrast that to my experience with a group of volunteers who might log in a couple of days a week, communication is a lot more async, and you might not care about all the topics of discussion. I have found Zulip makes it easier to come back and catch up on just the bits you care about.

*I still think Slack encourages a "continuous partial attention" way of engaging with chat that I don't like. But, we do make it work.

Imagine communication server as... a house

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

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)

agreed, slack channels can definitely have the "lived-in space" feel to them (which is feel is the key point to the GP's comment)

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.

This experience sounds very formed by the particular communities you've interacted with on each platform?

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.

In Zulip, if a thread meanders with messages about a tangent, the authors/mods can choose to move those messages to a new thread (and IIRC messages with links between the two threads are created so it's easy to jump back and forth for any missing context)

Personally I found Flowdock's thread model the best at least for small'ish teams (company size was <30). You can see it in action at https://web.archive.org/web/20210728031306/http://blog.flowd.... Unfortunately the company itself didn't survive. It was eventually acquired by CA which then killed it later.

(from my older comment) Essentially there is a default view which contains all messages as usual. Each message also has a symbol next to it. If it's grey message bubble, it's a message that is not tied to any thread (it can be replied to to start a new thread. Previously if no other messages have appeared on channel so far, it can be dragged & dropped to another thread). If it's colored message bubble, it's the first message in the thread. A colored arrow means it's part of the thread with that color.

This allows you to mostly just stay in default view with all of the channel's messages. As long as people are putting the messages in the thread itself, you could quickly use the colors to see which thread the message is on (color collisions did happen, but they were fairly rare). You would need to open the thread only if you needed more context or wanted to reply to it, though replying can also be done by writing to channel & dragging the message to thread.

Yes it's odd that nobody I know has copied this. Clearly better than what Slack and Teams are doing.

Agree, unfortunately. Zulip is one of those apps I want to see succeed but I cannot for the life of me get used to the UX.

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".

I understand that part but it makes it really difficult to peruse when joining a large instance. I have little to no idea what I'm even looking for, which actions are going to cause side effects others can see, etc.

How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?

Onboarding has a thread going here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401.

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.

Stoat is early in development. For example, https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits, compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish them luck! It's really important that we have multiple independent efforts.

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.

-----------------------------------------

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.

So like git and GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket should have made GitHub enshittification impossible?

No, How git and GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket should have made git enshittification impossible.

Nothing is certain in this world, but I don't think that means one should give up and just use megacorp software.

And Zulip is specifically designed by some very capable people to be resilient. While we can mess up future versions, but you can always run (forks of) the older version. And as discussed on our values page, we've worked very hard to make the code readable and maintainable. (Various professors use Zulip as a teaching codebase).

We've made a lot of investments in the goal of having keeping-the-lights-on work for Zulip to be doable with a couple excellent people working part-time. It's good for our ability to spend our limited time on improving the product. But it also means that it doesn't require a lot of people to care in order for Zulip to remain functional and maintained. And I certainly care quite a bit.

So while I'd certainly expect other maintainers to introduce a lot more regressions, especially if doing significant changes... If you like the product today, probably the option will exist to continue using roughly that for a long time.

> 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.

>For people looking for a simple chat that stays simple, is this a bad thing?

If the application does everything you want it to do, then no, it's fine. How much new development does grep get these days?

However, it was mentioned that it has no mobile apps, and that's a deal-breaker for probably most organizations and teams. If you can't access your team's communications channel when you're away from your desk, that probably isn't acceptable to many. And of course, developing and supporting mobile apps (on at least 2 platforms these days) is a large effort, and also requires constant maintenance since the two dominant platforms are continually evolving and changing their APIs.

Looks to me like it doesn't have mobile apps because it doesn't need them to work on a mobile.

No mobile app sounds like a feature in my book. Few things are so urgent that people should be expected to be reading and replying to chats while away from their desk.

If your job requires you to go on-site, or even to another part of the company to work with physical equipment, this is going to be a no-go. Not all jobs can be done from your desk.

Sold

Thank you! Zulip is a great project.

What is the video calling and screen share experience like?

Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.

I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it means splitting things across multiple apps.

No different to ising Slack and Zoom which is a very common combination.

It is when you're talking about competing with Discord which has very good voice and streaming support

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.

I'm not expecting anything from anybody, but I'm also not switching to a discord alternative that doesn't support those features

Discord's main competitive advantages:

* 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.

Nobody gives a shit about that man. I don't care if it's unfair. I care that this app does the things I want. How it came to be is entirely irrelevant to me.

> Create it! Boom! No installation, no hosting, no monetary cost.

Don't Discord servers have free tier caps? A few of the larger ones I'm on beg for Nitro boosts/packs from premium users for capacity and features.

Zulip is a website packaged into an electron app. It does not take $1billion to implement webrtc into a website as screensharing + video / audio calls are a solved problem on the web (Zulip is a web app).

Where did you get the idea that it takes a ton of money to do it?

This is my problem with the alternatives, nothing has replicated simple voice channels (next to text ones) that you can see who's in and just jump in and out of, with screen share. This shouldn't be any harder to implement than video calling itself but almost nothing has done it. Even spacebar chat is more interested in keeping discord bots compatible than achieving feature parity.

Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.

Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi

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.

I would say the main thing that got people to switch to Discord was the fact that voice chat was free, paid for by VC money.

sure but also that you didn't have to pass around your teamspeak/ventrillo information to every rando you wanted to play with, less friction in discord with invite links etc

I have never created an account nor logged on to use jitsi.

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.

If you are selfhosting zulip, what prevents you to selfhost jitsi?

I have in fact done that before several years ago, though when I looked at it again late last year it seemed more complicated.

Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?

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.

Channels + topics >>> just channels

1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected

Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3

https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory says hi

Know of a good IRCv3 client for Linux/Web/Android? And what are some good v3 servers these days, besides Libera?

I've set up Ergo and KiwiIRC before, and it seemed pretty cool. I even enabled the Jitsi plugin in KiwiIRC, so it was like an indie alternative to Slack or Teams. I turned it off years ago, but if I were to do that again, I might try with UnrealIRCd.

Last I checked, IRC wasn't really mobile-friendly.

> 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. :)

Could you expand on this?

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.

> 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.

The killer feateure is that it's very easy to move last $x messages to another topic, so if someone writes a short note that begins a conversation everyone is free to reorganize it, and also moving messages between threads is easy and nice.

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.

How accurate is that understanding?

That seems like a reasonable comparison. I've thought of Zulip as halfway between IRC and a forum.

No, it’s not fully threaded like those examples (or HN). In a particular discussion, you can’t reply to a post in the middle and have your reply branch off from the main discussion.

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.

What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip?

(Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)

You can do everything with the keyboard, and we do write everything with screenreader accessibility and colorblindness accessibility in mind.

But we don't have a dedicated accessibility tester on staff, so we're reliant on people reporting issues that bother them in actual use.

I should also mention there's a nice TUI app: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal, which can be helpful for some people.

Thank you!

I'd like to convince other parts of my organization to move to Zulip, this will help.

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!

https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...

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.

Happy to hear Pidgin is still at it after all these decades. I still fondly remember using it when it was still called Gaim and only spoke OSCAR, back when Rob was involved before he started Asterisk. I lurked on IRC back then and even made a simple TUI when libpurple first came out.

> Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.

You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip. Nothing else matters to me

Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.

My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.

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.

Google workspace integrates with google meet. It's likely they don't want a competitor to google chat that uses meet infra.

PTT = push to talk (at least that seems the most probable match on Wikipedia)

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.

So, thank you, sincerely.

> hangringing

I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree

> like twisting your hand until you agree

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".

I believe it was actually meant to be haranguing

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangui...

Hey man, don't be sorry!

I actually didn't know so this was a good correction! :)

I think you got flagged for the "incorrect" definition, but I think you were being playful with a mnemonic to remember it- so that's not fair.

Thanks so much for sharing the story!

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.

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.

> 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....

i would read that write-up!

> 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'm not sure, because I'm using Apple's notification servers directly, not through Firebase.

I believe it works just as a proxy, and you need to specify your own Apple credentials when you set up the Firebase project?

You're implying some difference here that I don't see.

Both platforms need some way for the client to register to their respective push services, Apple needs an Apple account, Android needs google-services.json.

Both platforms require your app to generate a token which the platform's respective push service holds, and send it to your server which you then use to identify the client you're pushing to.

Apple also requires the Auth p8, Bundle ID, Team ID and Key ID, which are roughly equivalent to the contents of the google-services.json.

On iOS you don't need a separate binary, the server-side infrastructure is not scoped to individual apps.

I don't think that it's possible on Android.

The solution for this is to install the self-hosted Zulip as a PWA, but unfortunately they don't support web push.

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.

What would "as generic as possible" look like in practice?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954896

I think it's right to worry about this. However, the Zulip project has a long (10 year?) history and track record with a stable team.

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!

I can't say whether Zulip might be a fit for your needs. But you can always email our lovely sales/support team. https://zulip.com/help/self-hosted-billing#paid-plan-discoun... should give you a sense of our policies.

> 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.

> our product

It's either your product first or an open source project first. If you care more about having a marketable product then it's fair for people who care about open source to go elsewhere.

It's not a technical problem, it's a policy problem from the mobile vendors. You'd basically be paying them to deal with Apple's and Google's messaging infrastructure through their (zulip's) infrastructure.

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.

I guess my question is, what makes you confident that Element won't change the terms under which people can use their push server?

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.

So it's not actually an architectural issue, it's just that in practice there are multiple competing Matrix apps whereas nobody has yet bothered to do this for Zulip?

> So it's not actually an architectural issue

I mean, maybe? It's not obvious to me that Zulip is just as easy to develop a third party client for as Matrix.

> in practice

What's true in practice is all that matters to me, because I have a real life use case. The only might-bes I care about are the risks.

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?

Because ntfy doesn’t, at least not in a way that detaches you from a central authority.

On its own notification to your device will happen eventually when the ntfy app on your phone wakes up and polls. Pull, not push.

My ntfy server has a config line for an upstream, which is a service that then uses push. Basically it’s self hosted and handing off push.

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.

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.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/subscribe/phone/#instant-delivery

The upstream approach you describe is only necessary for iOS devices that don't permit apps to do that.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#ios-instant-notifications

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 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.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/subscribe/phone/#instant-delivery

So it either drains battery and gets significant delays (as per ntfy's own docs), or it still uses Google's solution. There is no free lunch.

I think you misread, the delays are if you don't use instant delivery. I use it and it's extremely consistently delivered instantly, which makes sense, it's a websocket.

As to battery drain, I'm sure it technically does consume more, but according to my phone it's an insignificant amount: <1% of usage which is the lowest stat it gives you. Their docs suggest the same thing:

> the app has to maintain a constant connection to the server, which consumes about 0-1% of battery in 17h of use (on my phone). There has been a ton of testing and improvement around this. I think it's pretty decent now.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-...

Honestly it's a good solution that works well with few downsides, the only real one is that iOS doesn't support doing it, but personally I don't have any apple phones so I do get an essentially free lunch.

Listening on a socket doesn't drain any battery when no data arrives unless the app does other things that actually use CPU. That's just what Google/Apple want you to believe so you depend on their proprietary lock in services.

Also like, how else would the Google / Apple services do it? Probably via sockets right? I guess you could do it in a pull-based approach on a timer, but that doesn't seem more efficient to me.

But waiting on multiple sockets for each app is surely more expensive than a single one, isn't it?

A single process waiting on multiple sockets is basically no more expensive than a single socket, but if each app has its own background process then that is more expensive. So for best performance you really want to delegate all the push-notification-listening for all the apps on a device to a single background process owned by the OS, but it'd be fine for each app to use its own push server (though of course most apps do not actually want to self-host this).

Google doesn't have any magic way to do instant notification that nobody else has access to. The only thing they have access to in this regard is disabling any battery optimisations without triggering warnings.

Notification and battery performance is on par with google's solution except when an android build does dumb things to prevent the background activity, in which case notification performance gets worse and battery draw gets worse (not sure why exactly, it's just a common issue in these regards).

Well, there is an advantage, if everything is using the one service then you only need to have one thing alive to check it, so each new app is "free" if you already have push enabled (assuming that push notifications are rare enough the activity isn't the cost), as where each app doing it themselves is going to cause more battery use, so it isn't directly equivalent.

However, it also isn't a big deal, at least in my experience, at least for ntfy.sh.

It does.

Ntfy pays Apple/Google for the ability to deliver notifications to you. They use the free plan as a "gateway drug." It's just a cost of business to them, a marketing tactic to acquire paid users, no different in principle than plastering ads on billboards.

You can't set up your own Ntfy server (at least not without also having a private copy of the Ntfy app).

(Things may be different on the fDroid side, but many custom notification servers are a batterly life and privacy concern nevertheless).

You can self-host their notification server, and in their app you provide this server's url.

> 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

Setting up stoat.chat right now, I'll let you know if I have any notification issues with it ...

There is a lot of truth in what you write, so I am just going to point out the UnifiedPush project[0].

Of course with the, rather large, caveat of that not working outside of

> TestFlight or an analogous Android channel

This implements a push service (caveat: Android only) that is less restrictive than what google provides, and allows the reuse of an existing notification server (ntfy, prosody, etc) by other installed apps.

Since f-droid exists, this allows for a halfway decently user-friendly-ish way to completely self host outside of relying on googles server's and zulip, for example, could offer the ability to receive notifications through it if there's an a unified push distributor available on the phone. It seems that there is at least awareness for this in the project [1].

But with google tightening the noose around alternative ways to install apps, who knows how long this will be even possible.

[0] https://unifiedpush.org/ [1] https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter/issues/1198

It would be nice if you could run separate instances of an app that were considered separate, and forking around a push notification key would make a lot of sense. Another reason I would like to do this is to be able to have different Discord accounts coexisting on the same device. (But, the idea of having some set of different Zulip instances is maybe the exact same use case, with better server-side support.)

Doesn't Element support unified push?

So you can use a custom push server

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).

>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.

Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?

IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.

Huh? Where did he argue that you shouldn't pay for those things?

Grep and vim are a much smaller magnitude than Linux, so don't mix the two. And you do pay for Linux indirectly, it ain't written by some developer in their basements out of their good heart for a long time. It's written by Intel, Nvidia, cloud vendors' etc - full salaried employees. You just pay for it via hardware or cloud fees.

But to be honest your stance is extremely detached from reality. It's a huge privilege to be able to work on a hobby project, people tend to need food and a place to live, you know?

Grep and vim are obviously stand ins for a myriad of tools that together are much larger than Linux. And even Linux still has unpaid volunteers and even the majority corporate contributors are not that relevant to the discussion because none of them have control over the project to the degree that they could enshittify it.

> people tend to need food and a place to live, you know

That has never been enough reason to require that others support your business model. I for one don't need or want any more "products" in my life, especially ones that are or depend on services I can only get from a single vendor.

Etymologically, a product is a thing which is produced. But it's unpleasant to think about how the sausage gets made, so nobody wants to consider the goods in their lives as products. They want their Nikes to simply pop into existence before them.

Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.

You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I worked on Linux, I know how it’s funded. And it’s not by charging people

How is it double-speak? The "free" part doesn't mean "free beer"...

Do you think clang, linux, and kubernetes could ever exist and survive in their current forms without the work of salaried developers? Volunteer maintenance is not sustainable; the long hours of unpaid labour are famously prone to causing burnout.

Free software is free as in speech, not free as in beer. If you want to save your cash, go use discord. If you're not paying, you're the product.

The federation of Matrix seems risky to me to the person self-hosting. I don’t want to host random people’s content. I’ve read some interesting articles about the design flaws of Matrix that led me to believe that it’s not a good option.

What is confusing to you about the community tier? It is basically describing any type of community of people who are not a for-profit business. Groups of friends, non-profits, volunteer groups, etc.

Zulip isn’t charging you anything unless you’re a business with more than 10 users and need push notifications, and that is still only $3.50/month/user if you don’t need more enterprisey things like SSO and compliance stuff.

> The federation of Matrix seems risky to me to the person self-hosting. I don’t want to host random people’s content. I’ve read some interesting articles about the design flaws of Matrix that led me to believe that it’s not a good option.

You can just not federate.

My experience with Matrix as a "discord replacement" at the scale of a few tens of people is that it works and is stable but is also jank and has a lot of features I don't really care about, federation being one of them. Hence my enthusiasm for a possible alternative.

> What is confusing to you about the community tier? It is basically describing any type of community of people who are not a for-profit business. Groups of friends, non-profits, volunteer groups, etc.

The part that isn't clear to me is how you prove to the Zulip people that you are worthy of being included in that tier. I'm certainly willing to write a few sentences explaining my use case, but the help page is light on specifics.

I'm pretty sure it's just an honor system similar to a lot of similar software.

Corporations tend to self-comply because they don't want to risk failed audits and lawsuits.

If you don't want to just random people's content, dont let random people use your server

I use Zulip every day for the julia programming language (https://julialang.zulipchat.com).

I really like Zulip, and I'd like to migrate my friend-group onto it, but it probably won't happen. I think Zulip is just a bit too heavy-duty for a friend group chatting, and also lacks the visual polish that a lot of people want.

For now, my friends and I mostly just use Signal for group chats, which leaves a lot to be desired, but IMO is still just a better experience for our purposes than Zulip or Matrix.

That said, if you have friends who are keen to try things out, I would definitely recommend at least trying Zulip and see what you like and what you don't. It has a lot of really nice features and things to love.

Having interacted a fair amount with the Zulip devs over the years, and being an open-source product, I believe that they have no plans or intention of trying to fleece or milk self-hosted users or small communities.

Thanks for the input. I'm working on setting up an instance, so we'll see how it goes!

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.

What was wrong with React Native that caused it to be slow? How did you figure out that flutter was the reason for improved performance, rather than simply rebuilding the app with lessons learned from the old app?

Put another way, given enough time, what was not possible to do with react Native and is now possible with flutter?

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.

Can you give more specific feedback -- what specifically are you looking at, and what specifically do you think contributes to it being noisy?

Well for me it's the animations, and it doesn't seem like prefers-reduced-motion is handled anywhere. I go to some great lengths to try to eliminate animations with custom js/css, and things are still moving and changing. The logos are probably most immediately noticeable.

> Given current events in the USA,

This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.

>>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.

Fixed this for you: "I haven’t been affected, so everyone else is overreacting."

Almost no one has been affected so yes.

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.

Glad things are comfy for you though.

Or just beaten, locked up, abused, then released, because after all they had never done anything wrong to begin with!

never done anything wrong to begin with

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.

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.

I know they were. But when Obama and Clinton were doing it, one of the big differences was that there were not all these Karens blowing whistles and interfering with those operations. The difference is that now there are far more deranged people who want to take the law into their own hands, and often these people are violently attacking law enforcement.

I don't like having these conversations, and I don't consider myself a defender of the current ICE. It's far from a perfect organisation and it has a lot of problems.

But it seems clear to me that the concept of law and an ordered society has taken a big hit. Trump Derangement Syndrome is not an excuse to allow that to evaporate in Minneapolis and all the other cities with extremely violent protests and attacks on law enforcement.

It seems you're under the belief that the Karens blowing whistles is creating the different enforcement mechanism.

Can you explain how this is not disproven by:

1) POTUS's own statements for years prior to taking power that he would enact a totally different kind of immigration enforcement regime

2) The massive budget increase and personnel surge for ICE, planned at least several months before Trump even took power

3) DHS policy memos shared days after Trump taking power that claimed nationwide expansion of expedited removal powers

4) Declaration of expansive state powers under AEA, also planned months before taking power and therefore months before any public resistance to immigration enforcement

These are all extremely, extremely aberrational actions and policy decisions, all of which contribute to the current facts on the ground in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and none of which were in response to Karens blowing whistles.

What evidence do you have that Karens are causing the enforcement shift, versus the enforcement shift causing the Karens, given that the enforcement shifts were planned for months before the Karens even had any whistles to blow?

Do you actually believe every person getting abused is an illegal immigrant, or are you just pretending because it's the only way to make your point?

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.

Here are a few examples of said violations by our government: https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118180/documents/...

Now show me the country where law enforcement does not occasionally happen to inconvenience people who in the end turn out to be innocent.

Are you also going to call for ban of all vaccines because they or the methods in which they are administered can in rare cases be fatal?

Where did I call for a ban on anything?

I'm simply calling for my government to obey the Constitution.

If they can't execute these operations without violating people's rights, then uhh... they can't execute these operations. That's not me "banning" anything, that's just called "following the law." Violating people's Constitutional rights (even immigrants', even illegal immigrants'!) is already banned.

Can't edit my prior comment, but anyway here are some thoughts from a Founding Father, 2nd President of the United States, and leader of the American Revolution, John Adams:

> We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever

Lots of wisdom in this

> You may not like it, but the USA is still a nation of laws.

I would love it if the US was a country of laws, but the rule of law has been quite thoroughly killed by the Trump administration. It wasn't very effective even before Trump, as you can see by how the prosecution of Trump's crimes got blocked or derailed every step of the way, but after his election, the Constitution has gone completely out of the window.

> 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.

Their problems don't come from illegal immigration. Not even a bit. Unless you use it as a euphemism for colonialism. The real problem there is corruption and a lack of rule of law. And the US is heading in that same direction fast.

> I'm rather glad that US culture hasn't yet turned into another Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Republicans are working on that.

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.

Continually pandering to "humane" bullshit is why the country has become the way it is.

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.

That's some serious right wing programming.

The presence of illegal immigrants does not, in fact, mean we have to go looking for them. It definitely does not mean we have to break the law while doing so.

Also it's weird how the group that used to talk about personal responsibility elected trump, the literal antithesis of taking responsibility for anything ever.

> The presence of illegal immigrants does not, in fact, mean we have to go looking for them.

It does unless you are calling for the selective enforcement of laws.

> It definitely does not mean we have to break the law while doing so

Which is fair but most people upset with ICE are essentially calling for no enforcement due to a couple of incidents among a country of 300 million just like with any other issue being advanced by the opposing tribe. I think we can objectively say that the previous level of enforcement was not a sufficient deterrent to reduce the level of illegal immigration. Whether the current enforcement is "breaking laws" or if incidents are tolerable mistakes will be for courts to decide.

> Also it's weird how the group that used to talk about personal responsibility elected trump, the literal antithesis of taking responsibility for anything ever.

I think many of the voters, certainly enough to swing the scale, voted for the lesser of two evils rather than being believers in everything trump. As a random non-American I am not convinced they made the wrong choice.

You are free to spend your own money to make those people's lives better in their own country or even to get them US citizenship or residency through legal channels if applicable. Turning developed countries into a welfare system for the world's desperate is not a solution to anything and will only result in those developed countries regressing to lower standards of living if not outright imploding as you end up importing the root problems causing the desperation along with the immigrants.

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.

That is not the right question because a) zero mistakes is not a reasonable standard for any country-scale operation and b) legal residency does not preclude there being a valid reason for deportation such as violating the terms of that residency permit.

What we’re seeing isn’t mistakes, it’s deliberate abuse. You don’t accidentally tackle somebody and shoot them in the back ten times.

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.

You should consider how allowing millions of illegal immigrants impacts legal residents next time you vote then.

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.

What does it mean to be "cheated by all the ones who didn't"? Their ire, if it's a real thing, is directed at the wrong people. They should direct it at the ones who made becoming an American citizen a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process, not their fellow immigrants who came to the US seeking a better life through hard work. As a true blue and red-blooded American, I'd vote a hundred times to make it as simple for those people to become an American citizen as it was for my forefathers, who only had to hop on a boat over in Europe and not shit themselves to death before they got here.

>They should direct it at the ones who made becoming an American citizen a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process, not their fellow immigrants who came to the US seeking a better life through hard work.

No one is entitled to come to the US. We are not the world's soup kitchen. You follow the process we the people have decided or you go somewhere else. Period.

You alone don't get to decide this, these laws were passed by a democratically elected Congress.

> No one is entitled to come to the US. We are not the world's soup kitchen. You follow the process we the people have decided or you go somewhere else. Period.

I strongly disagree. Everyone is entitled to come to the US, and we should welcome them with open arms. Immigrants built this country and immigrants make it better, whether they're highly qualified programmers and doctors, or refugees from "shithole countries" who had to bribe their way across the border and now work on a dairy. All are welcome! Though please spare me your inevitable "have you let them into your home?!" bullshit, it's a tired argument.

> You alone don't get to decide this, these laws were passed by a democratically elected Congress.

"Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" — Martin Luther King Jr.

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.” — Henry David Thoreau

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" — The poem engraved on the plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

Though please spare me your inevitable "have you let them into your home?!" bullshit, it's a tired argument.

You are the one who's spouting bullshit, and alongside the usual deliberate confusion of legal immigrants with illegal ones. We don't need any more of the latter, especially the ones who commit violent crimes and are otherwise a threat to society.

> don't need any more of the latter, especially the ones who commit violent crimes and are otherwise a threat to society

Weirdly we're fine with the legal citizens who do that though

Hi, I'm a legal immigrant.

I've seen what scum ICE and CBP are a long time before the current brouhaha. I hope they are in a world of hurt after Trump is kicked out.

This has nothing to do with the treatment of the current people residing in the US by ICE, regardless of status.

You should reconsider it.

You would have to include ALL actions, including ICE troopers shooting dead US citizens too. You can not merely confine it to "this is what they do in theory"; you need to look at what they do in practice.

I have considered it, which is why I'm voting blue.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/09/irish-man-se...

No they weren't.

Did you even read the article? He entered the country on a tourist visa and never left. That is entering the country illegally. Getting married and applying for adjustment of status does not give him legal status. He should rightfully be deported.

Every story is like this without fail.

You just said that he entered legally. Then you said the opposite.

You do understand that visas have terms and limited durations, right?

Entering on a tourist visa with intent to stay is illegal. Do you know what the word tourist means?

Except most US voters disagree with you. Someone married to a US citizen does have residency rights, notwithstanding the paperwork quirk that you're supposed to exit and re-enter, which typically involves flying somewhere going to the US embassy to get a stamp and flying back. So just as most people don't support the death penalty for speeding, most people don't support criminal deportation for someone who has the right to be in the US but for whatever reason (perhaps lack of money or perhaps fear of strip searching and disappearing to the gulag) didn't follow the proper process. Because most voters don't see this situation as a crime and certainly not one requiring deportation, the law doesn't treat this situation as a serious crime, or actually a crime at all.

If you want to aggressively going after folks who have skirted immigration rules perhaps the place to begin is in the east wing (if it still existed).

He has resided and worked in the country illegally for 16 years. Getting married at the end of that time doesn't automatically grant you legal status, you have to apply for adjustment of status at which point they will review your history with adhering to US immigration law. He could have chosen to be deported, per the terms of the visa waiver program he entered on, but he chose not to so he can wait in detention until the legal process he has repeatedly avoided proceeds.

Majority of Americans are against illegal immigration. Only liberal elites want it in order to stay in power. The people do not want this. Every poll confirms this.

That assumes that e. g. ICE were only involved against people who have broken the law. First and foremost - this is not the case. Second: when you look at the two executions of US citizens, that is also something not touched by your comment. It is not good to try to describe e. g. ICE without also mentioning the negative sides, such as them having shot dead at the least two US citizens already for no justifiable reason.

> for no justifiable reason

How about we wait for the courts to come to a conclusion on that instead of making assumptions based on agenda-driven outrage media?

This narrative has been debunked many times already. Legal residents, even citizens, have been arrested, deported, or shot. And people get denied entry based on social media posts. Your comment is way off base and severely detached from reality.

If the US criminal "justice" system arrests people suspected of crimes, why are the criminals running the country while innocents get locked up?

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.

Citizens are abducted by ICE too. Even native Americans

Newsflash: citizens have also been deported. Maybe you're next, who knows.

Want to bet?

Nobody needs to bet - in a lawful society, the law should protect citizens from government agents shooting them dead. ICE already shot dead two US citizens. What would a bet change here? That is a system that clearly does not work.

People died after they deliberately put themselves in harms way in an attempt to illegally interfere with law enforcement. That's tragic but doesn't make the law enforcement inherently wrong.

One wonders if you would be equally philosophical about an ICE agent getting shot after breaking down someone's door with an "administrative warrant" (which isn't a warrant).

Zero citizens got shot that didn't spend their days conspiring ways to obstruct and assault federal law enforcement executing deportation orders given by our judicial system.

If you obstruct ICE, you are going against the executive branch executing these laws, against the legislative branch who passed these laws, and the judicial branch who granted the deportation orders. You are a traitor to this country.

WTF are you talking about? Next time you fail to obey a yellow light signal, you'd be rightfully distraught if you were put in prison and someone were to say that you deserved it because you should have thought about stopping at the yellow as the law prescribed.

People who were actively violating the law of the country.

Not true. As mentioned elsewhere, plenty of people were not in fact violating any laws when this happened to them.

Here's another case. In this one, the government targeted someone who had violated no laws for exercising the 1st Amendment rights afforded to every individual in our country.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2025-04/FIRE%20Ozt...

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 well known that news and social media is biased towards outrage. Most issues people get upset about are really not that big in reality and quickly forgotten once the public consciousness moves on to the next thing. If there is someone yelling "look out for the truck" all the time no matter what the rational choice is to ignore them.

Ignoring them means not letting them influence your opinion either way. You should still allow yourself to reach the same opinion they're espousing by your own means, otherwise you're letting them control your opinions just as much as somebody who slavishly agrees with them.

Ignore the boy crying wolf, but you should still watch for wolves. If you don't want to, fine, but "I don't look for wolves and my sheep are fine" is not a very good argument.

> I only scan the headlines

Have you scanned any headlines about ICE lately? Maybe do a quick search for news about Minnesota?

(I'm pretty sure that if you'd been putting your pants on in Minnesota, you would not have written this comment.)

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, two of them were just killed. Does that qualify as "having a tough time?"

And how many people live in Minnesota? What were they doing when they were killed?

I don't get your point. What proportion of residents does an event need to negatively impact for you to believe that it's hassling people?

Surely it can't be 100%, right? No event in any major city, even horrific events, actually affect everyone.

How many illegal aliens were killed in Minnesota?

Huh? Did you respond to the wrong comment?

What's the ratio of citizens to non-citizens that's okay? One citizen per every hundred or are you thinking 10-1?

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.

You're right that immigration enforcement in the past did not have to deal with mobs trying to interfere with that enforcement.

DHS's own data proves that current enforcement priorities have changed.

So what's more probable in your mind?

( Hypothesis A ) -- Mobs trying to interfere with law enforcement has caused DHS to focus on arresting and deporting immigrants without criminal background

( Hypothesis B ) -- DHS's focus on arresting and deporting immigrants without criminal background has required significant scale-up of personnel with minimal training (validated by DHS's own data) and required tactics that a large number of Americans believe to strike an unacceptable cost-benefit balance

( Hypothesis C ) -- The two facts (enforcement approach and public response) are not causally related to each other at all

It's telling you chose to not answer the question and instead chose to introduce a different (straw man) question in response.

At least people in the past had the integrity to acknowledge their positions head-on. One of the lamentable things missing today

Interfering with federal law enforcement is not punishable by summary execution.

You keep moving the goalposts that much and maybe the patriots can win the Super Bowl.

> What were they doing when they were killed?

One was returning from dropping off her 6 year old child at school.

The other was videotaping ICE activity with one hand while holding out the other hand to show he was no was no threat.

What is your point, exactly? Neither was doing anything illegal, neither was directly trying to interfere with ICE actions. (The first wasn't trying to interfere at all.)

Although normally I'd say wait for the full evidence to be revealed, in this case (1) there's already a wealth of evidence from bystanders, and (2) the investigations are actively being interfered with so official evidence is not forthcoming.

Those are the 2 citizens killed. CBP and ICE killed at least 25 other people in the field and at least 30 died in custody (one source cites 30-32, another 44).

Apparently, the violence is necessary to deport at (checks notes) a lower rate than Biden's. It might make sense if the current enforcement was aimed at serious criminals, but only the rhetoric is. The current enforcement is much less selective. More damage, less gain.

A corollary I don't see mentioned enough by the morons who believe there are roving hordes of violent illegal criminals:

Let's assume there was. Then what on earth is the administration doing tracking down and putting cuffs on so many people who do not fit in that category?

Every seat in a detention center, courtroom, or plane filled by a random guy stopped in the Home Depot parking lot is a seat taken away from one of these allegedly numerous violent rapist/murders/whatever.

So even if you were stupid enough to believe all the transparent bullshit from this gang of liars, they'd still be fucking awful!

All this stuff does, in addition to squelching public appetite for immigration enforcement writ large, is keeps the actual bad guys inside the country even longer!

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.

It's sad and pathetic to see such apathy.

That is not a good analysis because it insinuates that everything stays the same. This is clearly not the case. Besides - no matter whether in a democracy or in a dictatorship, almost everyone puts on pants.

It is also incorrect to confine this "merely" to social media. This is clearly government overreach. They want data from The People.

while there is nothing wrong with it, you are clearly in a stable section of a stable country

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!

Yes, hear hear! As someone who've run a couple of FOSS communities, many of them having chats via IRC, Slack, Discord, forums and more, using Zulip has always been one of the most welcome options, yet also the one that takes the longest for people to understand if they've never seen it.

But it's easily worth it, as you can actually come back and read through old discussions and understand things and it isn't a mess. It's like if you could force Slack/Discord to only do threads, and the entire UI is optimizing for that specific UX. Overall pleasant experience once you get over the initial bump :)

This feels like you're chatting with yourself.

I think you need to invite more people to your Zulip instance if you keep feeling like you're chatting with yourself.

Thanks so much for this!!

> Given current events in the USA

Don't worry - they're repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The one that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post.

This means there will be no platforms at all very soon.

What is the purpose of repealing this act? Make platforms liable and thus enact more restrictions, is that right?

Makes selective political retribution easier.

As you suggest, it's clearly to curtail free speech further; but in a way that their supporters can claim isn't fascist because 'it's the companies doing it not the government'.

We do really need non-USA based social media, stat.

Companies already have the right to curtail space as much as they want. The government wants to force companies to ban left-wing speech.

>Don't worry

I'm not worried. We'll use Zulip which has values and thus takes responsibility for everything its users post, right?

how does zulip as a technical solution solve the ultimate problems with discord and gmail and so on - EU chat control, US porn control, etc?

arent you as a zulip instance owner going to have to implement all the same stuff as discord?

It depends on what you’re doing with the instance, where you and your users are located, etc.

If you create an invite-only Zulip chat for your pub trivia league or school parent association that’s all adults, probably not.

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.

Fun fact: Shortly after MS Teams launched I created an internal "reconstituted" desktop Teams client for myself and the poor souls in my org that had MS Teams thrust upon them. It extracted resources from the (unminified!) electron app as well the js and CSS files from their web version, then repackaged it again via electron, wrapping into a standalone executable. Think like a really complicated greasemonkey/tampermonkey script.

My fork at the time replaced their criminal white space use and offered a more compact and information dense alternative using CSS and JavaScript, injected all post rendering. Ah, the silly things one is capable when faced with a minor inconvenience and a wandering mind...

You are referring to yourself as an “organization”, can you define that precisely?

LOVE Zulip!

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)

If you do no configuration, it'll use the public Jitsi service for video calls. So no action required unless you want a different video call provider.

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 !

Wow what the hell, Salesforce.

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.

It turns out e2ee in a chatroom is really, really, really difficult.

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.

> where the messages are encrypted in transit, but the server has access to the messages.

So the easiest and most useless kind. There were 1000s succesful db leaks for 1 successful mitm. Last time I heard of one, I did it myself on WEP. Https everywhere trend is super annoying for me because all it does for me is make my life difficult when I want to save time and transfer by setting up local caching proxy for myself.

> the volume of messages people do in high-traffic Discord or Zulip communities.

Why do people recieve volume of messages that's too expensive for their device to decipher? Are they gonna read them all?

Decryption should happen as needed. Before render. Before building local search index.

And what's up with notifications? Can't background process of my local app notify me?

> metadata like channel membership ... so a malicious server could just add a fake user to every channel

If you post to a channel anyone can join it's by definition public message regardless of any encryption. So no encryption needed.

> 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.

We should have an abstraction that is a socket that encrypts outgoing packets with my private key and deceypts incoming with provided public key.

Such chat apps should have only the right to use such sockets but not general ones.

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.

Yep, it's easy: https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost.

Self hosting could be an option, but it does not help when a country require you to identify if a user is adult or not.

Doesn't self hosting usually exempt you? Most such regulations only apply to commercial entities above some minimum user count.

While I personally strongly favor federated solutions those are of significantly more concern in this regard.

Good luck telling a FOSS project what to do. At the very least you'd have to pay for the work and it seems to me they could claim whatever price they want.

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

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 advertised pricing is for workplace use where the users are on payroll; if you read the plans page carefully you'll see we have free or highly discounted pricing for other use cases, both in Cloud and self-hosted.

Zulip is not designed to support 2M user accounts in a single organization. But if you enable the public access option (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option), such that no account is required just to read content, you can end up with 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer "total accounts" that just wanted to see something once and don't actually use the server.

Ah ok, that makes sense.

If you're curious, I put together a dev test for our developers and users to check out: https://portableapps.com/node/80118

Just dropping in on a completely unrelated note to thank you for developing PortableApps - as a kid with no UAC access almost two decades ago now it helped me immensely to develop my interest in IT :-)

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?

Moderation of self-hosted servers is entirely the responsibility of the server's owners (and perhaps hosting providers, if it's extreme enough). We have no way to know what's happening on self-hosted servers, and it's none of our business.

Regardless, there is no technical mechanism through which we could block access to a self-hosted Zulip server via the web application (which is hosted by the self-hosted server itself and designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices).

For Zulip Cloud, you can read https://zulip.com/policies/rules. One of the nice things about Zulip's model is that communities that we do not want to host can just migrate to self-hosting.

Can you get Zulip supported by OpenClaw? Zulip was my first choice communication channel.

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/discussions/5163 suggests it already has a PR.

I'm told (https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/127-integrations/topi...) that upvoting that discussion might help it get prioritized.

so instead of discord, google, meta having access to private convos... we should all switch to Zulip and have Zulip being the one with access to those convos? Or join someones self hosted instance and let them have access to those convos?

I am confused.

You can host your own instance or choose someone you trust to host it. With discord, google, meta you have no options.

I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool.

I don't think it's cool even now.

I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization.

Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source.

I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside.

It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf

I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :)

PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site.

When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce...

Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.

You need someone to rework that ecosystem.pdf file if you're serious. You spent a million dollars on this but your ecosystem pdf looks like it was created by a 12-year old trying out slides for the first time.

Crypto is the problem not the solution, that's why no one cares. We aren't going to pump your shit coin so you can rug pull, give up.

Hard disagree. You read nothing, you assumed everything, and wrote cookie-cutter slop that adds nothing of substance.

There is no shit coin and no rug pull. You can’t own any coin. But this perfectly illustrates why HN, full of smart people, is also full of people who actively fight against solutions to centralization.

These problems existed before crypto. You are defending a dystopian nightmare system that is progressively getting worse. If people like me don’t build a decentralized alternative you’ll just keep bitching about problems while having literally zero solutions (except “just give the government MORE power and they’ll save us this time through regulations”.) Newsflash, the governments are the biggest consumers of this centralized tech (like Palantir) and pushers of this dystopian future where they can do anything secretly while you can’t do anything without them knowing.

“Hacker ethos” is now filled with a lot of shills for corporate greed. You’re the ones pumping your latest centralized data silo where VC-funded companies convince everyone to give them your data or just grab it into your AI models, which take published work of millions of people, with Nigerians paid to label your data for pennies, and then sell it back to the stock market for billions of dollars in yet another bubble. “Web2” platforms have been shilling and rugpulling the public for decades. It’s called “capturing the market” and “extracting profits for shareholders from the ecosystem”. Go read Peter Thiel’s “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. You have no moral authority to chastise authors of decentralized protocols and distributed systems. They’re cleaning up YOUR mess.

This is the worst PDF I've seen. Please stop shilling this in every thread.

Hi Tim! (We know each other :))

I'm curious whether you feel you're actually in control to actually make policy decisions about data protection or whether you feel you could be hit any day by the "$5 wrench" by the government any time they feel it necessary. I'm starting to feel that in this environment, nothing is safe, even if encrypted and on FOSS platforms.

Hey Dheera! It's been forever.

Personally, I advocate for self-hosting communications software, ideally on physical hardware that someone in your community has control over. Zulip runs great on old laptops, if you can solve the IP address problem for hosting it in your house.

And if you want to be extra careful, put your chat system behind a VPN/firewall, so it's difficult to identify what software is being used externally.

And if you're not going to do that, because it sounds like too much work, the next best thing is to at least pick a Cloud service where you can migrate your group to paranoid self-hosting overnight if you decide the work is now worth it.

Self-hosting this way doesn't protect against all threat models. I am human and have children who I love dearly, so it's hard to rule out the possibility of my being compelled to make a malicious release.

But at least the Zulip source code is entirely open and highly readable; so users would at least have a chance to notice and not upgrade. With a centralized architecture like Discord, you're entirely reliant on whisteblowers.

Are we the bad guys?

Zulip is amazing, thanks bro.

hope you get some money man. instead of just "oh you do FOSS, thank you" - fuck those guys.

Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant.

I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan.

I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither.

tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.

My feelings as well.

I'm really hoping for Zulip to succeed, which is why I'm even commenting. But it really needs people with UI/UX expertise. E.g. good user onboarding does not mean showing them a 2 minute video, as another comment on here mentioned.

Value-focused organizations mean nothing to me. They throw out their values as soon as they are in the way of financial success.

Having a fully open-source self-hostable product improves this significantly.

Also your website (https://zulip.com) is so fast and snappy, I was surprised to see everything load instantly when clicking around. I have not tried the app yet, but seeing a static website like this is quite refreshing.

How well does Zulip protect users' privacy against snooping admins? I.e., does it have E2EE DMs? Unfortunately, this is a legitimate threat to be concerned about

How do you see Zulip comparing to anytype, https://anytype.io/ ?

> https://zulip.com/values/

Every word of this page appears as its own line on mobile.

Some of the big weaknesses of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:

- Your server admin can see DMs (or at least metadata, not sure if Zulip does E2E for DMs). The same is true for centralized services in theory, but unless you're a terrorist or a person of interest to a major government, it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically. Your admin is likely part of your community and may know you personally, so the temptation is much, much higher.

- If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point, and there's no way for users to reconstitute the network semi-automatically. Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to.

- It's much less secure in practice, it relies on your admin to always be on guard and constantly update their server to prevent vulnerabilities, either in Zulip or in the myriad of other self-hosted services running on it. One guy in his basement that goes on vacation once a year and has family responsibilities is far more likely to make mistakes than a team of trained cybersecurity professionals.

- Many Discord users are in 20+ servers. Anything that doesn't provide a one-click server joining experience (for users who already have an account on a different server) is nowhere near a Discord replacement.

- People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only.

- Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition, as many fraud-prevention approaches rely on the fraudster blindly guessing at what the code and ML models (do you even have ML models for this) are doing.

> it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically

No, but history shows some unscrupulous staff members will always snoop, whether its just pure interest or something more nafarious like intent to sell on the black market. This makes the risk of your private data being leaked > 0, which should always be treated as a valid risk.

> If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point

This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work, besides the point that servers "die by themselves" which of course isn't true in reality. You decrease the bus factor if this is a problem for you.

> Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to

If all the sysadmins at Discord died and nobody else has the keys, exactly the same problem happens. Discord though surely have multiple backups of the keys and so on, something you too can do when you have your own infrastructure, so overall that argument feels almost dishonest, since you don't compare the two accurately.

> Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition

What? Completely orthogonal concerns, and if your main "fraud-prevention approaches" depend on security by obscurity, I'm not sure you should even attempt to be involved in those efforts, because that's not what the rest of the industry is going by a long mile.

> People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only.

Actually, the further I get in your comment, the more it seems like you don't actually understand what Zulip offers nor what the parent comment is about. Music streaming on voice channels? Completely outside the scope of Zulip...

----------

I think you have to understand the comment you're replying to a bit better, before attempting to lift Discord above Zulip. They're specifically talking about Zulip as an alternative "for managing the firehose of busy communities", not as a general replacement for every single Discord "server" out there. Yet you've responded to the comment as that's what they've been doing.

> This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work

No, infrastructure doesn't have to work this way. This is a very old-school mentality.

Sign the content with a key that you control. Back up the content locally. And boom- your server is easily replaced. It only helps copy data around and performs certain conveniences.

I've been working on this full-time for a few years. If we succeed, we solve link rot (broken links) on the web.

Well, you're basically repeating what I'm saying, but with more detail. It's still what I true, "the one who holds the key holds the kingdom", just shifting it to the user rather than the admin. This is great, and works too, but doesn't make what I say less true.

>- People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only.

So basically Discord is a warez service?

Hi tabbott. Thanks kindly for offering to answer questions. :)

I signed up on your site just a bit ago, but I'm a bit concerned with the paid upgrade. Unlike Discord, I need to pay per user, which I find onerous and would get out of control fast for the group I run with around 100 members. Is there any plans for a flat fee model? I'm even happy to pay twice what I pay for Discord Nitro, but yeah, $8/mo per user is too expensive.

If it helps at all, it's for a retro computing community group, and not for profit.

Not affiliated with Zulip, but have you checked the "Free and discounted Zulip Cloud Standard" info on their help center? https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-billing#free-and-discount...

Sounds like you could be eligible for free or for a significant discount. Also:

"If there are any circumstances that make regular pricing unaffordable for your organization, contact sales@zulip.com to discuss your situation."

Thank you! I didn't see this when I was first looking into it.

I spent 7 hours or so yesterday installing Zulip. It was a huge pain; for one, it wants to own an entire server and the only supported installation method is this mega-script that clobbers everything, so I had to try to use the Docker container. Documentation on installation is scarce; other than telling you to use the script, and the fact that a docker container exists (though the GitHub repo it linked me to was no longer accurate, and I had to find the updated image name elsewhere), there's practically no information on how it works or how to use it, or what it depends on or how to configure it.

- Had to use ChatGPT to help generate me a docker-compose.yml, except it forgot about memcached, set the wrong environment variables and just generally did a sloppy job.

- Once it was running it was a huge pain to set up reverse proxying properly, because Zulip apparently doesn't even pay attention to proxy headers if you're talking to it on port 80, even if X-Forwarded-Proto says https. It would get stuck in an endless redirect loop trying to redirect https to https. I could only properly debug this with tcpdump. The only solution I could find was to expose port 443 of the container and then have the reverse proxy talk to that, but Zulip still won't respect X-Forwarded-For, and login emails still show the Docker network address for whatever reason. No idea how to fix this as I couldn't find documentation on how to do it for Docker; the doc for reverse proxying without Docker says to edit zulip.conf, which is impossible (or I don't know how, as again, I couldn't find documentation on any way to do it for Docker.)

- Even once I could access Zulip it was a huge pain to get it to access the databases it needs, because again, I couldn't find documentation on how to do this for Docker. This was after it was a pain to figure out how to generate an org creation link because I don't think I could find documentation for that either, I had to find the script and read the source to figure it out.

- Even once it could access the databases it needs, and I could get it to use the right passwords (which was annoying as it generated SOME of own secrets, but not others, and started ignoring the corresponding settings, like the email host password), I tried to set up push notifications but that required a setting I didn't know how to set because I couldn't find documentation on how to do that for Docker; I eventually figured it out but it was annoying.

It was so awful and took up practically my entire day. Once I could finally get it to work, it works pretty well, but it's not an experience I would recommend until the docs start supporting this use case.

I'm sure it would've been easier if I read the entire documentation, the entire source code, the entire build script of the Docker container, etc. but I just wanted something to work...

I typed "Zulip docker compose" into DuckDuckGo, the first result was https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip which has commits from today, so doesn't seem out-of-date.

> Had to use ChatGPT to help generate me a docker-compose.yml, except it forgot about memcached, set the wrong environment variables and just generally did a sloppy job.

It has a docker-compose file in it, has memcached in it.

> [...] X-Forwarded-Proto [...]

Does https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t... help?

> access the databases it needs

The official docker compose has databases set up already, I guess you were missing those from your ChatGPT created compose file.

____

It kind of seems like you were linked to the wrong place for documentation about Zulip with docker in the beginning and then went from that.

A quick click-through seems to suggest you landed on https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht... and then clicked on the prominent "Docker image" link on top which leads to a random location on the page. (at least on Firefox)

That's very understandably annoying. If can you confirm that that is what happens, a bug report either with Zulip or ReadTheDocs (not sure which) might be in order.

> I typed "Zulip docker compose" into DuckDuckGo, the first result was https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip which has commits from today, so doesn't seem out-of-date.

Of course, that's where I started as well. However, when I tried to pull as described in the README:

    $ docker pull ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0
    Error response from daemon: failed to resolve reference "ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0": ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0: not found

So I had to pull from `zulip/docker-zulip` instead, because that one actually does exist.

> Does https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t... help?

It almost did, but Zulip's port 80 still would try to redirect to HTTPS, even when X-Forwarded-Proto said https.

Today (after I had made the comment you replied to), I tried setting `CONFIG_application_server__http_only: "true"` as should work according to https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/add4339a92d3073d5... , but it appears the image I actually have is different, as /sbin/entrypoint.sh reads:

    if [ "$DISABLE_HTTPS" == "True" ]; then
        echo "Disabling https in nginx."
        crudini --set /etc/zulip/zulip.conf application_server http_only true
    fi

So I set DISABLE_HTTPS instead and that worked. It appears this has been removed according to https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/add4339a92d3073d5... first committed two days ago, but that change seemingly hasn't reached the image I'm using? Either way I wasn't even upgrading so how would I find those docs?

> The official docker compose has databases set up already, I guess you were missing those from your ChatGPT created compose file.

I didn't even know how / to use the official docker compose because I didn't find documentation that explained what to do. I didn't see information in the repository on what to do and assumed its compose files were for development/testing.

> A quick click-through seems to suggest you landed on https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht... and then clicked on the prominent "Docker image" link on top which leads to a random location on the page. (at least on Firefox)

Using Safari; for me it leads to the "Zulip in Docker" section on the "Deployment options" page. It says only that the Docker image exists, and that using it increases the effort required (obviously). I followed the link to the Docker image and only read the README because that's usually where installation instructions are. I found none. At the bottom it says "See our main documentation" which I didn't follow because I thought it was just a link to Zulip's documentation which I had already established was near useless. Following it now, apparently it's Docker-unique documentation. Would've been helpful to have known that or for it even to have been indicated anywhere. But some of it still doesn't apply to the image I'm using since the ghcr.io one seemingly disappeared for some reason.

That is strange. `docker pull ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0` works fine for me. So something seems off with your setup in general.

Hey -- Zulip developer who works on the Docker images here. I'm sorry you had so much trouble; that sounds like a really frustrating experience!

We were in the middle of a transition to a new Docker image when this news dropped. There was a short period where the new ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0 image was broken (https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/31-production-help/to...) due to an overzealous Github Action which "helpfully" cleaned up the sub-images (see https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/pull/600). That's almost certainly what bit you when you first tried to pull. The image has been repaired and repushed, which is why pulls of it are working now.

The HTTP/HTPS complications you ran into are frustrations which we were specifically trying to address with the new image; and the documentation in https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/ is specifically about the new image because we didn't expect new users to be starting fresh there but with the old image. For instance, the new image defaults to HTTP-only, since that's a much more common deployment mechanism with Docker these days. See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t...

It sounds like we need to do a better job of:

- Clarifying on the documentation it is for the ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server images

- Updating the documentation link from the repo's README to be more explicitly the Docker Zulip documentation, and placing it more prominently

- Updating the links in the standard Zulip documentation to go to the new Docker documentation, and not to the repo's README.

I'll push those changes today.

We've got some instructions on moving to the new images (https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t...), but because you don't have a lot of configuration set, this will mostly just be switching to our provided compose file.

If you have other questions or feedback, please drop by https://chat.zulip.org -- we're friendly, and happy to help out. :)

> If you have other questions or feedback, please drop by https://chat.zulip.org -- we're friendly, and happy to help out. :)

I recall reading that there would be no support for my setup if I'm not clobbering an entire server with the official installation script:

> If you decide to disregard our advice and use a server that hosts other services, we can’t support you

So, I'm just thoroughly confused at this point about what one would be expected to do in my situation, and how they could come to learn that.

That's intended to be about if you're using the non-Docker install on a host which hosts other services. Docker installs are very much a supported setup!

As a former user of Zulip at a previous company, thank you for this software, I enjoyed using it. Maybe I'll setup a private instance for friends and family so I can enjoy it once again.

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.

+1.

It's a push out.

That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.

Discord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...

Discord is focused on large groups. E2EE doesn't work in this case. Group management overhead traffic is too high and too unreliable, and a bad actor could just join the group under a pseudonym to log messages. Discord isn't E2EE for the same reason Hacker News isn't.

For large public servers it would be pointless. But for DMs and small private servers, it would be meaningful. Most people in DMs and small private servers would not appreciate their messages being publicly accessible like HN comments are.

I REALLY doubt anyone XYZ while XYZ is illegal/pursued/banned in their country hasn't already extensively thought about their own threat model, and that disclosing this kind of infomration on a public platform is not safe.

> 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.

Exactly. I am sure they won't share their face or ID and will move somewhere else. Big opportunity for other platforms to stand up and grow their user base.

Literally just finished spinning up a Matrix server for my friends and I to try out

nice!

You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna upload ID to use a “shitposting about video games with friends” service.

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.

wdym, how did your dog driver license even pass before AI ?!

The tech used some variant of OCR, presumably

He's a handsome boy.

Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.

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.

well, any dog can pass the driving exam in US

It used to be that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. ;)

The perfect reply. Hats off to you, good sir.

* on fidonet

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.

The Distributed YouTube Archive project is, sadly, on Discord.

Just use Ai to make a non existent human face, might as well

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.

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.

It's definitely fraud, the consideration is access to their service.

It's still fraud

It's likely against the ToS rather than illegal. But if they're deleting IDs correctly after verifying I guess you just have to get past 30 days

The mere possession of a fake ID is illegal on its face, using it is fraud.

But is a photoshopped image of an ID a fake id? Do you possess it? A photo of an id isn’t an id, it’s a photo. Ceci n'est pas une pipe

I suppose that's tongue-in-cheek? Otherwise I can only wish you good look in court with that defense. ;)

In my jurisdiction, it's clear- cut: yes, that would constitute a forgery.

But how does Discord sue you? On face might be a crime, but in reality it is expensive for Discord to sue someone just because of an ID.

Of course I agree this doesn’t worth it. If they force an ID I would just abandon the platform.

I was referring to the concept of "ceci n'est pas une pipe", and that even just digital forgery of an ID can constitute a crime that can be prosecuted independently from anybody suing.

Of course I highly doubt they'd sue. They either just don't let you in or you abandon them. I'm with the latter.

Yeah I agree. There is always some risk about government ID. Long gone the day that ppl could forge one relatively easily, when ID was just a piece of well made paper.

I’m not a lawyer, but i’d guess that possessing a jpg of a fake id is treated differently under the law than a physical forged id. Once you use it to defraud someone, that’s probably treated the same, but just owning the jpg?

I guess I assumed it’s illegal in that you are using an image to tell a lie in a transaction… like any other kind of forgery - but what i’m actually unsure of is posessing a jpg of an altered drivers license illegal? Seems different than a physical license.

At least where I'm from, the forgery or the possession of a forged ID is a criminal offense in itself, not matter the intent or whether it's actually used.

I'm not sure that photoshopping a dog in place of the portrait would qualify to though. It's immediately obvious that it is neither you nor a valid government issued document so doesn't that preclude it qualifying as forgery?

Good question, IANAL.

Obviously you can go further: What if you just draw up the whole thing with a pencil? What if it's an ID identifying you as a citizen of Nowhereistan? Where does freedom of artistic expression end and a forgery start?

Again, IANAL, but I suppose it would qualify at least as fraud once you try to use even an obvious fake as "proof of identity" in place of a requested government issued document. In that case, there's an intent to deceive that's hard to deny, even if it's just about age verification for access to a digital platform.

I could imagine in court it might come down to details, like whether it's sufficiently similar to a real ID at a glance, or whether tamper-proof marks of an official ID were copied as well.

In any case I wouldn't want to risk up to a year of jail time over a joke.

Yes, it is indeed not always clear what constitutes forgery (Germany).

> A document in the classic sense requires an embodied declaration of intent that identifies an issuer and is suitable for providing proof in legal transactions. In the case of a lawyer's letter, the signature is an essential part of the standard repertoire of authenticity.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Document-fraud-via-email-Why-th...

So removing some parts to make it _could_ make it safe, to Not create a "risk of confusion":

> Even if computer processing creates the appearance of a genuine document, the typical characteristics of the original must be present to establish a serious risk of confusion. Likewise, the BayObLG did not consider the offense of forging evidential data according to Section 269 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) to be fulfilled.

Off topic, but I love how every country has its weird abbreviations that seem obvious but really aren’t, like BayObLG for Bayerisches Oberlandesgericht (Bavarian State Superior Court) or something close to that. Or how every British cop show assumes its audience knows exactly what a DCI is, as in “This is DCI Foxwaddle and I’m DCI Rugby-Botherington, may we have a word?”

I found a picture of someone my age, gender, and background and used that in the past for some things.

But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber, but probably won't ever use it again, either.

You do realize this is wire fraud right?

Wire fraud is more than just lying to someone over the Internet. It requires a financial gain.

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.

This gives me some idea: just use AI to generate an ID.

Yeah, I've been warning everyone about the consequences but nobody wanted to hear it. So do people still want a general social media ban for teens?

Everybody hates teenagers, so yes.

It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.

This is the kind of thing I would have posted while in High School.

Brilliant observation! I would like to make the statement more precise: not hate/hatred but jealousy.

They're not hated, they're just treated as non-entities that aren't assumed to have or need any agency.

People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.

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.

Absolutely. Social media and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Ban it for everyone.

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.

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.

I’m not suggesting “upload an id”. I’m suggesting ban all these brain slugs outright.

Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind bars.

Yes we should give the government more power and put up “The Great American Firewall” so Americans can’t use any foreign Facebook like companies.

I didn't respond to the suggestion of absolute prohibition because it's too ridiculous a concept to take seriously.

It's the only reasonable thing to do; the status quo is what's ridiculous.

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

>All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly

This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.

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.

While we're architecting the lives of millions of strangers what other reasonable things would you personally like to disallow?

Your personal blog fucktrump.com is social media. I tipped the government about it so it can be correctly blocked and you punished with jail.

So you chose to respond to something they didn't say instead? Weird tack.

Do you disagree with the first amendment? That's fine, just get it repealed first.

If I host a personal server with a Facebook-like app for myself and a few friends, at which point do I go behind bars in your brave new world?

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?

> "won't someone think of the children" scare

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.

Who cares? What exactly is lost. Personally I’m not going to give them my ID, I’m just going to stop using those parts of the internet.

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.

This place should burn too.

And every video game is a RPG because you play a role.

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.

> some guy running an Anime forum.

I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at this point.

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.

Blue sky is a social network, not social media.

A subtle but important distinction

I am super curious about this distinction! Could you say more?

On a network, people interact with each other.

In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.

Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.

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".

It was renamed from social network to social media by business executives, who hijacked the social networks built by us

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.

If anything the terminology shift was the other way, we called forums and MySpace social media back then even though MySpace is called social networking now. "Networking" back then was pretty restricted to business / self-promotion oriented stuff like LinkedIn.

We didn’t call forums back then “social media”, we called them discussion forums…

I was there, just go to the official phpBB forums and search my name..

I was also there. We (ie the people I interacted with) called myspace social media and considered discussion forums to be a specialized subset of social media.

We also considered myspace to be a social network (due to the friend graph) while forums were not.

The chans were a weird almost edge case. I think they qualify as social media but the lack of persistent identities significantly changes the dynamics (obviously).

Nobody called a phpBB forum “social media” 20-25 years ago.

Nobody.

Not only did we do it back then, scroll around this thread - it's still a thing today, people are calling HN "social media".

As far as I know chans are always considered "image boards" and they are usually distinct by the fact that the information is "pushed off" the board after a time or amount posted afterwards.

Image boards, which are a subset of forums, which are a subset of social media.

This is based on changes in trends and is somewhat of a moving target so I'll give some dates.

In the 2000s, 'forums' were forums, and 'social network' was the dominant term for products like FB and Myspace. A movie even came out with that name. Both were also 'communities'. These are verifiable on Google trends.

In the 2010s, 'social media' became the preferred term, mainly because it contrasted with 'the media' as the other major source of information available, but also because it was just an easier to use and more generic term than 'social network'. 'Forums' were still largely forums, tho like all activity online, on occasion it got lumped into 'social media'.

Sometime in the 2010s we started to delineate 'social network' from 'social media' as distinct eras of social products and properties of how the products work. This became extremely clear once the era of video took over in ~2020, as video is historically 'media' in a way that exchanging text never was.

The term 'networking' is/was its own thing and mostly unrelated to 'social networks'.

FWIW I did market analysis for Yahoo's online communities division in 06 and worked on two FB app startups, one which was a college social network, and interfaced a lot with FB in 08-12. All of these words and fine delineations were essential to my work and part of the research I was doing at the time. I looked over my notes to confirm.

This delineation does not match the common usage of the terms as I understand them. If you want to talk about parasocial media then just use that term.

By that logic, Discord would be a network. There's no default feed for Discord, you need to actively seek out friends and community.

Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.

> "specialized ~creators~"

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.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have the same patterns. There's no requirement for them to be in video form.

Most successful Twitter and Facebook posts are visual anyway.

This is a distinction that no existing or proposed law has made and is based solely on your feels.

A social network exists between people, it does not require a platform or technology. Social media is a medium where people correspond.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answe...

All the explainers in the world don't matter if people don't actually use the terminology that way.

And yet here we are, using the terminology that way.

Not uniformly, no. The local comment subtree is plenty evidence of that.

Blueskys only difference is that it hasnt been enshitified yet.

And when (if) that happens, everyone will just continue to use the same network through a better app. Blacksky is a notable example of this already happening.

Sorry but you sound exactly like that comic. "Our blessed homeland, their barbarous waters"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

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!

Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.

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.

> What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. etc.

Whether or not it's "better" is orthogonal to the point at hand.

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.

Can we still call 4chan antisocial media?

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.

I don’t understand your point.

I don’t use any of these platforms, except HN. But the distinction between social media and social networks is pretty clear.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answe...

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.

Hacker News is also social media - at least by most reasonable definitions of social media. Should it also be banned?

Having an account should probably be restricted to adults only. But it's such a low priority target compared to the other platforms.

I think we should ban all users until they provide 10 photos of their face from different angles and lighting. Passport and birth certificates and a lawyer letter confirming it’s really you trying to sign up under the username: LexiMax

Then all this will be synced with govs so can read all your messages. And sell to ad companies to spam you later. (They can link your phone number, email etc to you as you provided real id on all those).

And if you travel to some country that doesn’t approve what you ever said, maybe you broke their law, so you deserve a few years in prison.

No, because banning social media at large probably isn't the right answer. It's certain interaction patterns that cause harm. That can be pushed back against either technologically (ex chronological feeds) or culturally (ie via moderation).

There's no perfect solution but some are significantly better than others.

The banned interaction patterns are the ones that make social media social media.

And oxygen is also a poison. I don't know what's wrong with HN, but the moment there's _any_ basis for comparison, so many people here are extremely confident that there's no difference between the two things. I'm sure it's an earnestly-held belief, but it's maddening and simply incorrect.

Further, if in some contrived scenario we had to lose HN to get rid of all social media, I'd happily do it.

Social media doesn't mean communicating with people you know. Social media means optimized algorithmic feeds. You could have met the same friends over email.

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".

It’s bad for everyone, except for the advertisers, and arguably it’s bad for them as a 2nd order effect.

I think we just need to ban social media in general. It's done more harm to our societies than good.

Good bye, Hacker News. I knew ye uhh... Well, I knew ye.

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.

Comments are where 90% of the value of HN is. If you remove them and it just becomes another news aggregator, I very much doubt that it would retain most of its users. Nor would submissions be "high quality".

define 'social media' .. were BBSs social media? usenet? email? aol instant messenger? physical community bulletin boards? classified ads? newspapers?

What is social media?

What happens when the governments around the world decide to ban something that you care about? Will you be so eager to agree with them or will you cry that your rights and your freedom are being taken away?

Don't like social media, fine, nobody is forcing you to use it.

ID verification for sites that where people speak the truth.

Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.

It's the worst of both worlds.

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.

Absolutely, who gives a shit about some platforms on the internet.

Then use that server without age verification?

I’ll vibe code that sh*t in a sitting

Seriously, and probably do a better job of it. Electron. Yuck.

The problem isn't the platform, it's getting a critical mass of users. Until everyone is using it, nobody is.

You can say “shit” on the internet.

Only if you let them scan your face first, comrade.

Please do and write about it, whether it goes well or not.

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

We shouldn't reward their data collection and AI surveillance bullshit with apathy, though.

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

Government, sure.

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.

Discord hasn't been video game only for a long time

I think Discord is trapped in an ugly place:

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.

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.

That’s not a reasonable societal expectation. That should be an expectation of the parents to follow through on.

> 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.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

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.

Feel free to go make a social media website that requires ID. What you are claiming is that websites that don't require ID should be destroyed. No.

I don't need a public ID to sit in my local park nor shop for most things on Main Street.

>nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.

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.

>> nobody should escape the consequences

There are no consequences whatsoever for this.

I've never been to a town square where I had to let some random person photograph my face or tell me to leave.

I'd never thought I'd see advocates against privacy on HN of all places but here we are.

The old town square had anonymous pamphleteers.

You don't have to, you just can't access NSFW channels and servers.

I believe what you said is correct and this headline is incredibly misleading. Most people should not need to upload any ID. If you are so addicted to NSFW content on Discord, then it is a different story.

I'm in a small server that's marked NSFW, not because the purpose is to share porn, but because without the server owner checking that box, Discord with use content filters wherever it deems necessary.

Lots of servers just hit the nsfw checkbox to avoid the discord nanny tsk tsking them all the time.

I would have to verify my ID to talk to those friends.

> I would have to verify my ID to talk to those friends.

Or they uncheck that box.

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>.

Eh, I dunno, there’s a free chat app lifecycle that they all pretty predictably go through and Discord is getting a bit long in the tooth.

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.

WRT the verification, it is a symptom of the fact that Discord is entering the monetization phase. So, I don’t think it will be the thing that causes people to leave. It is just an interesting road mark along the way.

WRT the stickiness, I just use Discord as a site to chat with my friends. Based on other comments, some folks use it as more like a social-media site. So, maybe I just don’t see the roots. If it is more like a social media site, it might survive in that lingering state that sites like Facebook have.

> I’m giving it exactly 2 weeks after implementation for most people to just suck it up and upload their IDs.

I don't most people will even notice, as they are not in age restricted servers or channels.

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.

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.

That won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many times it's used to permaban you later.

This is the big problem.

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.

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.

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.

How do we get back to what we had?

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?

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.

I read the suggestion to replace your discord guild and not the entire Discord.

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?"

> scaling such communication isn't free.

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.

The fediverse already exists.

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.

>A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.

Based on a quick Google search, it looks like there are a number of tools to download and back up Discord conversation archives.

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.

> 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.)

> Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again

We had forums using forum software but moderating the spam got too hard. If you create your own space using any common software platform then you'll be pwned (a la PHP-Nuke et al). I presume even pure custom web pages would end in tears these days (DoS complaints seem to be a more recent reason; also Bot form submission is pretty good at being bad).

It's not that bad. Yes, you need to make a couple of good sysadmin decisions, but it's very much possible to operate a small web.

Source: my VPS-hosted site was up through all of the recent AWS, Cloudflare and Azure outages.

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.

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

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.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

Reddit and HN.

Since when does HN have shadowbans?

since almost forever, that's what the "show dead" toggle in your profile settings is for - it shows the dead posts from shadow banned people

I always assumed that those were posts that got flagged too often.

"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

No, FB has their own shadowban system

Tip: You can always tell if you are banned on Reddit by accessing the shadowban appeal page which is only visible if you are shadowbanned yourself:

https://reddit.com/appeal

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.

The indieweb circle calls this POSSE: post own site, syndicate elsewhere

Most of the big platforms penalise posts that contain outlinks however.

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.

`I could still tell because their profiles were sterile`

That is exactly example that parent posted about. Not every fb user is addicted to it, and has used it for long time.

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.

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.

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.

Can you elaborate on this and tells us which banks?

Name and shame please, so that we can avoid these nasty banks. I also hope you leave some bad reviews on TrustPilot.

Discover hit me with a 3rd party ID check (Socure) after being a customer of theirs for decades. They locked me out of my account, including access to savings, CDs, and credit card e-statements until I complied. And they did it without any warning.

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.

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.

There is automated pipeline for this generated from obituary for monetary fraud.

> 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.

Companies still do this today.

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.

You're thinking of the fraud detection tools. I'm talking about a tool that was designed to NEVER let the user succeed. There is no way to successfully verify your ID and get your account reopened. They build it because their fraud tools were hyper aggressive and it was cheaper to lose the customers and block the fraud.

That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.

If you mix in the spammer and bad actors, it makes sense to just say no.

The solution is, of course, have smaller social networks.

> 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.

I honestly believe it's a battle no one can win.

Fake phone support users? Of course not. Maybe in a few years.

This all goes away if you require social media companies to charge users for access. The addiction to free stuff is what’s really killing the internet.

You think feds won't pay for bot accounts? Record labels already pay for botted streams, so I'm pretty sure MOSSAD would pay to bot Facebook. Hell, it already happens on X.

The problem mentioned in the parent comment was the volume of fake accounts overloading customer support. If it’s no longer free to create spam accounts for phishing etc, the profitability of scamming will shrink and decrease the incentives. I don’t think feds are exactly slamming the support queue.

More importantly than the bot problem, it would decrease social media usage in the aggregate while also encouraging more competition. Much easier to bootstrap a business if you’re not having to compete with big tech offering the same thing for free because they can subsidize the losses.

You should read report from those support workers. How many disgusting image they need to see each day.

Adding more support staff just more complexity. Facebook need to break down into small networks. (ie. make less revenue, if that's all you care)

You suggest they should scale up the support team, I said they should just scale down their whole business.

Somehow I can't see Facebook volunatarily scaling down, and even if they did, it would leave a gap for a "global" network to take its place.

Companies as large as Facebook (really all of the American Big Tech) should just be illegal.

It's long overdue that we remembered that the very notion of a corporation is a creation of society. Corporations have no natural rights whatsoever because they don't naturally exist. It follows, then, that societies have the right to impose any limits and prohibitions when chartering corporations that don't discriminate against their owners (i.e. so long as restrictions apply uniformly). This includes limit on company size, its marketshare etc.

They already are illegal, laws are just not enforced. We don't need more laws, we need enforcement. It's the same in the EU. If GDPR laws were probably enforced the yearly fines would be a magnitude higher than they currently are. But they're still too scared because of the defense and gas reliance.

It stems me positive to read this by a user with a 2012 HN account though! Nice.

In US at least, the current interpretation of our anti-trust laws (after Bork's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox) is such that it is not illegal - you have to prove harm to users, mere market dominance isn't sufficient.

> You should read report from those support workers. How many disgusting image they need to see each day.

Nonsense. You're talking about image moderation when somebody else is talking about appealing when their account is shut down after an accusation of being automated. There is 1) no one being (overly) traumatized by basic customer service, and 2) no reduced responsibility for removing child pornography from your platform if your customer service is terrible.

You should read reports of how Amazon drivers and warehouse workers are treated.

In any case, hiring more support staff doesn't change the quantity of that stuff.

> You suggest they should scale up the support team, I said they should just scale down their whole business.

Oh no, I always agreed with you that what you're saying should be what happens. But there's zero chance of that happening, as only the US can really do this, and it won't unless the candidates for 2028 are not the current frontrunners.

Requiring human phone support however is something e.g. the EU could very reasonably do and get away with.

A quick way to discredit your own point is to confuse revenue with profit. Never mention revenue when you are trying to claim companies can afford to do X or Y.

Grocery stores famously have large revenues but very narrow profit margins so they can’t afford anything expensive.

Meta’s profit was $60 billion in 2025. That’s the number to use in examples like yours.

If you have the wherewithal, small claims is a secondary appeals process: https://www.keenesentinel.com/state_news/how-owner-of-teatot...

https://archive.ph/TrqXA

I battled an online casino that did this. I had under a grand in balance but my account got locked and they needed verification for every payment method I had ever used over a 2 year period, and I had used A LOT. I would reply back immediately with all the information, etc. Took a good month and a trip to my bank to get documentation on ownership of old debit cards but by the end of it I was sending them basically a 20 page package of all the proof they needed with everything already laid out perfect. I had accumulated a bunch of internal support email addresses of various agents or systems and would CC everyone every time, by the end the email chain was 200+ messages and I had 15 people on CC. But I got it unlocked.

Substack also wont let you contact human support without spending days fkdskf around with its ai chatbots who refuse to ever, ever escalate to a person

Exactly my experience. Hoovered up my data and refused to let me in after.

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...

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.

> The big ad networks want >> unique for each delivery so you can track

> it's hard not to think we're living the last decades of American economic hegemony

Bit of a stretch to correlate this with Instagram suspending some guy

You see, they had to start at the conclusion and work backwards to somehow justify how they "arrived" at such a take.

Remember, we've been in "late stage capitalism" for over 100 years

Yeah, same here. I tried logging in years back and they wanted my driver's license. My last comment must have been in 2013 or so.

I don't see it as the journey's end. But it's gonna be a much quieter road if most people don't walk away from this stuff. Maybe that's for the best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you not buy/sell on marketplace? I guess this might be a wrong website to ask such questions.

I browsed for a while but didn’t see anything worthwhile.

I’ve had friends coordinate for me in the past for a couple things but honestly eBay is still my go to.

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.

Those pesky whistleblowers, journalists, and political dissidents have had it good for far too long. They’ve needed taking down a peg

That’s a strawman. It’s such a tiny aspect of the what the majority of activity on the internet is that it’s irrelevant to any large scale discussion of the internet.

Just like how school shooters are irrelevant to any large scale discussion of education? It is very relevant and impactful and you can't just hand-wave it away by saying percentages mean it doesn't count.

Until use of TCP/IP or DNS requires uploading a video scan, the internet will keep on.

Try to remind your neighbors that you can go outside and talk to people to share news of the hood

It sounds like they would like the idea of Worldcoin[1] very much (I want to make sure I am being sarcastic. I hate the idea).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

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.

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group:

- Matrix

- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)

- IRC + Mumble

- Signal

I have found Element and Matrix to be totally unusable in iOS

Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.

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...

MiroTalk can be made into a widget on Element, is open source, and is P2P after the initial connection.

Revolt's rename to stoat is probably worse than any rebranding MSFT done ever.

It's because of the trademark: https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat

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.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626225, not sure how accurate it is, but it makes me want to revolt .

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.

It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.

"[beaver emoji] Revolt is Stoat now"

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 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.

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.

Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

According to the last comment in the issue it is already available for self hosted clients.

Matrix screen sharing is a feature of Element Call / MatrixRTC (in development).

For now, I think they do it through their Jitsi integration. I don't know how easy it is, as I haven't tried it.

https://docs.element.io/latest/element-cloud-documentation/i...

I’ve been self hosting Element Call and use it to call my girlfriend (and also used it with another friend a few nights ago). I’ve had a few problems where when starting the call it seems to not connect but just trying again works, and that’s really the only issue i’ve had that I can think of since setting up a TURN server (before that it would completely fail sometimes, but that’s not Element Call’s fault)

Thanks for sharing. I think the design of MatrixRTC (especially the scaling via hierarchical SFUs) looks promising. It's nice to see someone actually using it at this early stage, even if only for 1:1 calls.

Jitsi does that well

I use MiroTalk for it. Within Element you can set up widgets (basically PWAs) and so you can call via Element’s built in Jitsi widget (or a more reliable dedicated Jitsi link) and then use MiroTalk to share screens. It is a LOT better, especially for streaming video.

In terms of ease of use, it’s like three clicks. Technically more than Discord, but it’s p2p streaming so it’s far nicer quality.

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.

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

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)

Kids these days...

Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?

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.

IRC exposes your IP and you can't even access history unless you're willing to self-host your own bouncer, which costs time, money, and risk even if you already know how to do it, which most people don't. Being IRC only will exclude a lot of people who want to contribute to your project while also adding a lot of friction to the mere act of sharing screenshots, which is problematic if you have any software which renders to something not text.

I grew up on IRC and still use it, I have my own bouncer set up, etc. But the devs on Discord and not IRC probably aren't the devs with the skillset and resources to host their own server and bouncer. IRC just isn't in the running to fill the Discord shaped hole.

I haven't used an IRC server implementation in 20 years that doesn't do host masking. (IE; cloaking of client IP addresses).

That said, I'm biased as I have been running an IRC community for 22 years or so... but I prefer to have video/voice in it's own system. (mumble/jitsi)

>IRC exposes your IP

That hasn't been true for decades, and even if it was, it sounds like Hollywood's idea of a problem.

>IRC only will exclude a lot of people

If they can't figure out how to point a client to an IRC server, their contribution is worthless. It's the most trivial barrier to entry possible.

>sharing screenshots

Print screen > paste to image host > share link. Not hard.

I get that the Discord experience is slick, if you're willing to give up any sort of privacy or confidentiality. IRC is lightweight and simple, and its shortcomings can be worked around without too much effort. Discord is bloated, malicious, evil - I will gladly suffer some inconveniences of IRC.

Keep in mind that I am an IRC user, and I am not advocating for staying on Discord. I'm just stating that IRC is not - and probably never will be - a contender for "Discord alternatives", even among developers.

I can still see other peoples IPs on IRC today. When writing this comment, I can see people on major IRC servers with IP addresses that appear to correspond to consumer ISPs.

Another benefit of not being on IRC is that they don't have to interact with people who will disregard their contributions as "worthless". That's so dismissive of other people that I can't really take your comment seriously on the topic of interpersonal collaboration and communication.

And yes, even sharing screenshots becomes difficult. What host would you use that works in every country the IRC server operates in, works with people using any given VPN, and has a ToS and PP that is at least not worse than Discord's? Keep in mind this excludes Imgur and Catbox.

IRC is not simple and its many problems are not trivial.

Someday the big-name networks will support IRCv3 ChatHistory and all will become well with the world.

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.

Or even persistent chat history

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.

Which of these has been around for over three decades?

That would be my answer.

Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.

Most of the more elaborate features can probably be done through CTCP.

Snikket (https://snikket.org ) with Monal as the iOS client

Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

Any XMPP provider will give you a chat address that is compatible with Snikket: https://providers.xmpp.net

Zulip?

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.

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 lead the Zulip project).

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.

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.

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.

Not sure which compose file you mean; here's Zulip's official container image repo:

https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip

https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/main/compose.yaml

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.

This seems like a nice breakdown of some options:

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

(Not affiliated)

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."

> government overreach

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've been tempted for a long time.

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.

I wonder if you break TOS by sending unlawful content that way... :) Would have to be local model I'd imagine.

Any option that is not self hosted will eventually suffer the same fate. Decentralization is the way forward

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.

Discourse?

> 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.

For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.

Thank you! I've bookmarked your website!

Discord's voice rooms with screen sharing is a very cool feature i depend on daily. I haven't seen opensource messenger that implemented this yet.

Jitsi handles this very well.

I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

Jitsi has audio rooms like discord?

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.

Well, even if Jitsi doesn't have Push-to-Talk, you can still easily get it by using a hotkey to mute/unmute the mic system-wide.

For exampple, if you're on PC, MicMute [1] can be used for free, or if you want more customization, I would humbly present my side project, AutoPTT [2].

[1] https://github.com/SaifAqqad/AHK_MicMute/

[2] https://autoptt.com/

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.

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.

https://zulip.com/

Matrix has been trivial enough for me to implement with some of my non-technical friends. YMMV

You've pretty much covered all the open source alternatives, other than rocket.chat which is more similar to slack. This has a good list - https://medium.com/@jingjunm/the-best-alternatives-to-discor...

If you don't NEED the open-source, pumble and steam group chats work great too

https://nostrapps.com/flotilla

Check out Diode Collab. It’s private communities to join/create, no IDs/personal info needed, fully encrypted, and keeps your data under your control. Not a voice clone, but great if privacy and community joining/creating is the main thing.

Diode Collab - not fully open source but network and client are all open source. It has dramatic privacy commitment (stores no data on servers, decentralized user-to-user routing, no PII/phone/emails). Diode team just added STUN/TURN to the network last month and streaming will come soon. https://collab.diode.io

Worth looking at Diode Collab too No PII, E2E encrypted, p2p. Not 1:1, but its Zones are Discord-like. https://collab.diode.io

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.

>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.

Palantir? /s

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.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...

Thanks for the context

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?

Shake your head and move on.

It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.

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.

We start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated. Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security.

Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.

Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/

https://stoat.chat/

> Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated

Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/

> Discord is a good design

Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.

... 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.

Matrix is slow, buggy trash with bad clients.

(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.)

Bad clients issue stemming from the bad design.

Soatok covered it very well here: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...

I'm quite sure most of these issues were fixed by now, but the fundamental issues remain, at least in this federation.

What fundamental issues

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.

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.

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.

That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people went to mastadon/bluesky.

Reddit dropped a lot in quality after that. I suspect a lot of people stopped posting, even if they did continue using it in some capacity.

I uninstalled it from my phone entirely. Definitely helped curb my usage.

That was certainly my experience. I got rid of the app and only used reddit in browser mode to read without participating. The noticeable quality drop after the migration, as well as all the artificial hurdles they put up to force you back on the app eventually made me stop using it entirely.

For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.

Hah I did the same thing. I only ever interact with it now when it appears in search results.

In the attention economy, you rarely become obsolete overnight. It's a more gradual shift of user focused being spent other places.

Platforms lose momentum when these events strike, and momentum loss is the death knell for social platforms. Reddit's missteps have put it on a downward spiral. They may hang on, even for an impressively long time, but recovery from this point is very difficult and usually involves transforming or re-forming the vision.

It can be done. It takes the right leaders. Most are unfit for this particular challenge.

I moved to Lemmy and it reminds me of 2006 era Reddit

In a good 'niche forums and quirky local cultures' type of way, or in the annoying epic bacon kind of way?

I was going to add "without the epic bacon narwhal" shit but opted to let that meme die forever

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

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.

atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue

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.

There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.

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 remember back in the days of instant messaging, there were clients which let you chat with people in a manner agnostic to the underlying IM provider. I used this one:

https://adium.im/

Maybe we need similar omniclients for group chat platforms, with automated migration scripts etc. I think the ideal migration method would be to implement continuous archiving, so the platform can't block you from scraping your own chat archives.

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.

Absolutely exhausting to be honest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?

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.

You do understand the difference?

Maybe time for a Usenet renaissance?

In a way, Usenet was a kind of ancient fediverse.

I don't want to run my own Whatever server.

I want Whatever to be designed in a way that allows me to go find a provider of Whatever that I'm comfortable with, to run my server for me, and for it to interoperate with Whatevers of other people regardless of which provider they are using.

I also want it to be possible for me to take all my data - chat logs, membership etc - and move them to another provider of Whatever if my current provider enshittifies.

And yes, I do want it to be possible to self-host, if it turns out that no remaining providers of Whatever meet the bar.

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?

discord being a closed, unsearchable platform is one of its main features.

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.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

Its hard to say. Reddit is still a shit show, but I still peer into niche communities you won't find anywhere else on the internet.

Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.

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.

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.

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.

I hope that this causes enough outrage that Discord starts to lose its effective-monopoly for gamers and other folks. The platform has been getting more and more shitty over time and it isn't healthy for one product to have this much power.

I would guess that there needs to be a clear, cheap, easy to use alternative to discord in order for a large numbers of communities to move over. It probably has to be a single clear alternative as well – multiple will exacerbate the decision cost

Gilded used to exist but it's seemingly gone now. The power Discord has is quite insane, to the point where people haven't even seriously tried to compete it seems.

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).

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".

> panic at losing years of history

I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.

Yeah. You male new friends and find new experiences. Or maybe you don't. That's the cost of freedom, I suppose.

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.

The thing is, what other option do I have?

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 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.

How do I know that this message isn't divisive propaganda posted by a bot?

Because it's not posted by a Russian/Indian account, duh!

In practical terms, it just ensures that the only bots flooding the zone with propaganda will be the ones owned by governments in whose jurisdiction Discord is.

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.

They don't have to comply in advance.

I wouldn't call it a response, but rather another thing that normalises ID verification online. Now all these governments can use Discord as a reference that (1) this is possible at scale and (2) companies are willing to do this.

Seems like an unforced error to implement this before being forced to.

Sounds like when Netflix reneged on family accounts.

I cancelled my account in protest, but their financials say they made money on the change (and thus all the execs are happy with it).

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.

Netflix supposedly added 24M, or 8%, subscribers in 2025.

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/netflix-q4-2025-financial-e...

They also cancelled 25M good shows and played 800% more ads in the same time

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.

The issue is that it's yet another platform that could leak your data? Why would you ever want to increase that chance?

Also, I'm not sure you would need to give discord your ID unless you're sending porn in your work chat or something.

In 30 years using the internet not once have my ID has been leaked (or my CC stolen, etc). Even if it happens now, and then 2 more times during my lifetime... the benefits of the modern internet exceed the risk of that happening.

It's weird how everyone here have been giving their credit card at restaurants and show their ID at events, but DISCORD is where they draw the line, somehow.

I'd give my ID to Discord if it was guaranteed that the leadership of Discord goes to prison in case of a data breach.

Why would the leadership should go to jail when a data breach is IT's fault? If your card gets cloned, the CEO of the bank should not go to jail. I agree with paying (HUGE) fines, but you suggestion is juvenile, at best.

> Why would the leadership should go to jail when a data breach is IT's fault

So that they don't create conditions under which such breaches are inevitable in the long run.

> giving their credit card at restaurants and show their ID at events

I've only had people look, glance, or swipe.

You're doing it wrong when you let them take a photo of you, your license, and your credit card whilst providing an email, your phone number, and agree to receive texts in order to get a code to proceed. Leave when they provide you an AUP, TOS, or privacy policy you must agree to prior. Stop staying for 30-days per their requirements, let them prance you around to God knows where like you're their property, asking them to wait whilst you research any involved, or worry about what happens when they're bought out.

When they hand it back saying you're a bot, or it's been refused, give them a daft look then try again. When their systems are down, meaning they can't see, don't try again when told to since vision doesn't work that way. What do I know though since you wouldn't shock me if you handed them your house keys instead, provided someone to escort them there, and then thanked them for their business. Hate to break it to you, but your line was missed, lost, ran off, or left you with the other lost souls in Baffleland.

I had the same thing with Reddit and let it see my face. It didn't bother me much - I don't really do anything more exciting there than this sort of hn comment. If I wanted to post controversial / illegal stuff I'd make a separate account.

I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy.

It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives.

Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find quite a bit of information. My introduction to hash chains is for for age verification specifically: https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/

this is just a think of the children attack

How would that mechanism work in practice, though? If every parent needs to become a trusted authority, wouldn’t that just move the goalpost? Who would be the trusted authority, and who would implement that?

I agree that the mechanism is elegant, but figuring out which entity should be trusted in a way that scales globally is somewhat difficult.

The use of the parent is an example. In reality it would be some official age checking provider (maybe the government).

Yes. I think that wahtever organization that issues your passport, would be a natural choice for setting this up.

But nothing prevents it from being a private company, although I cannot see a sound business model for it. Also it would need to project great credibility for customers to trust them with their information.

Realistically this would be another service attached to the government ID. Something like this does function in some European countries, doesn’t it?

It works quite well in Czechia. Upon verification request, you are redirected to a government site, where you select exactly what data (Full name, DOB, address ... ) you intend to share with the entity requesting the information.

I can imagine you could share just your DOB in such a case, while keeping your real identity private. In such a way Discord would learn only your age, keeping everything else from them.

Government learns that Discord was provided your data, but this is supposedly a trusted, regulated entity.

A better system is in beta in Switzerland. Government is the root of trust, but only signs your private cert regarding your ID. All the interaction with third parties is local to your device, the government doesn’t get to know you interacted with Discord. Discord gets a single bit “is the user of this device 16/18 (restricted/full legal autonomy age) years old?” With chain of trust to the government.

It depends on you thread model and how much you trust government.

In your model, government now know you are on discord -- they know where to ask when they want to find you.

It really depends which government you are under.

If the input is "give ID", what the software claims to do is almost meaningless since you cannot prove that software was running. What do I care that someone can tell me they built a privacy-first way of validating IDs/age if I cannot be sure that is the software they are running?

They can just as easily save the ID to disk and return "all good" for all I know.

No, the solution does not require that.

It requires that Bob proves posession of a private key, that only he has ever had. That private key could be generated specifically for the commitment that he got from Alice.

Something like half of Israel's economy is intelligence gathering wtf do you think is happening here it's pretty obvious. economic leverage, surveillance, foreign influence, tech exports being used politically, etc.

Even easier, just get tokens that carry no other information from ones government, and the government runs an API, that for a given token tells whether that token is valid. Can tokens be stolen? Maybe. Can your face be stolen? Today yes.

What's stopping kids from all using the token of that one older brother?

Same thing as using the ID or photo of the same older brother : Nothing.

No, using another ID has a much higher barrier: more likely to get caught (it's the same ID, after all - tokens might (or should) be better anonymized so services don't build user profiles just using the age tokens), more likely to get punished (there's a real name attached to it), more likely to lead to a video verification request to compare ID picture with actual face.

Discord say they won't keep a copy of the ID, so getting caught for duplicate ID would contradict this narrative.

I don't see how this is worse than using a TAN list, or using someone's phone to circumvent 2FA.

No API, they sign the tokens with the government's private key and you verify them with the government's public key

If discord needs to contact an API, then the government can associate the token with you, and you with discord, and know what you browse online. No thank you.

Hash-chains allows the solution to be token-less. You no longer need those per transaction information leaking API calls. You also avoid dependency on a single provider.

The communication in connection with a transaction would only go between the identity owner (Bob) and the provider (Cycle shop).

The EU is working on a actual privacy-preserving initiative [0] that allows owners of ID wallets to verify their age, without their actual age or personal data being transmitted. The standard and reference implementations are open source on GitHub. Yet everybody screams uploading IDs and total government surveillance.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

The same EU that is trying to backdoor every messaging app to "protect the children" TM? I 'll use their ID system on my dead body.

This is just pointless whataboutism. There are smart devs and crypto experts designing a sound, privacy-friendly system that is open source. It does what is supposed to do and how everybody would want it to be implemented. Yet people reject it on irrational grounds for whatever negative aspect they associate the EU with.

It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.

You trust the EU's pinky promise a keep their word that your ID will be safe and secure and never tied to what you say, the content of your messages or who you send them to. If that is so, then go ahead and use it. That's your business.

> whatever negative aspect

The EU literally wants to read your personal messages because it doesn't trust that you are not some criminal in disguise. Instead of the state having to prove that you are criminal breaking the law, it wants to read everything you send and store the data permanently in case you break the law one day. If you think that is acceptable and that is an entity that can be trusted, then I don't know what to tell you.

If I understand correctly how this works, it doesn't require trust or knowledge. The service gets exactly 1 bit of information (over/under the required age), the government system gets nothing.

"Don't trust, verify". It is an open protocol based on cryptography for everyone to verify that simply does not allow to submit identity information when you perform the age verificaiton check. There is no opinion here, no "you have to trust X not to do that later" - it is the property of the used technology to just submit the verified age. You can't derive identity information now or in the future just if you age-verified yourself. You are being paranoid and talking about a fantasy, non-existing system that is not the one I linked to.

On a side note, whataboutism is not about "stating a fact". It is when the stated fact has nothing to do or does not interfere with the original point being made. As in "Why would I trust the EUDI act when the EU does shenanigans like come up with stupid norms of the shape of bananas" - Stated is a fact, but it has nothing to do with the actualy EUDI act.

> It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.

What do you think whataboutism is?

At this point, it's just something stupid people say. It used to mean that when you pointed out that my people were desperate for the freedom of living under capitalism, I would point out that you lived in an apartheid state.

Somehow, here, "whataboutism" means that if after you point out that the EU is coming up with an age verification system that they claim preserves personal privacy, I point out that the EU is also very much, openly, against any sort of personal privacy. Somehow that's some form of communist propaganda. Or Russian propaganda. Terrorist? Whatever. The important part is that I'm someone who should be watched or arrested if I continue to question your motives on behalf of our enemies.

No matter how open source something is, as long as you can only run it on a non-rooted Google or Apple device, and it’s hardcoded with remote attestation features exclusive to these two platforms, it suddenly isn’t much better than a bro asking you to trust him.

Btw the other guy has a point, by definition you can’t support both privacy and something that obliterates it.

Yes, that EU. It's very big. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Dear littlecranky67, as overseer for your digital wallet, I am happy to inform you that the owner of the discord server kinkydwarfporn doesn't know who you are and your privacy is protected.

Signed your friendly EU official.

As long as someone in the chain is able to physically connect the dots it is game over for privacy.

Your comment assumes there is an "overseer". There is not. Guys, read the technical documents. It is all standardized and open-source. I can code my own wallet.

>Тhe EUDI Wallet notifies the user of a pending request to prove their age, including: the name and identity of the requesting party.

>She consents to share the requested info and her wallet uses verifiable credentials issued by a trusted authority (e.g., national civil registry) to generate a cryptographic proof that she meets the age requirement.

I am fairly sure that here is enough info to be deanonimized by the authorities issuing the EUDI and the wallet app developers.

You first quote reads: "You, the end user, get a notification that a party (probably the porn website you visited) wants to request your age and you, the USER, get the identity of the website (not vice versa).

As for the second quote: Yes sure, you credentials need to be signed by a trusted authority, someone has to establish you are an adult. But it is a cryptographic signature. Same as https certificate needs to be signed by a third party vs. self-signed certificates.

And the ID app developer logs that the porn site has requested my ID. So there is no privacy from the government. Which is much more important privacy.

How difficult would it be to add further anonymization? Let's say I want to prevent the bike shop from building a usage profile on the basis of the age check (e.g. because I'm buying booze). Would I just need to get more chains from Alice, or is there an easy way to integrate e.g. group signatures into the scheme?

I think the way to go would be for Alice to give you lots of commitments. They are computationally light-weight to generate anyway.

That would at least be a good and also simple solution. Maybe there is a perfect solution, but then I dont know it.

If you wanted to implement this in real life, who plays the role of Alice?

I think that whatever organization that issues your passport, would be a natural choice for setting this up. But it could be some other authority. In a way it is the identity owners and the providers that decide who they will trust as authorities.

Well your solution includes handwritten signatures and everyone being a handwriting expert so that they compare handwritten signatures. I wouldn't call this an elegant solution.

That is what the example uses. In the real world that would be a digital signature. Look under the heading "Fitting the parts together" to see what the real world solution could be like.

I'm not sure how hash chains would resolve the fundamental issue of needing to send your ID or similar to some random third-party company that does god-knows-what with it (probably stores it in a publicly accessible path with big "steal me" signs pointing at it). That they need to attest to your age means that they need to trust what your age is, which has really just moved the problem one layer deeper (as far as I can tell).

I assume by third party you mean the authority, and yes, the authority would need to know your personal information. At least enough of it to verify your age. So the ideal is that the authority is the entity that already knows your personal information. Like the entity that issued your passport to you, or the one that issued you drivers license.

But even if the authority was a private company, I think it would be an improvement compared to the current situation. In this situation your personal information would be held by this one company, and not whatever provider that needs to verify your age. Also, you would be able to use the commitments, that this private authority gave you, without any coordination afterwards. The authority would not know about your transactions.

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.

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?

How does this impact you in any way?

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.

They're saying there's a very good chance that, in your use case, you still won't be asked to provide ID.

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.

I don't disagree with that, personally.

If all you use Discord for is chatting with 3 people, these changes will have zero impact on you and your daily usage. You wont ever see an ID prompt.

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.

You don't have to make excuses for corporate decisions that damage user privacy.

this is hilarious, person who barely uses service says he will leave the service, what a concept

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.)

Future? Just look at China. They do all this already.

She's great but also damned to be a Cassandra, unfortunately.

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.

Yeah the LGBTQ folks I know are highly suspicious of how this will roll out.

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.

I'm afraid the thing that would be replacing Discord will be even worse

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.

We use Jitsi for voice/video calls + screen sharing (but I realise you may be talking about all-in-one alternatives)

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...

of course this has yet to be built.

I think it is more likely that the next best platform will end up gaining three principled civil libertarians and about seven zillion witches.

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.

I think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are.

And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.

At this point might as well...

There is a news story every 12 minutes for a company that leaked IDs

I really think on device verification is the way to go - and I don’t even see why we need to use ID.

Parents are always in control of a kids device. Just mandate devices have a child mode that parents can activate and have it send a ‘this is a child’ flag to all websites and apps.

But this assumes this isn’t all about ID checking everyone online, which is what it’s really about.

That would either mean you can tell the device to lie (which makes it useless), or that you don't own the device you use (which makes it unacceptable).

> or that you don't own the device you use (which makes it unacceptable)

It's already like this, unless you go out of your way to install a custom Android rom, which 99.9% of people will never do.

I agree it is unacceptable.

The thing is though - only KIDS need to not own their device. With parents overseeing it.

Why do we even need to age check adults?

Apple already has this https://developer.apple.com/documentation/declaredagerange/ I saw Claude app request it the other day.

Apple actually has this already. For countries that support IDs in Apple Wallet there is a "Verify with Wallet API" [1] and for other countries the app developer can get the age range from the iCloud Account [2] - but that is not verified with any legal authority and only based on user input.

1) https://developer.apple.com/wallet/get-started-with-verify-w... 2) https://developer.apple.com/documentation/declaredagerange/

I have my Gmail account since they were on invitations, circa 2004, and Google certainly knows this. That's the ultimate proof I'm an adult :-) That information could be exposed and used by 3rd parties.

Happily walking right down the path they are leading us down...

A world where nothing can be accessed except through a Google or Apple hardware-attested, photo ID verified device

This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasible to criminalize (watching videos of consenting adults engaging in all kinds of sexual acts) and adding more and more friction to the process (no pun intended!) is the best thing they can get. And the internet companies want more of your data to track you.

Like the UK, where you can tweet that someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants, and you can be arrested for tweeting that.

Or like Russia, where you can tweet that you don't like the president, and you can be arrested for tweeting that?

Like both, of course!

When you build a panopticon for some group you perceive as "good guys" to use keep in mind that eventually it will be controlled by "bad guys".

The burn down a hotel thing wasn't about panopticons - Lucy Connolly posted publicly with her own name and photo. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRestIsPolitics/comments/1lvrepk/...)

The sentence was probably excessive though.

UK also apparently arrest people for posting videos of zieg heiling dogs and other such nonsense. Which is exactly my point - once the instruments to track and de-anonymize people online are set up, they eventually will be used for all kinds of purposes.

Yeah but that doesn't seem to be the purpose or design of the current tech. Like anyone can still make an anonymous account and post whatever.

X requires email and phone number verification and your tweets are still buried if you don't pay (with a credit card)

Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?

> Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?

Yes? Yes, of course? Being an idiot on internet has traditionally been legal in civilized liberal western countries. Such person could be banned by a platform that doesn't want such content and ostracized by their peers (they guy who made sieg heiling dog video claimed he did it for his girlfriend or something and I would dump him, if I was her) but I don't want my government to build a panopticon to prevent such behavior and I don't want my taxes wasted on policing it.

In Germany it's illegal to venerate the Holocaust in any way whatsoever — for obvious reasons. Are you suggesting that should change?

Yes, absolutely. It should be perfectly legal to venerate whatever people want to venerate, that's basic freedom of conscience.

> someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants

> you don't like the president

One of these things is not like the other. In the second case, it's expressing disagreement with a political figure that has directed multiple mass murders of vulnerable people.

But in the first, it's promoting the mass murder of vulnerable people. Free speech isn't freedom to promote hate crimes.

> Like the UK, where you can tweet that someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants, and you can be arrested for tweeting that.

During the middle of a riot where people were actively trying to set fire to a hotel full of migrants.

Look up how people were prosecuted in the US during the 1950s and onwards for having "communist sympathies" or being against racism.

Do you think someone should be arrested for encouraging the burning down of a hotel full of people in real life? If so, why should it be different online? If not, well then you have more serious problems.

I do, but a lot of people don't think it should be possible for the government to track down the person who tweeted let's burn down the migrants hotel.

Does not having government-controlled cameras in our apartments make it impossible for police to prosecute wife-beaters? Can police do some actual work to catch "bad people" as opposed to making internet a panopticon?

I don't think that's a goal, but as a side effect of truly respecting privacy, I'm fine with that.

Do you have someone announce you when entering somewhere in real life, and if not why should it be any different online?

Yeah I 100% agree - but if you give them an alternative way to do the same thing without everyone having to get IDed - then I’d they still want that they’ll have to come out and be explicit.

How would that work on a PC? Not everyone uses Discord on their phone/tablet.

jumping from the frying pan straight into the fire.

why on earth would you give Google or Apple more attestation power and control.

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)

(here's part of it: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )

This is the true solution that gets the best of all worlds. The tech is just too immature still but this will change soon I hope.

For those curious, check out zkPassport (https://zkpassport.id/)

> 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!

It will be easy to check with devtools when the update is released

They could use AVF pKVM for this (which'd require a partnership with Google) but that of course requires locked bootloader + remote attestation..

So actually, I hope they're just lying..

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.

Who implements these idiotic policies? We do! Politicians could not code their way out of a paper bag! Giving up is not the solution. Refuse to do it. Make ID pass for a full-white jpeg.

Platforms want this, they're happily implementing it because they'll get a mountain of data to train on and sell, and they'll finally get to sell their userbase as real monetizable humans to their partners.

The more precise the profile the more money is fetched for you at market.

> Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first.

No offence but I think you are being extremely naive if you think that the people in power and the lobbyists who have spent the last 10 years relentlessly pushing for ID verification online and mass content scanning in the US and in the EU do not know what they are doing.

Here is the thing, most people are increasingly unhappy about the way things are going whether they are on the right or the left of the political spectrum. Governments can see that and don't want to see what happened in Nepal recently repeat itself. So they are getting ahead of the curve.

First require everyone to ID themselves online, then tie everything you say to your ID then use that against you one day if you decide that enough is enough.

The western countries are looking at what China is doing and simply iterating on it. They wrap it in a nit little bow to either "fight terrorism" TM or "protect the children" TM.

This is a pure power play meant to save their asses and the people who have been warning that this was always going to be going in that direction have been ridiculed and called conspiracy nuts but here we are.

Look at OFCOM in the UK. First it was to protect children form porn. Now they are looking to expand their powers to moderate speech online based on what THEY think is acceptable. If the EU gets it's way, you'll have client scanning in all messaging apps across the EU. And it won't stop.

This sort of thing is never about protecting kids, reducing harm or whatever they call it. It's about control about what you see, what you write, all done with the purpose to determine if you as an individual will become a problem for them in the future.

Platforms want this because it means they can get rid of the mountains of money they were paying for moderators to keep "child unfriendly" content off their platform

"If your kid is on Discord, and sees something they shouldn't, it's their or your fault, not ours"

> 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.

Isn’t that the first rule from On Tyranny? “Do not obey in advance"

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.

Yes, a good digital ID system would enable age verification in a way that protects privacy.

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.

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.

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.

It is only a matter of time before ID verification means the camera is always on watching the face of the person looking at the screen.

That's why I put black tape over my front-facing camera.

Expect a visit feom ho.eland security 10 years from now

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-t...

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.

> It is clearly _possible_

Is it?

I don't think it is.

I truly don't believe that there's any possible way to verify someone's age without collecting ID from them.

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.

It's possible to (cryptpgraphically verifiably) split up the age verification and the knowledge of what the verification is for.

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)

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.

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.

Here's my solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

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.

> ever so slightly

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.

So VPN in from Panama to access shady sites no one else frequents? That's your solution?

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.

You need to process that other people disagree with that claim, and do not believe we'd be better off.

We should not accept the Overton window shifting here, and say "well, if we do it to ourselves, in a privacy-preserving way, that's less bad".

> 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.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776272

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838417

> 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.

> Build and promote alternatives that don't.

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.

> 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 do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies?

_we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!_

It really would be less bad though wouldn't it?

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.

> You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.

Or, as has always been my experience, gives it a cursory glance without scanning or recording it.

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.

It doesn't have to be 1 middleman. Multiple companies can issue the cards, just like there are multiple beer and cigarette and lottery companies.

I wish I could edit my post because a lot of people had the same misconception when I first wrote it.

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.

there are multiple credit card companies, but only 3 big payment systems: Europay, Mastercard, Visa. that is the protocol: a triopoly that controls everything and then a handful of companies that wrap the same product and can't fundamentally change it.

Not unlike generic laptops that are made by OEMs in taiwan and resold by dell, and whatever small company.

"Solving" the problem of signing up clients and vendors at the same time is a different problem for the companies. They benefit from the vendor lock-in. The "solution" is to establish a monopoly

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.

> If parents want to abdicate their parental responsibilities, their children should bare the cost of that, not millions of strangers.

Oh but we all will. One way or another. There is a least bad option.

I guess my point would be that it is impossible to simulate raising a child. Sometimes least worst == worst. Huge wide spread cost with vanishing little practical benefit.

There is no 'half-pregnant' option. Compromise is synonymous with 'bring into danger' for a reason. They are right to be dogmatic about rights - believing that is like believing it will really be 'just the tip'.

mDLs support selective disclosure of age.

They dont want it to be private. They want to profile you and sell your data

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.

Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...

Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.

Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc.

Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.

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.

that's true, guilds moved to discord because it was easier to use than teamspeak

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.

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.

Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.

If you're in a democracy, that's the call to pay attention and vote in helpful representatives.

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.

A mayor or governor can't change these things though. That's part of the problem since I'm in the EU. It's irrelevant what representatives in my country want because they're too small of a minority. But even among those representatives there's nobody that actually cares about issues like this.

>That's why local elections are so important, despite the dreadfully low turnout.

Local elections here are about parties, not candidates. You can give your vote to Jim, but it's counted as a vote for Jim's party instead. The party picks whomever was their #1 candidate for the locality.

Youre joking, right? Nobody i have ever voted for has won anything

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.

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.

Multi-billion dollar corporations have never had any problems lobbying for their interests before.

Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links, scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for "ground truth" is the real interest here?

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?

> this decision is more defensive

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.

In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/

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.

It's not 'internal politics,' what are you talking about. It's the politics in our real world. UK gov is requiring ID verification for adult sites. France gov is calling a social media ban for teenagers.

We're talking about elected European governments here. It's not like Discord shareholders just woke up this morning and decided to make themselves poor.

Switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'

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.

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.

French lawmakers vote to ban social media use by under-15s ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-...)

Online age verification in the United Kingdom ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...)

Blaming Discord and switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'

Discord isn't under pressure to implement these measures globally.

I fully agree that they shouldn't be blamed for kick-starting age verification, because governments are pushing for this all around the world. But it's simply ignorant to pretend that Discord isn't helping these governments to normalise this process with their actions. They're also signalling that businesses are willing to comply and that they have all means necessary to do this.

> and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.

I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.

Pretty much every non-E2EE platform is scanning every uploaded image for CSAM at least, that's a baseline ass-covering measure.

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.

They have to at least for CSAM.

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.

To be fair, the terms and conditions probably say that they can do whatever they want with that data :-).

Don’t forget all the government creeps snooping on the wires.

Until the current administration, I was much more bothered by private misuse/abuse of date than the government. Now I worry about both.

Why? People who volunteer to work for these government drag nets must be total psychos.

Volunteer? I mean they do get paid.

The thing is it's a mix of both.

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.

We gave those brogrammers the keys to the machine when we made programming more accessible.

Good. Being OK with authoritarianism because they are on your side is never good.

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

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?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/16uy0an/not_sur...

Everything that is not end-to-end encrypted understandably has to do it.

Well it's not E2EE, so what did you expect? Nothing you do on Discord is private, everything is screened, categorized and readable by third parties.

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.

[1] - https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://convos.chat/

[3] - https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients

I set up this exact combo (thelounge + mumble) for my friends last night after this news. It's not a complete 1:1, but I think it'll meet our needs. I'm going on a road trip and as a fun experiment I'm going to try to get Claude to churn on integrating Mumble into thelounge, somehow, to mimic the Discord client. I'd really prefer something other than Jitsi for screen sharing, since I'm a weirdo and don't like the UX of making a 'call' and much rather prefer the 'hop in' style VC like Discord or Mumble.

Nice. If you do happen to integrate Mumble into one of the web front-ends please consider sharing it with them upstream so others may benefit from your work or perhaps just share a git repo with your patches. I am certain others would appreciate that.

Thanks - will look into these. IRC is a bit jarring after using something a little more convenient!

IRC is a bit jarring

Indeed it is not as polished and refined as the commercially supported service. Even if the self hosted services people stand up do not gain the same popularity as Discord they are nice to have when Discord is down or if people want to share something too sensitive for a corporation and their third parties to be trusted with.

On the plus side assorted IRC daemons have been around long enough that one can find Docker or Ansible examples to get started. More complex but popular IRC daemons such as UnrealIRCD [1] can be a little daunting at first yet have all the configuration directives and modules one could likely ever need. Many capabilities can also be disabled for simple setups. One of the simplest IRCD's to set up is ngIRCd [2]. I think the fastest I have set up ngIRCd including LetsEncrypt certs was around 5 minutes but that is because I get wildcard certs.

[1] - https://www.unrealircd.org/

[2] - https://ngircd.barton.de/

How convenient how "age restriction" leads to mass surveillance.

Also makes me wonder how people used to promote discord in the past. Big Brother is watching you.

That’s why you never promote anything, or if you do, you do it with full awareness that you are being irresponsible, because you don’t know what the future holds, and acting like things won’t change is incredibly shallow.

> After completing a chosen method, users will receive confirmation via a direct message from Discord’s official account.

Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing

I'll hardly miss using Discord, but if this isn't going to be a wake-up call to ALL (mainly) open-source projects using it, then we're all doomed.

We should seriously go back to mailing lists and IRC as a standard for OSS. Everything else should be viewed as disposable.

And websites that are not SPAs in disguise.

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.

F** that, guess I'm leaving that platform too now...

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.

I don’t sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile number every 90 days.

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.

Your solution is subservience.

Read again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't care.

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.

A solution implies a problem. I don't have a problem with this.

Like I said your opinion doesn't matter in this, it's your actions which matter. Whether see the actual problem or not is immaterial.

You clearly don't understand how this works. Social problems are not objective, like math problems. A lack of family support, for example, is something that many people label as a problem... but a lot of people just build strong social networks outside of their family and really don't care when someone says "family first!".

That's what I think about the cries around a lack of privacy.

I know I somehow ended up in a forum full of IT people and that might my problem, but: People are not software. You don't get to flag something as "problematic" on other people.

Deal with it and move on.

You must be unaware that you're your own best salesman. Only you buy the bullshit you sell, and you can't be shocked when others don't. There's a lot I could tackle here, as you're wrong in tons of ways, but objective facts reveal truth. Sadly that bot of yours won't work in the physical realm, so hopefully that's not the bullshitter.

Install cameras everywhere there's assumed privacy like the bathroom / water closet, bedrooms, or anywhere else. Can keep costs down by simply filming it as well. When anyone asks what you've been doing lately simply provide them those recordings. Might want to upload somewhere if easier, and freely post those too since you don't care.

Make copies of your ID, credit cards, phone number, and email addresses. Have some with two of those, some with three, and some with all four included. Mix it up in any carefree fashion you'd like. Next time one is required hand them copies, and then carelessly proceed about your business. Tell them to get over it, and move on, since that's their social problem of which you don't care regardless if they care you're a weirdo that doesn't care.

Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't assume others will falter in the same fashion.

"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.

I'm 45. My friend, I still resist licking the boot. Stop believing that your experience is somehow more universal.

I have a rich social network, I have a family, and now more than any time in my life do I think it's important to resist.

Stop saying you'll get less radical as you age, it's just not the axiom you think it is.

I have a spouse and kids. I still stick to my guns. Both literally and figuratively. Speak for yourself.

I sincerely hope you are merely goading folks on and don't actually believe the words you speak.

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.

>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.

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.

I don't socialize on Discord, I use it for work. That's why I don't care. I said that from the perspective of the people that are crying about Discord's move.

The weird thing is that you give your personal info, including your biometrics, to your government and your bank. You probably weren't thrilled when they asked you for your finger prints but eventually you gave them anyway because the alternative was not having a bank account. Everybody folds in the end.

What makes you think "corporations bad" but it's OK if governments and bankers do it? They're just as malicious and incompetent.

This is like being afraid to fly when you drive every day which is 200 times more dangerous.

Happily deleted it, just as I would for most % of the online rot I am a part of.

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.

Discord does not care about you old coders, they want the faces of the young. Moses traveled the deserts until the idol worshiping generation died out. Big Tech sees you as the problem and knows the young will fall in line.

FYI they're sending the data to K-ID, a Malaysian AI company to "detect" the age.

I wonder if this is compliant with EU laws around data sovereignty and similar?

If that’s the right question? :-) Not my area!

Are they going to leak IDs of minors again like they did last time? Who does this protect exactly?

It protects the investors so they can IPO

> Facial age estimation

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).

https://use-their-id.com/

> Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels

I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...

Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.

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...

OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.

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 genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...

Way more than you think. There are tons of Discord servers that only exist to share pornography.

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.

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.

https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

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/

In case anyone else can’t read it: https://archive.is/PvpAx

On all my devices and all my connections (residential and mobile) here in the EU I end up in a captcha loop for this site nowadays. Is it just me?

EDIT: seems like I'm not the only one [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1q0ewh1/do_you...

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

Can't wait to send my id to the cheapest identification provider they could find.

I'm really torn on this one.

I remember the internet from '99. Before facebook, before messangers.

People were communicating via usenet mailing groups - think online forum but via email - 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 an username.

I understand it was different time at different place, but oh boy, it was so much better.

You didn’t have the hoi polloi on the internet back then.

Well, yes, you could argue the internet was like "harvard", a proper secret society club, where only wealthy and approved were invited, but still, even in '99 the internet was freely available at unis and I remember we had a whole plethora of weirdos.

The other weird artifact of that era were "gaming caffes" - much like internet caffes, but before the internet was widely available and people were often bringing their own PCs to play starcraft or quake on LAN.

I play competitive games online to this day and I really miss these days. Today's online scene is extremely toxic. I still remember my den which was often frequented by local gopniks, outmost disgusting creatures, but when we played the game there was a strong sense of chivalry and sportsmanship that's nowhere to be find in today's online games.

I truly do hope this sinks Discord. It's a dreadful platform and an information black hole.

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else.

Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control.

> The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...

What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?

Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.

Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.

> Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.

This is not at all what section 230 does. All section 230 does is get rid of lawsuits that wouldn't be able to satisfy standing of a first amendment lawsuit or similar. Section 230 has to be one of the most misunderstood and confused laws known in the modern day. Absolutely nowhere in the text of the law does it say or imply that an interactive computer service, or the operator of such service, gets total immunity for anything and everything they do. Yet this myth is constantly perpetuated.

As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.

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.

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.

Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.

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.

Apt username. I already have to deal with non-functional wifi because of frequency band restrictions. And instead of buying physical media (or streaming), I have to "pirate" content because of DRM.

Any hardware or software that disobeys the user is useless for the user. It just becomes a tool for power grabs.

Nothing in that description involves hardware or software disobeying the parent user. The parent has all the power. What's wrong with that?

It's fine if it's opt-in until the opt-in becomes opt-out and I get to use my old gear until it dies. That would still be fine with me except for the fact that my income and by extension wife and family depend on me using a computer. That would still be fine if somehow we could escape this system and still have food and shelter but that won't fly with the healthcare system we depend on.

I didn't see how one (admin) account setting a flag on another account could be anything but opt-in. It's really unclear to me what you're worried about, the whole world getting put onto child accounts or something? I don't think a law that bans the vast majority of online commerce would get any support, among other reasons.

In theory, yes. But the idea was:

> Pass a law that requires devices and software to support a per-device or per user account 'child' or 'minor' flag.

We already know how such laws pan out in practise. Vendors don't want to be sued for non-compliance and benefit from restricting their customers anyway so their products are designed to obey the manufacturer at the cost of the owner.

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”.

> Parents are just burnt out, I think.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.

It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.

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]

[1] https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...

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 :)

For a 90% global drug crisis comparison: Also when I was a kid my parents generally didn't let us eat sugar. They were fine if we ate sugar at a friends but they didn't themselves buy sugary cereals or ice cream or candy or soft drinks (except for special occasions like birthdays).

As a kid I hated it and it made me feel like my family was weird. I can only think of one friend growing up that didn't have soft drinks in their house and his mom was a registered dietician. I'll have to ask my folks sometime if they fielded complaints from other parents.

And, yes, the comparison of today to the 90s is not apples to apples. There are legitimate safety reasons why kids today need cell phones. In the 90s there were pay phones everywhere and that is no longer true.

But I assume parental controls on today's cell phones let parents block all apps but Contacts/Dialing/Messaging if they want to.

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.

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.

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.

What's ruined by this? Honestly asking

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.

You don't have to ID after this, you just won't be able to access NSFW discord servers.

Then don’t give it to them. Stop using the platforms that require this.

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.

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.

Even though it's a bit easy to disable, you can use the "Unhook" extension to turn off Shorts.

It will take a 15 year old less than 5 minutes to figure out how to disable it.

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.

User agent flags? Those are some of the easiest to spoof. Wouldn't last 10 minutes.

No, there is hardware based attestation, and it could be set by an administrator / parent for the user account.

That doesn't really matter if something like more than 95% of time it's followed. Compared to now where there is nothing.

No corporation wants your kids to use their platforms less. Zero incentive for them to fix this. Parents are at war with corporations.

We must hold the line.

I sympathize with this a lot. What you’re describing really is exhausting, and it shouldn’t be this hard.

My take is that parental controls fail because they’re trying to solve a social and psychological problem at the technical layer. No amount of filters or settings can keep up with the internet, and kids are better at routing around them than we like to admit.

What’s worked better for us is treating this like other hard topics. We talk to our kids directly about social media, disturbing content, and strangers online, the same way we talk to them about drugs or sex.

We’re explicit about why some things aren’t allowed, what kinds of content exist out there beyond just sex, and that if something upsetting happens, telling us is always the right move and won’t cost them our trust or love.

That doesn’t remove all risk, but it shifts the burden from constant surveillance to shared understanding. To me that feels more realistic than trying to centrally control an environment that isn’t controllable.

We do that too of course. It’s not even the content that really bothers me. What bothers me is the targeted capitalization of kids’ attention. The instant gratification content model is changing behaviors for an entire connected generation in a way the world has never seen before. The real reason parental controls don’t exist is because it’s counter to what makes money for megacorps.

> When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job"

you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of discussion is not really productive.

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.

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.

Parents can’t do this. Kids need to be kept off this as a monolith otherwise they just get left out and become outcasts.

What I don't understand is why not have designated actors/ombudsman like notaries in the society that can verify your age/id without anyone knowing what it's for.

One can easily implement a nationwide system like this. You can trust people in your own community. There are no central govt actors. In such a system no one has any knowledge of which service you are proving your identity/age for and the cryptographic approval can be done without any ids being exchanged. The input to the ombudsman is a hash you provide which he can sign with his key and send to a server, that can ask the ombudsman: "this thing you are signing is for age verification > 18, check persons ID and press confirm if that's the case". The ombudsman presses confirm after checking the id and you are done. Every city municipality can elect a local councilman/notaries to do this, for a small fees.

Eu actually plans to introduce something similar through its EUDIW initiative. It will be a digital wallet focusing on privacy preservance and user control over attributes that are shared.

It will take some time tho before it is successfully implemented.

Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.

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.

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.

Just remember that the Terms of Service you agreed to are about as firm as explosive diarrhea.

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.

Then why could they not also legally get away with using account age as a proxy?

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.

Exactly.

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.

How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?

They need to have an always-on camera looking at the person using the device. No camera, no discord.

This may seem like hyperbole, but this is the reality for students and test-takers every day in virtual environments now.

I assisted as TA in a virtual learning environment. While we didn't make it strictly mandatory to keep the camera on, our learners were encouraged to do it, and we kept tabs on who was "engaged" and present, because at the very least, we needed to tabulate an attendance roll for every day.

If you're taking a standardized test, whether you're at home or in a controlled lab, the camera will always be on. Multiple ones. Not optional.

There is a large storm of controversy on college campuses about adapting young students early to surveillance cultures. I attended a community college about 7 years ago, and I felt I'd be a second-class citizen without a smartphone and an SMS'able mobile.

We weren't surveilled through smartphones at the time. But there was an app to receive campus alerts about public safety and other crisis events. And our virtual class sessions had various ways of ensuring we were human, and awake.

Taking finals and certification exams, I was often sat in a special-purpose testing center, and Step One was showing ID; Step Two was surrendering my watch, my phone, my wallet to place in a locker outside. So, students simply become accustomed to showing ID and being on-camera, and it becomes a fact of life before you graduate.

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.

So then it's REASONABLY not the corporation's fault if that user sees explicit content.

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 ;)

Apple deleted many legacy mac-dot-com accounts without qualms, not long ago. It was the phone accounts, in so many ways, driving it .. IMHO

Has discord even been around for 18 years?

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.

They are planning on doing something similar:

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,”

I'm curious to know what this "model" actually means. A real-time AI monitoring for conversations?

This infrastructure is already implemented

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12926016807575...

Great news, there’s finally going to be sufficient motivation for people to both build out and use open source alternatives.

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.

> 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.

sigh

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.

Perfect enforcement is not required for authoritarians. All they need is to have a threat of punishment, and a questionable process of uploading your ID is more than sufficient for that purpose. Most people will comply in advance.

More groups than authoritarians support online age checks of various sorts, and any for-profit enterprise would far rather externalize the heavy lifting of profitless identity verification to a government agency or contract. Coincidentally, I noticed Discord doesn’t seem to accept ID.me; how curious! If anyone has a larger database of verified ages with online proofs, I’m not sure who it would be.

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.

> these “protections” don’t yet exist on desktop

(Note: They do, but platform-native things are anathema to Electron and most apps, so.)

Ah, you probably meant TPM + Intel/AMD signatures + Windows + Microsoft signatures + Microsoft restricting the way Windows can be modified?

Not good, hopefully Microslop continues its downfall so that apps won't start using this "for securiy"..

No, because they won't do it in a web browser.

It'll be a smartphone app that only works on bootloader-locked devices (iPhones or Google SafetyNet for Android)

Replying to myself because someone made pretty much exactly that: https://age-verifier.kibty.town/

Discord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying. Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.

If you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this enough.

it’s not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be where everyone already is, even if there’s less privacy

IRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make discord enjoyable.

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.

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.

Rules for thee, free love for me.

I'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really keep it to adults and be safe.

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.

'I'm fine with extreme indulgence, but just really keep it restrained and be safe.'

By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms.

There's also an argument to be made that normalizing debauchery invites scope creep.

do as we say, not as we do

What do you mean day by day.

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.

I think that's the exact irony that the parent is eluding to.

It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?

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.

1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

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.

I would say it's more like "this is the best we have, not necessarily good", hence the reference to idealism and justice, much like the sentiment in Churchill's famous quote, "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried".

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.

If we repeal the income tax, virtue will return to the wealthy.

Is that something you believe?

Improbable. It's hard to un-ring a bell once rung. Was adding critical context to the Carnegie citation.

Are you really asking this? For real?

You're shooting the messenger.

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.

It's all about the kids when you need a certain segment of the population to vote a certain way.

It's never about kids. If they cared about kids, they would have school lunch and wouldn't starve.

It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and business leaders.

Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of privacy and from monitoring and tracking.

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 your interpretation is uncharitable. One of the options is a fraud and a pedophile and the other wasn’t. They absolutely were not equally bad.

You're right, the other was Kamala Harris, who was far worse.

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...

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.

Sorry but if you claim to be from the party of law and order and vote in a criminal, I have no issues calling those people stupid and evil.

It wasn't like Trump just had some petty past crime on his hands and had turned a new leaf.

>a turd sandwich and a giant douche

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.

> From a pure performance standard across economy and quality of life, its pretty clear that Democratic policies always end up as net positive,

All one has to do is point at San Francisco as this us provably false. Dems have been in charge their for decades and it's arguably not working.

It’s not working so hard people pay millions just to live there.

People do because of the economic activity, not the pristine management of the city.

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.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/us/san-francisco-super-bo...

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.

Maybe compare 2023 mission to 2008 mission. It's not even close, and 2008 it was already considered a bad part of the city.

Are you saying that the Mission today is not only a "bad part of the city," but much, much worse than 2008? That's insane. The Mission is vibrant and hip. We have street parties every few weeks with live music and hundreds of people showing up. New restaurants are opening all the time. Dolores Park is a delight. When was the last time you visited?

There was a slump during Covid, but we're definitely on the upswing.

I can cherry pick a worse republican run city easily, despite you picking pretty much the worst example of Democratic run city, that despite its problem is also is home to many tech companies with a strong economy.

I dunno why you guys even try to argue against Dems at this point tbh. Even if I am wrong on that point, there are a thousand others that demonstrably show that Republican policies and politicians, especially during this administration, are many times worse.

> conservative talking point

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.

> that I am a long ways from conservative

You are 100% conservative, because only a braindead conservative would be typing some paragraph about charisma, ignoring the fact that TRUMP LITERALLY TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT. You guys are so bad at hiding this that its embarrassing at this point, so stop trying.

And before you start saying "no he didn't", please go and read the entire supreme court case where he said that yes, he did in fact present a fradulent set of electors, but he should be immune from prosecution because he was acting in official capacity, and Supreme Court agreed.

To be super crystal clear, if instead of Kamala, the option was even "worse" in your eyes, like low level left wing politician from San Francisco that wanted to do something like UBI, and you still voted for Trump, you are a traitor to the country that honestly should be tried on charges of conspiring for treason and given appropriate capital punishment, and the argument of "oh i didn't know he tried to overthrow the government" should not fly.

There are levels of bad, and what Trump did is pretty much one step short of using actual military forces to take over the congress and force people to sign the papers at gunpoint installing himself as a dictator. An example needs to be made of people who support this kind of person.

But hey, like I said, this is what people wanted. Well see if everyone feels the same way when US economy tanks and bullets start flying as unemployed people looking to feed their families will have nothing to lose. Maybe well even have a Red Scare 2 except instead of communists, everyone will be paranoid of Maga people.

Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.

This is a completely useless statistic, and I'm not even close to being a Trump fan.

Way more people didn't vote, and not voting against Trump is just as bad as voting for him.

There are many reasons why people didn't vote, and it's not all because they sat out the election. Minors can't vote. Felons can't vote. Non-citizens can't vote. Those three groups of people comprise a substantial proportion of the total population. About half the country wasn't registered to vote. (Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...)

If GP had written "22% of the eligible voting population" or "22% of registered voters" hadn't voted for Trump, those would be more meaningful facts.

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's just sarcasm.

and they keep protecting the pedos from prosecution. lol.

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.

Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at "14-28 year olds".

It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of personally identifying information.

Especially by the company already involved in a leak of a massive trove of pictures, personal details (including IDs), etc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

What could possibly go wrong this time...

It would be in their rights to do it.

Its users who value their privacy will be in their rights to leave and we will.

They have a right to ask for my passport and SSN. And I have a right to say "hell no" and delete my account in response.

I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.

The owners of Tumblr thought being banned from the app store was certain death, but losing the nsfw content was only possible death.

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.

That would make sense if apps like Twitter or Reddit were banned from the app store or had also decided to ban NSFW content, but they seem to be getting along fine with their verification-free "click here if you're an adult" systems. Why was Tumblr different?

To be sure, this move by Discord seems like a reflection of the same kind of decision that Tumblr made. But blaming it on the app store in Tumblr's case doesn't seem to make sense. Discord seems to be doing it either to comply with increasingly fragmented laws, out of actual moral desire to fix a problem, or to avoid lawsuits-- not because of app store policies.

> That would make sense if apps like Twitter or Reddit were banned from the app store or had also decided to ban NSFW content, but they seem to be getting along fine with their verification-free "click here if you're an adult" systems. Why was Tumblr different?

The official Reddit app was still relatively new, but various third party reddit apps had occasionally got in trouble for nsfw content on reddit. Twitter had a lot more direct relationship with Apple than the third party reddit apps or Yahoo/Tumblr at that point.

- Removed from App Store: November 16th (https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...)

- Mass purge of NSFW blogs: November 19th (https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblrs-child-porn-crackdown-ensn...)

- Official ban on NSFW content announced: December 3rd (https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...)

- Restored to app store: December 13th (https://web.archive.org/web/20220112052215/https://9to5mac.c...)

Now, _could_ Tumblr have tightened up CSAM prevention without banning all regular adult NSFW content too? Probably. But given Apple had gone nuclear on them, the decision was made to err on the safe side as it was a lot easier to enforce a blanket no NSFW policy than a policy that allows nude 19 year olds but blocks nude 17 year olds, especially given the variation in body types people have.

And sure, there were people within Yahoo who had wanted a no-NSFW policy for a long while to make Tumblr more advertiser friendly and they probably pushed for the more total NSFW ban too. But honestly Tumblr was mostly in its arms length neglect phase at that point and "do whatever Apple wants to make this go away" was the driving motivation.

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'.

Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that, though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+

he was convicted of soliciting prostitution (not of minors), right?

why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?

This article was on the front page recently: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534

So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth getting involved with.

good call! hadn't read that.

He pled to Procuring Person under 18 for Prostitution.

I could be wrong and would be happy to be so but it seems like this to me:

If someone did a few months of house arrest for "pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor" it would be incredibly easy for that person to say - whoops, she said she was 25 and then they threw the book at me." And not terribly unreasonable for someone to take him at his word on that.

The real crime is that the prosecutors massively under charged him for doing an insane gigantic awful pedophile recruitment ring. No one really knew that til a long time later.

He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted procuring a child for prostitution.

He ran a sex-trafficking ring that involved hundreds of girls and women. Possibly over a thousand. He wasn't keeping it all to himself.

> not of minors, right?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481...

"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.

that's a grand jury charge, not what he actually pled to, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

> Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

They are not more effective. They basically always end up as highly currupt ineffective mess.

> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.

That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1]

You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary.

Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

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.

Yeah, for companies this works because there are external (government) entities providing and enforcing a framework. For countries, there is nothing like that. The traditional solution is separation of powers inside of the country I guess, but this requires limiting individual power. Also it's quite complicated in practice and requires a complex legal framework which is sadly often weak to "workarounds" again.

> FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done.

Because congress and senate in America are soooo active ...

Government is doing stuff that's awful and whenever people propose solutions to this someone always complains that government "won't be able to get anything done." That's the point! What are you worried about?

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.

It is straightforward, and very predictable. Bad actors, aren't an anomaly.

> 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.

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.

Well we can look at attempts at socialism and see that some failed, some were successful: https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/successful-sociali...

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.

We aren’t inherently competitive, we just want nice things. It takes a very special mindset to want others to have less, and society should actively discourage such lines of thought by countering them with examples of how things never end well.

This said, I wasn’t suggesting socialism or equality or anything like that - only minimizing long-term unhappiness. That’s the only thing that I could not think an argument against - like why would anyone rational ever want others to be long-term unhappy?

> the lazier and more bored they get

People don't become "lazy". They're lazy from the beginning. Laziness is something they overcome for personal gain. And if the system promises fewer personal gains for overcoming laziness, then why bother?

There can be other valid perspectives than your own

In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.

In enlightenment, you realise rich and powerful are synonyms.

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.

Bundling would get around that to some extent

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.

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.

Activist judges?

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?

In the case of Citizens United, it's actually a pretty straightforward case. Without a constitutional amendment, it would take a very unorthodox reading of the first amendment.

The "problem" with Citizens United is that it's a very clear case.

Corporations are amoral immortals who cannot be placed behind bars. Therefore they should never be given the rights of human beings.

They don't have the rights of human beings. Humans don't lose their rights because they are in a corporation, that is the outcome of Citizens United.

"A corporation is people" is the singular of "corporations are people". Anyone saying anything different is lying or misinformed.

Think about all the times someone who definitely knew better implied that it meant a corporation is a person and trust them less.

PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country

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).

who could have seen this coming.. twice.

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.

What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?

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.

It should apply to the checks which they issue as well --- either they are popular and will have lots of work to put volunteers to, or they will have to hire lots of min. wage folks to make marks on letters and checks --- think of it as a job creation program.

Private money in politics is one of the counterbalances to the emergence of a totalitarian state. The government gains a huge advantage over the opposition due to the fact that it is the government and receives free media coverage.

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.

We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.

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.

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.

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)

Sortation.

Sortition?

Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment.

And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.

Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.

There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.

How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.

A lien on the property? Although almost all jurisdictions already have property taxes, so it hasn't been an insurmountable problem so far

Rich people are very good at coming up with ways of financializing assets to their advantage. That creativity goes away when it comes to paying taxes, for some reason.

Real estate mostly isn't subject to the "I sold one for a huge sum, but the price would tank if I sold them all" effect, unless you own immensely much real estate.

But either way, just a lien on sale of the properties. We can still give the option of paying wealth tax according to valuation directly (in $) instead of in natura (in Y), then there's less to complain about - and as a bonus, we get revealed preferences on how inflated people think the prices of their assets are.

you can tax stock without taxing inventory.

Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting

> you can tax stock without taxing inventory.

How? What is the difference between "stock" and "inventory"?

So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see that as a win/win.

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.

That would instantly wipe out most leverage from the stock market, and from a casual bystander perspective, it would be a great thing.

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.

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.

> 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.

The taxable value is exactly how much you borrowed against it!

> The taxable value is exactly how much you borrowed against it!

I'm not sure what you mean by that term, since we're not talking about property taxes. With respect to capital-gains tax, the amount you liquidate is not the same as the gains being taxed.

> is exactly how much you borrowed

You're mistaken, the tax depends on the history of the item being liquidated. Suppose you need to repay a loan, and you have two options:

1. Sell 1 share of Acme stock for $20, that you originally bought for $20. Your $0 gain leads to $0 tax. Net cash: $20.

2. Sell 1 share of Acme stock for $20, that you originally bought for $5. Your $15 gain leads to $3 tax. Net cash: $17.

It's obvious you'd prefer the first one, right? Even though they're stocks from the same company being sold on the same day for the same market-price to service the same debt.

When you borrow money against an illiquid asset, the value of that asset is at least the amount you borrowed because otherwise the lender wouldn't have approved it. So just use that amount.

> the value of that asset is at least the amount you borrowed

That assumption just isn't true: Loans are made based on risk and the expected ability to repay. Collateral is an optional and sometimes partial of reducing the lenders' risk, it bears no firm relationship to the amount being sought.

To illustrate, imagine a Debtor borrows $5,000 and offers up one of their child's crayon drawings as collateral. For private reasons we cannot see, the Lender accepts this deal. Do you truly believe the crayon-drawing has been proven to be "worth at least $5,000"? Would you joyfully jump at the chance to buy that crayon-drawing for a mere $1,250, confident that you could resell it for an easy $3,750 profit?

Probably not, and that's assuming everyone is acting ethically, we haven't even started to talk about how the Debtor and Lender could collude to game the system.

> So just use that amount.

At this point, you're probably thinking: "Very funny Terr_, but we both know the crayon-drawing obviously wasn't covering the full $5,000 loan here."

Yeah, but how did you reach that conclusion, what mathematical steps did you use?

I'm pretty sure you applied an independent judgement of what a likely crayon-drawing "should" fetch in some hypothetical future. That's quite reasonable, but the fact that you had to do it shows that the loan-basics are not sufficient to solve the problem.

That just doesn't happen. Either the lendor is happy with an uncollateralized loan, a significantly but partially collateralised loan (such as 50%) or a fully collateralised loan. And in each of those cases the lender knows exactly how much he thinks the collateral is worth. If the collateral doesn't cover the loan, there is a written agreement between both parties stating so. The borrower would be wise to use that as evidence, since it reduces his taxable gains. Otherwise it's assumed the collateral covers the loan. No need to do anything special.

Who says you need to tax the whole wealth if it in form of Ys?

We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10 billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a social network and name it Y

Many countries have figured out a wealth tax, so this isn't an impossible problem.

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.

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.

With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/

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

Oh we spend that money, just on weapons or handouts to the welfare class known as the ultrawealthy.

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.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

But that's mostly people/companies spending on health care, not as much the government (because that'd be socialism, apparently)

I'm just talking about government spending. If you add private spending it is even more unbalanced. Just per capita government spending alone:

US $12k

Germany $8k

UK $6k

Medicaid + Medicare is 22% of all US federal spending. Defense is 13%.

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.

Dude, I literally posted a link to the numbers. 12k public. 2.5k private, 14.8k total per person public plus private.

Here is another link to the OECD numbers directly. Is is 12k public, 14.8k Public plus private.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...

Can we agree on the 12k and move on now?

I totally missed your link earlier. You are correct here and I am wrong.

The welfare classes that the government hands money to are elderly people and children.

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.

I am amazed. What an incredible statement!

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.

I think OP is talking about decoupling tax and government spending, Modern Monetary Theory-style.

In this model government just prints all the money it needs in order to function. Taxation isn't used to fund government, it's used to give your currency value, and to stop inflation running out of control. Metaphorically, you might as well pile all that tax take up and burn it, because once you've collected it it's performed its function.

This is a very simplistic take on MMR, and I don't think it would work in the real world, but spending does precede taxation.

It will be a cold day in hell before Americans stop assuming everyone on the internet is American or talks about the US government.

The government's role is whatever the people voting for it decide it to be - maybe to defend the borders, maybe to educate everyone, maybe keep everyone fed, clothed and sheltered.

The issue is, again I don't really care about the US or your government, some governments come to power on a platform of welfare. As long as they keep giving people "welfare" they will continue to be voted in power. As such, they will distribute wealth created in that country towards the goals of staying in power.

Myself, without being special, I never found myself having the same needs as this majority. Unfortunately, since I'm a minority (middle class), without the means to avoid being coerced into contributing to this plan (not super-rich), I'm left without recourse.

The weak are intentionally condemned through poor education and by voting idiots that promise them bullshit to get elected, not because the government doesn't have enough tax money. This cycle will never break by allocating more money, and the last 100 years have plenty of examples in that sense.

> control inflation

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Taxation reduces the money supply. Government spending increases the money supply.

In particular, the central bank, charged with controlling inflation, cannot use taxation to reduce the money supply, because banks do not get to set tax policy. That leaves raising interest rates as its only policy tool.

As the political arm of the government chooses to run deficits in excess of growth plus inflation, then (a) that causes more inflation, and (b) the central bank raises rates, increasing the cost of government borrowing, causing bigger deficits.

This escalates as a result of the central bank trying to control the effects of high government spending by applying a mis-matched policy tool (interest rates) in place of the politicians who have abdicated their responsibility to use a matched policy tool (taxation). Either it spirals out of control, or more and more of the government budget is devoted to interest expense (direct government transfers of wealth paid exclusively to the debt holders) and less of it is spent on providing actual government services (that benefit all taxpayers).

If the central bank does not raise rates, of course, things go even more badly.

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.

> 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.

Sure it does. That Treasury debt is often bought up by the FED in huge tranches by increasing the money supply, they call it things like "unlimited QE (quantative easing)". For example, the FED announced unlimited QE on March 23rd, 2020 causing the stock market and real estate market to bounce. Trillions of new dollars were created in these last 5-6 years, and that's why everything costs more. The USG continues to overspend, and too often on dumb shit too (e.g. tax breaks for the ultra wealthy).

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.

> 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.

> 2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake.

Also because taxing income (or other cash) is disinflationary. Taxing assets is inflationary because it forces sales.

Shouldn't sales reduce inflation because they increase supply?

Selling things increases money velocity.

> 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.

> 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.

The main counterargument:

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.

okay, another example:

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.

The situation you're describing is equivalent to paying your 5% in asset tax the normal way (by giving up 5% of the asset) and then saying "I love enron, let me take out a loan to buy stock with!" Buying stock with a loan is an obviously stupid move, and wanting to "stay invested" is nothing more than a rationalization. Keeping the same percentage of your wealth in the stock is already staying invested. Increasing the percentage for the sole purpose of keeping the same number of shares is a bad idea.

And this hypothetical me, having to pay a wealth tax, is way way over the line of needing a financial advisor, so that advisor will be telling me it's a bad idea to take out loans to buy stock.

Don't buy Enron stock?

A wealth tax would be like 5% of the $100k, nothing to do with the gains.

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.

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.

We don't know how much money the richest person has because many assets are not publicly traded or disclosed.

Even if you go only by Elon's TSLA shares, he has north of 200B net worth.

> Today the richest man in the world has $300b, Rockefeller levels before the 1929 crash.

I think it's more like 800B right now.

> 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.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

>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.

In Canada you can carry back capital losses up to (I think) 3 years. Of course you lose the time-value of that loss. Can carry forward losses too.

Similar things happen with (on the way to) "bankrupt" corporations that have large tax losses that can be applied to future profits.

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.

> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave

Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of trickle down economics mentality?

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.

> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave

You say this like it’s a bad thing.

> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands?

Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve

This wouldn't stop the AMA from controlling medicine.

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.

You pay enough. Musk doesn't. Does he even pay any at all?

Wealth tax will just create an industry around hiding wealth for the rich

Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

Those tax dollars just go back to the wealthy in the form of interest payments on government bonds, which they own.

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.

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.

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.

Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power

Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.

Let's start with your private property.

95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.

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.

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.

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.

> white color workers need representation [...]

Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"

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 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.

This comment is not well-formatted and a bit "zomg", but an important mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...

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".

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.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/15-years-after-c...

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.

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.

https://www.project2025.observer/

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.

Because it is not the same deportation policy.

Trump has to deal with the aftermath of the Biden years, where unauthorized immigrant population reached 14 million in 2023. It is also harder to expel them if they are inside the US rather than at the border.

The problem isn't deporting illegal immigrants, the problem is revoking legal status, abusing detainees, hurting people on the street, and the occasional murder.

Obama years had also the same kind of abuse and killings by the border patrol. At least 56 recorded deaths of immigrants caused by ICE and custody[0]. Some murders were settled to avoid a trial.

Protests against ICE were much smaller then (billionaires didn't fund NGOs to organise them either), so it was easier for the agency to operate as well, and it was quickly memory-holed.

[0] https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...

Any preventable death in custody is a tragedy, but there’s a major difference between a death due to inadequate precautions against suicide or due to inadequate medical care, and tacking someone to the ground in the street and shooting them ten times in the back. I really hope you understand that and are just pretending not to in order to score points.

Edit: also, why is it that whenever someone makes an "Obama did bad stuff too" argument, it's always with the intent of "so you shouldn't be upset about it now," rather than "you should have been upset then like I was, and I'm still upset about what's happening now"?

Regarding deportations, it's not "also bad stuff" - it's just an application of the law.

I don't see the problem with pointing out the hypocrisy where very wealthy democrat donors fund activist organizations to disrupt the ICE/Border patrol activity, while looking away when their guy is in power. Protests evolved as well, organized by professionals with the aim to escalate and disrupt ICE's activity, which leads to such tragic events.

In France, we are accustomed to the same kind of escalation, where antifa black blocks commonly throw molotov cocktails, leading to more violence and so on. Thankfully the riot police is well trained to avoid fatal incidents, which is clearly not the case of the current-day ICE (and generally in the police forces in the US).

After all the complaining, the solution is likely either to desescalate both sides, and ask for accountability and more training - bodycams are a good tool, for instance. But I guess that "better training for ICE" isn't a very entertaining slogan ;-)

Why are you talking about deportations again? The problem is the associated abuses.

What is the purpose of telling me that the same stuff happened under Obama? Let's say just for a moment that this is true, and that the difference in reactions is driven by some hypocritical activists. What sort of change are you hoping to induce in my mind by saying this? If that really was true, then the correct reaction would be to continue to be appalled by and oppose the current administration's actions, while also being careful to watch out for such things in the future by other administrations. But I'm going to do that anyway, so there isn't even any point to that.

It really looks like you're bringing this up with the intent that I should stop change my mind about what's happening now and think it's all just fine and dandy, which is ridiculous.

I was talking about the cause of the protests, which are primarily about the deportations, and started before the abuse took place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_mass_deportat...

As I explained before, two movements are at play: a drastic ramping up of the ICE, with some unexperienced agents behaving unprofessionally, and at the same time, billionaires funding NGOs to organize protests, coordinate media and harass the agencies in charge of the deportation.

Things such as blowing a whistle when ICE agents are intervening, doxxing agents or following their cars aren't going to help desescalate the situation or help create a sane culture in those agencies.

Which is it, did the protests start before the abuses, or are the abuses just a continuation of the Obama years?

It's not supposed to be up to the public to deescalate. Law enforcement needs to behave professionally even when facing people who don't like them. That is literally their job. If they can't handle it without committing some murders, then the agency should be torn down.

Democrats always get their way because their way is to do nothing. They rarely roll back all the stuff the republicans do in the term before.

Term limits for congress.

And age limits for congress.

Same for the Supreme Court. 20 years. A lifetime appointment is no different than a king.

That's not an elected office.

I never said it was.

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.

>Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off

The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption is a feature.

It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.

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.

> lack of truly representative government.

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.

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.

>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.

how would you implement this without going into nazi-like levels of control on the individual? assuming "we have the science".

Lmao you can’t. Eugenics is evil and denies reproductive rights, bodily autonomy at the most basic animal level. It is literally the idea of creating a master race and culling off anyone who doesn’t conform.

If you find yourself in a situation where you want to do something Nazis did — just not that way — you are halfway there.

yea, it's very suspect. regardless, every idiot who claims to have "found the science" has failed to produce anything beyond studies of n=10 (10 is PUSHING IT).

> how would you implement this without going into nazi-like levels of control on the individual?

I wasn't really talking about the practicality of it, especially because it's the furthest thing from the Overton Window imaginable. Literally everything else is closer to it. Even marrying toddlers, as shown by recent events. Slavery's half-inside the window.

It was just about the fact that it's possible.

> assuming "we have the science".

This isn't really disputable, given how much bigger nature is than nurture. See e.g. POTUS and his dad. Obviously it's not 100%, nothing is, but denying that "we have the science" to massively influence things would be purely out of ideological dislike.

Humans have practiced eugenics on animals on an absurdly huge scale. See domestication and its effects. Humans are animals, the idea that it would somehow be completely different for them has no basis in science.

I don't even think it's the tribalism. Society used to be racist AF and it worked ok. Heck, you could play a pretty amusing "guess the race/nationality" game with spicy quotes from 1880-1920.

I think the problem is that by making everything objective, systemic, numerically tracked, quantified, etc, etc. we've actively selected for evil people. The people who get ahead in those systems, the groups who's interests get served, are not the good ones. They are the evil ones who have no qualms about exploiting the vulnerabilities and oversights of the system. In our quest to optimized everything, we have optimized for the prioritization of dishonest people and bad causes that attract dishonest people and it shows at every level.

Ted K would probably have something to say about this.

If it wasn't numbers showing finance it was previously unrealised numbers showing muscle, bone density and height.

Imo, if we took tribe numbers now and went back to old world cave and stick we would see similar problems as we do today.

And yes agree about participation within one or more tribes, very similar to prisoner's dillema but with n>2 participants this time, and defection therefore has more of a payoff for every n.

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

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.

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.

Carney isn't a billionaire, right? He's been a bureaucrat, not a plutocrat.

Sometimes I wish we’d bring back tarring and feathering. “People should not be afraid of their governments …” and all that

Bring back sortition, within elected parties.

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.

They will have that exception on their phones.

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.

> handsomely rewarded after-the-fact

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.

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.

Technology might be one half, but the other half is demographics.

40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful).

Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

> 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.

The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.

Moo.

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.

I hope this time it really sinks in that law and rules are only for the little man. Time to think about the system from scratch.

What makes you think next time will be different?

Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.

The problem is not them. The problem is us.

> 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.

Do you also not wash your laundry?

Gross

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non%20sequitur

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.

it has never been about children.

These are literally _the same people_.

Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing kids to create porn with grok on X.

He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create child porn with grok on X.

Funny how all of you guys focus on Musk but no mention of Reid Hoffman anywhere who was far more involved with Epstein.

He sucks too. Not everyone is working backwards from their team sports fandoms.

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.

Only that you are incorrect that Elon hung out with Epstein. Unless there has been some new evidence

Indeed, _so_ strange that a lot of attention goes out to the wealthiest individual in the world.

Didn't know that Reid Hoffman knowingly released a CP generator on a platform with hundreds of millions of users either.

But is there proof Elon actually hung out with Epstein as the poster asserted?

Did Musk really hang out with Epstein? I only saw email conversations between the two.

By contrast, Bill Gates and Reid Hofmann hung out with Epstein A LOT.

And Hofmann was Epstein's primary connection into the Silicon Valley scene.

And, further, that all the child rape was coordinated, for the most part, in the clear over fucking Gmail.

But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.

You're really pulling your punches there.

It's useful to point out hypocrisy, but are you suggesting we shouldn't try to protect kids because of Jeffrey Epstein?

You might point out how this will protect children and what the trade offs are. You might also address the point that the same people who keep trying to do these "protect the children" attacks on privacy seem to be one or two steps away from people like Epstein. They didn't need to decrypt anyone's communications because they were the recipients - what did they do about it?

It seems many of them continued to "hang out" with him.

Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when you see a few of them committing crimes!

> that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.

In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".

Peter Mandelson was pushing very hard for digital ID cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006

A good implementation of digital ID can do things like verify age while respecting privacy.

> 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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

> Rules for thee, free love for me.

Rules for thee, free love for me and for my voters base.

I think it's wild you would make that connection for this topic

the "protect da kids" narrative is just a veil to make us give up more privacy and freedom for "security"

It's far easier to control and prosecute communication when an identity is attached.

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".

> Rules for thee, free love for me.

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

Discord aren't the good guys here. There are no good guys here.

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 only way any company can justify the risk of publishing Someone Else's Speech is if that risk is literally zero.

Or, you know, employing customer service agents. The non-employing of such also allowed them to become billionaires so it seems kind of fair.

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 trying to understand why discord is doing this. Is it because of the charlie kirk killer using discord?

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

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.

https://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/

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.

My first reaction is, what a disaster. More of the web becomes gated behind sacrificing your privacy to companies who by and large don't give a damn about it.

Then I remembered when I was a teen, thought about how I'd have reacted to this, and realized over the long term youth will rediscover old-school tools like IRC or migrate to new alternatives outside the claws of big corps and government.

And I felt a little better about the future of human civilization.

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.

I do not understand this at all. How is ID verification settling on banks????! And which of these banks are private?

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."

Good riddance Discord. Any alternative for the masses?

They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.

Why would Slack not be affected by the same stupid laws?

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.

Calling it right now. There will be a data breach and we’ll find out they in fact did not delete the ID data.

So where we all jumping to?

Running phpBB on some crappy shared hosting. Well, these days on some crappy VPS.

At least this would make FAQs and other important bits of information available to non-users and search engines.

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.

You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/

Thanks, I'll check it out :)

Every single forum I see now is using this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

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 hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger threads.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

Thanks, I'll have to look into it too, though the gamification sounds annoying AF.

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.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...

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 just wish that the whole badges thing was off by default. It's a forced gamification that's just annoying and doesn't really teach anything.

Except for that, I love Discourse.

It's their way of attempting to fight user churn. Forums need all the help they can get in that regard given the attention economy of today and the giants they're attempting to fight against. Anything novel is a win.

You are just being extremely nitpicky.

Discourse is awful software, from a user standpoint.

But its better than all the other forum software I've seen...

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.

Could use mumble instead?

Those are voice chat, yeah? Discord has chat too, which is used more than voice in many of my communities.

That would be great if your community only exists in a voip channel

I had a look at Teamspeak but you need to email somebody for permission to have more than 32 users on your server.

Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: https://once.com/campfire

> Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

There's an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server

I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

I got you: https://github.com/mk6i/smarter-smarter-child

This is amazing work, thank you!

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.

People talking about moving to Revolt. It's the most similar

Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But that's in the pipeline at least

our groups are discussing [stoat](https://stoat.chat/).

I don't know it well yet.

.......yet.

IRC never died.

Time to spin up a mumble server again...

The only viable option, of course: https://escargot.chat/

Is this open source? Would be cool to self host this..

Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, Rocket.chat - all open source.

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

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL0ZVwWu8K-hJWrloq...

Well, that ends DISCORD. Add to hosts file with 0.0.0.0 DNS

Why would any sane person allow this tracking and cross tracking and selling of our private info? Ridiculous for a commenting service.

With the current US administration all the worlds citizens should be careful about their data in the hands of US corporations. Unlike China, US has and can kidnap you from your own country if they feel like it even if not citizens of US. This was the case with previous US administration but they tried to at least follow their own laws if not international laws. This administration does not care about US laws or International laws.

current US regime*

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 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).

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.

Privacy preserving between you and the third party, but the implication is that the government now sees what you are using.

> 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.

You cannot automate adults buying alcohol from a single ID for all the children in the nation.

If age tokens are truly anonymous, what's the solution for preventing a single person from generating and selling them to whatever child wants one?

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.

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.

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.

There are many ways to do anonymous proof of age. E.g. go to a physical store and buy a proof of age token, the store will ID you as much as they would for buying alcohol or cigarettes.

But that doesn't meet the requirements which is proof of identity.

As a parent I pay for my child's phone and sim, and thus I have parental controls and I can limit access to discord, or youtube, or porn sites, both on the device level, on the sim card level, and on the home internet level.

I'm all for making parental controls easier to use, if you want to pass laws, enforce minimum standards on companies, encourage or mandate pan-company cooperation (why can't I control my child's microsoft account from my apple parental control page, or an EA account from a steam control page). I'd even be happy with sites being mandated to add say a DNS record saying "this is a site for over 18s only due to $reason", and then I, as the bill payer, can choose to allow that or not.

Key changes are

- ID verification to see porn on Discord.

- Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers.

Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure who this serves.

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.

I just wish parents would do what parents used to do: parenting. Then we wouldn't need any of this bullshit.

We need something vendor agnostic that still allows having a community. Something thats essentially a protocol like bitcoin, email, text, torrents. Probably some of this exists. Then there will be providers offering this a commodity, just like how email and hosting can be rented from any company with simmilar quality (kinda).

There are already: Matrix, Jabber, Mumble, Zulip - all open source.

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.

As an adult that interacts only with other adults in good faith, it's easy to look at this and feel outraged.

But there is a very real and dangerous situation where children and adolescents are using Discord with zero guardrails, constantly interacting with adults - many of whom are predators. This is happening every day. Millions of children around the world "meet people" playing games online, take the conversation to Discord, and then get brought into a very dark world online that their brains are simply not ready for.[^1]

I don't like the idea of blanket face scans/ID scans with that data stored in perpetuity - but age verification of some kind is a must IMO.

[1]: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-not-just-a-game-anymore

Discord has parental controls. There's a myriad of services out there that restrict and monitor phone usage for kids. Use them and lock their phone and discord accounts down to nothing.

Restricting adults because parents decide to give little Timmy unrestricted access to technology is stupid.

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 :)

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.

https://archive.is/E0kQ8

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.

Genreally this is the part of the slope when most everyone perks up and realizes what game is being played.

Combined with recent AUS,UK laws mandating the same across most online services - im sceptical that even opensource offering could evade te dragnet.

We already knew that any ID verification for kids would inevitable mean everyone gets carded then sorted. With this AI profiling essentailly piggybacking on the likes of Facebooks decades long shadow profile shenanigans , and the recent Ring revalation that theyare essentially doing the same via their cameras. Its a bleak panopticaon that has all the essential building blocks in place.

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.

To be honest it kinda sounds like a benefit for my use-case. I don’t engage with adult content on there and use it for one server with friends.

And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it remains usable without uploading my Id.

I think having kids asking if they can scan the face of their parents/older sibling will probably give rise to some good conversations.

Well, deleted my discord. It was the only social media I had, if it can be considered as such.

Shouldn't have been using a free product anyway. Committed the crime of convenience and paid with my telemetry. At least I stopped.

HN, you my only fren.

> 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 processing

Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.

> Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

Yes, it's global

> If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

Not until a court case on the topic gives us precedent.

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..

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.

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.

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.

I agree for private servers it’s good. We used it for backup ops when our internal chat server went down. The feature set is very good

This is categorically unacceptable.

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.

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)

[1] https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios

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?

How many people are doing age restricted stuff on Discord (besides the specifically there for adult content and gooning crowd)

All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns

Gaming certainly has age-concerns, many games are rated 13/15/16+ or 18+

But yeah, leaving discord... they are not getting my ID/Photo

At least Google is pushing on zero-knowledge solutions

Maybe they can force everyone's hand like they did for https

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

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?

Can their parents also approve their discord usage?

Are you saying they need parents to buy the game, but shouldn't to join chats about the same game?

> The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device.

I'm wondering if this will work with a YouTube video...

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.

What's the issue?

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.

It took so long to have a decision like that from Discord. I use Discord everyday and I know that a lot of teenagers use it and I think a decision like that can help to keep safe these teenagers from the internet. When last year Discord introduced that AI face scanning I thought that it was a serious problem for the security of our data but if, as they say, they remove all of the data of the ID extimation.. why not?

People are pretty skeptical that discord will actually delete it (because they had a data breach showing a lot of undeleted face scans and id pictures already) or that their partner organization who does the validation won't just save it instead.

Also I don't really think this solves the grooming issue - it stops them from going in certain channels or getting pictures from non friends but an adult who wants to get past that to get to kids probably will. You'd really want like "teen only" servers with verification going the other way, if anything. I've never seen that proposed oddly

It’s hard to trust a company when when they’ve already demonstrated that they [can’t be trusted](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-faces-ba...). And i’m sure there will be an argument of “but this will make it more likely that they’ll be safe about it to not have a repeat”, which will likely be true for a while. Then cost-cutting offloading to a third party that promises to not keep the data, or a new feature will come in that needs the photos, or a misconfiguration will happen where things that should be deleted won’t be, and we’ll be in the same boat again.

The only safe data is that which does not exist.

FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/

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.

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.

to take control of your own content while preventing it from being harvested for ai training, there’s a straightforward method.

- use a browser extension to encrypt comments sent to any social media platform. - by sharing your public key with intended recipients via a third-party channel, the platform only sees gibberish.

this makes ai training impossible, keeps corporations in the dark about your conversations, and ensures that any government surveillance only yields encrypted strings.

however, the platform might ban you as a bot, since this effectively prevents both the company and the government from snooping on your data.

This makes it non social media, the reason I post on social media is to ALLOW the world to view what I speak about. I don't mind if my data is harvested or trained off of.

Posting with encrypted data makes no sense as you are disrupting the social network with worthless garbage for 99.999% instead it would just be better to have an RSS type feed that your consumers (friends) can subscribe to and it shows the comment you made and the link to what you commented on.

Or if you just want to say something about it to 1 friend just send it to them.

You could still have pub/priv keys and an autodecrypt system though or use traditional authentication for allowing content pulls.

So a good EU OpenSource alternative : https://stoat.chat/ formerly known as Revolt.

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.

Okay, that's the end of #Discord (at least for me) because I will never upload 'selfies' or a copy of my id to a social media site, or something.

Discord is in a position to demand nothing.

No privacy loving person will comply with Discord on this matter.

Discord is doomed to only have weak compliant users on its platform.

This growing trend of accounts for everything enables the collection of all your data and attacks such as this gating your access behind sending in more personal info.

Your IDs and biometric data for most services is sent to multiple companies, governments, and who ever else comes asking, armed only with a piece of paper. It is never deleted. It is used to create a profile of you and your activities.

Never use an account if possible.

“We will find ways to bring people back” yeah because that usually works. I imagine this gets rolled back or siloed to only adult specific channels.

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'.

They wil learn by brute force. As we had to do.

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...

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 think discord has been terrible for the internet. A lot of open information has become gated. And now it's gated behind a platform that many of us are not willing to use anymore. Let's hope this pushes out people and communities back to forums and such, but in reality other platform will take over.

Wow.

On one hand, I'm not surprised.

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.

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.

So you'll still use Discord, just not Nitro?

If cancelling your premium sub is all you're willing to do, it means you're not being militant enough.

I am attempting to revive my once fairly large Minecraft server, and not being present there means suicide. What I can do is signal to them that not only am I not giving them my ID, I am no longer giving them my monthly payments ever again. Which is the metric investors want to see increase, not decrease. I have given them hundreds of dollars in monthly payments. That will now cease as a result of this decision.

You don't have to go pedal to the metal to signal disapproval in a way that hurts.

Genuine question, what is stopping users from using AI to generate a fake face or ID to bypass this restriction?

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.

> prior fakes

But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!

This is such a huge mistake, Discord. Hopefully enough people put a lot of pressure on them to reverse this.

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.

Yay to further fragmentation:D

Medium term, moving to another platform is the best solution. In the short term, I think using some other platform for the locked features is best?

For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have better alternatives.

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 can see the moderation and age-verification motivations here, but I am wary of how this changes expectations around identity on social platforms.

Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully reckoned with yet.

to everyone that tried to persuade me to move my projects from forums to discord :

phpBB never made me scan my face.

Well I've spent the better part of 7 years building a community on my own discord server with dozens of friends, many of whom I interact with daily in voice.

So... what now? I just have my life literally turned upside down because of a greedy surveillance state?

> "On my OWN discord server"

[Emphasis added]. You are confused about ownership, and now sadly are suffering the consequence. The answer to your question is simply yes.

Move the community over to a platform where you actually own the server. There are self hosted alternatives. (or pay a hosting provider to run it)

The child predators are not stalking the adult forums. They're in the "for kids" ones. This "protect the kids" nonsense needs to be called out for what it is - a sham.

Well maybe misdirected. I remember the first few times my dad caught me looking at hardcore BDSM pornography. I was probably 13 and definitely gay. The first time he cancelled our internet for a month and the second time he started shutting off the breaker to the computer at night. I was hooked though.

I can see how parents are wary, that was probably a big shock for him . Luckily he was able to process his feelings with the belt so didn’t have to go calling his senator.

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.)

I've had a Discord account for 10 years. They seem to assume all discord users are at least teenagers, so surely they can't think I was 8 when I created the account. So can't I have the "full" experience automatically?

because they want your data, and to be fair there's no safe way to determine your age, account could get stolen or transferred to other person.

This part is interesting:

> [verify to] Speak in a stage channel.

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?

Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!

> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.

What stops kids (or anyone) from using "AI" (which they are already using to a great extent)?

I bet you could bypass it without any video, too, while we are at it.

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.

This is a really misleading title. It doesn't "require" either. The majority of adults will not see any verification as the system is already able to verify they are old enough through other data/means.

I foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents from the likes of Ben Dover

Dingle Dongle

Hot Ta Tas

Source: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

Sounds reasonable particularly given age of account implementation. And even if new account, if I don't have my face scanned then they won't show all the garbage. I have no problem with that.

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.

Policing is one of them.

Discord doesn't need my identity and I don't need discord. Bye bye.

Good. ya'll will be surprised by how many under age kids use it...

The CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini. He's from McKinsey. So that tracks.

How else would you fight growing antisemitism on Discord?

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.

It is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.

Even grad level?

The youngest person to receive their PhD was 13, per the internet, so yes it is possible for a 12-year-old to be in grad school.

Although, at least when I was in university, even undergrads still got the @university.edu email address.

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.

The writing was on the wall here like a decade ago

And often is there for existing apps, that things like this can happen

So people might take stock of existing apps like Discord that they might want to migrate from

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.

At least I hope this will be the case.

Thanks, I'll just keep using XMPP MUCs like a caveman I am.

I thought we didn't talk about political issues around here?

What are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?

Credit card verification not an option.

Facial video estimates or submit an id card.

Option 3: if we analyze all of your data we have and see you are not going to bed at 8pm for middle school, you get adult status.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42054-9

Discord says immediate deletion. They already leaked 70k IDs. Your biometric enters the permanent record somewhere. Discord, their vendor, or Utah. Someone keeps it.

You can be running this in 10 minutes https://github.com/Merkoba/Hue

Discord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.

This is coming for all web-based services soon. Don't think for a second it's just Discord.

It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.

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

Such an important announcement for a platform reminds me the attempt of OnlyFans to ban sexual content. I wait the D soon retracts this decision.

When I first read the headline, I assumed it meant they were requiring face scans to protect against AI Agents/Bots, not to "protect" kids.

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).

HN User Chat: https://signal.group/#CjQKICCPlygJ6YXA0jqqOcE0K3AHovCOX4WKEN...

If you follow me and want to join my friends-and-associates one, I’m @sneak.07 on Signal.

We're going to see more social networks struggle and something like world.org or similar that protects privacy is needed.

Is this the final straw that kills their platform?

No thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.

People have dropped platforms en masse over lesser things. This is not going to go well. Are they even going to make it to their IPO?

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.

Uk, Effective from July 25, 2025, regulated platforms must use "highly effective" methods, such as facial age estimation, credit card checks, or ID verification to prevent children from accessing harmful material, with potential fines or bans for non-compliance. (extents to any platform with user uploaded content)

Australia, as of 10 December 2025 Australia requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent users under 16 from accessing accounts.

No wonder there where "no real complaints" those countries are already under heavy age verification law.

> Also teen mode doesn't actually seem that restrictive.

Doesn't mean it can't get more restrictive in a few months. Ease people into it would actually be the smart move since there will be less complaints.

> But for whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes to discord on here.

Because Discord has not handled their data well in recent memory (actually ever).

Also it is a global rollout not mandated by the countries law. This indicates that it is a business decisions and therefore probably they stand to gain from it financially.

or.... for simplicities sake, everywhere operates the same way. More countries are going to require this, this makes it pretty simple for them I'm guessing, just roll it out everywhere.

they had a breach last year...they didn't leak their core data, the 3rd party they used leaked data to do with age verification. Which was bad. What other data problems you see? Nearly everything else is unconfirmed/scraping public data.

They could make it more restrictive? sure.... but why? a core demographic for them is teens playing games and joining servers related to their games, why would they make it worse for one of their biggest target audiences? Any company who are targeting kids (Roblox did something similar) really do have to show they are doing at least something to protect that demographic. The consequence of not doing that is governments coming after you. That's their financial incentive, not to be shutdown, fined, sued etc.

Maybe this time finally a lot of communities will realize that discord sucks as a Archive, Forum, FAQ or news channel.

I'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.

Why does every company work with persona? It's the shadiest company outside of Palantir, what is going on?

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.

Be responsible for your spawn and don't be a weenie about asserting boundaries for them.

The solution is parents! Stop making your bad parenting my problem!

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.

How has it become your "problem"? Do you believe everyone should be able to get into any location anywhere worldwide without screening?

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.

A majority of Americans are in favor of age verification.

https://www.edweek.org/technology/not-meant-for-children-adu...

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.

The entire point is that it's not dumbing down the entire world. It's dumbing it down for kids that fail age verification.

If a kid gets in a car and drives without license we don't require all car manufactures to install age verification/license checker do we?

Usually we arrest and punish the offender, not the creator of the product used in the offence.

Why would this be different with the internet, in this case Discord?

I wish I could simply show Discord my adult genitals as evidence of my adult-hood.

The sharing of my ID with a known incompetent company & business seems like a risk they're foisting upon me.

You are not going to be liable if your information is leaked. They will be.

When the openclaw/moltbook fad dies, those Mac mini's could be repurposed for a p2p forum network.

Why does the idea of collecting millions of images of minors not sit right? Roblox, Character.ai, Discord…

Why would minors need to provide photos? The point of this is to verify adult users.

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.

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.

Indeed, the article basically says as much in more pacifying terms:

> driven by an international legal push for age checks and stronger child safety measures

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.

HN: Social media is terrible and ruining kids' mental health.

Also HN: Any attempt to limit access to verified adults is an "authoritarian crackdown" and totally unacceptable.

Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.

Right, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I forgot.

you may be surprised to learn that you can be a parent and have rules without being a "helicopter parent".

given your other bad faith comments in this thread, though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be contrarian for... fun? is it fun?

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.

HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2 things are bad.

Good. Maybe then we'll stop having Open Source projects using it as their only store of knowledge :)

Forget cancelling my Nitro - what's the best way to convince my friends to cancel theirs?

Not being there. Tell them you'll be at ____ when they need you.

What ____ is, that's the problem. There's no self-hostable option that has easy audio/video like Discord does.

mumble or teamspeak is pretty easy IMHO.

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.

Showing ID doesn’t stop crime or criminals, or stop fake accounts.

I’m simply going to scan someone else’s ID to keep my account.

Absolute idiots, who the hell is going to do a face scan? Or share their ID with ... Discord?

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..

What I don't get is out this is to protect teens, but what person that is 13 has an ID?

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.

Any recommendations?

I seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.

Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I'll have to revisit it.

have you looked at mumble or teamspeak, seems they where the default for a bit before discord. Atleast for gaming.

How do they green-light this? No one wants this. It doesn't make any sense.

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?

What’s with this recent push for ID verification from every site and service?

Cowering to autocrats all over the world.

Good bye. Discord is not trustworthy with this kind of data. As proven recently.

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?

> Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. [1]

That presumably includes selfies?

That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.

That seems dystopian.

1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25?

You’re never going to convince a parent or a lawmaker or even me that this is dystopian. Seems like a perfectly reasonable safeguard.

> 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?

> safeguard a small group, that being parents

69% of US Adults have children. That's not a typo. There is no group that benefits from this larger than parents.

In 2020, about 63 million Americans were parents to children under 18 [1]. That's about one in four adults. It's a small minority. Maybe 69% of all people have children in general, but most of those children are above the age of 18.

Not that it matters anyway. You picked out a single word out of my multi-paragraph comment with many arguments and ignored the rest. Even if parents of young children were the minority, does that mean they should dictate what the rest do for the sake of their safety? Like 85% of Americans are drivers, should the non-driving pedestrians start stocking up on bubble wrap? It's for the common good, after all.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...

They'll now have kompromat associated with a name, address, and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your country calls it)

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.

Actively withdrawing from all US proprietary software and subscriptions ...

This might be an unpopular opinion, but imo this is a directionally correct decision from Discord. I feel that it's important that there exist privacy preserving, anonymous communication platforms; not that every platform must have or must not have these qualities.

Platforms need to adapt to how they're used (or how they want to be used). The amount of child exploitation that happens on Discord should make any civilized person working in that company uncomfortable, and its natural and good to want to do something about it, not out of external or governmental pressure, but because you yourself can see the dashboards and logs, and can see what's happening.

There's a needle of difference between a government mandating identity verification, and a private organization saying this is how we want to run our company. Threading that needle is living in a free and safe society. If we can't thread it, and we fall to one side or the other, then you have to choose whether you prefer safety or freedom. Personally, I'd rather have both.

Guess I’ll have to try convincing all my friends to move to Matrix.

the social network no one really needs is going to require IDs. Guess I’ll go ahead and delete the app once I stumble across it some day.

Jump here, you can see Lucca (as we say in Italy, more or less..)

Not required by law, what could then be the reason, I wonder?

welp glad I set up my own replacement for my own business/events https://hub.lanified.com

So Long Discord, It’s not like It’s the only forum in town

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).

Good to reduce fraud, isn't this zero trust in practice.

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.

And I'll be uninstalling and looking for an alternative

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.

Hope they use zero knowledge proofs like ZKPassport app

Glad I don’t use it.

Curious how this will affect midjourney's earnings

what is the relation?

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.

IRC is still a thing

I think I’ll pass on a chat room face scan. Wow.

Is there an AI service that can generate fake IDs?

I'm so glad I always refused to accept this one.

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.

So glad I never put my eggs in the discord basket

Nitro cancelled, all boosts for my servers cancelled, have recommended my communities all do the same. It'll be a lot less smooth but we can go back to IRC + Mumble.

Enshittification and profit-maxing strikes down yet another decent piece of software. Rest in piss.

There's discord in gas town tonight.

I really hope this triggers a mass exodus

Goodbye Discord. It was good to have you.

I guesa i dont need to use discord anymore

i can live without discord but I’m required by law to interact with irs and therefore idme and their mess…

Based. Kids should start gamefaqs again!

every website will ask or phone someone to verify your id in the future. what a horrible day thatd be.

We need to being back p2p

Is this legal in the EU?

Should be yes, however the data (if any) gained is considered "personal data" and should be handled conform GDPR legislation.

Reminder: “age verification” is just another way of spelling “every single user of the service must provide a government ID to use it”.

Luckily, they well enshittified it prior to this move, so my account is already deleted. I wish Discord a swift irrelevance.

Glad I left months ago

Glad I never signed up to begin with

no more discord GenZ

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?

Is IRC illegal yet?

I will go against the grain and say that I am happy that Discord is doing something about the NSFW content that is being fed to children on its platform. I don't use Discord that much personally but I heard from friends that it is a goto for NSFW content, similar to reddit.

Every time the topic of ID for 18+ content comes up, the entire internet melts down over "big brother" and "privacy", yet no one flinches at presenting ID for alcohol at the store. And further more, nobody offers an alternative solution the problem. Status quo isn't acceptable. "Kids will always find a way to bypass measures/access their porn", is also not an acceptable answer.

We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing.

I will say I am usually the first person to oppose any sort of government overreach, I am very pro privacy.

I believe the energy put into the criticism and boycott of Discord should be put into finding solutions for verifying ID in a secure and private manner online. Something like Apple Pay for IDs?

I think the issue here is that companies (and govs) are choosing the worst possible solitions to a real problem because it benefits them. Gov wants it for control, companies want it to sell ads and mine data. They team up, and screw everyone over while overlooking other viable solitions

> We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing.

I agree, however show your ID is just a "Enter your date of birth" prompt with obfuscation.

Buying alcohol is physical and therefore has some advantages, for example you can be sure that your ID is not copied/sold as you are there and get it back.

In another comment the idea was presented to make a "I am adult" card you can buy (physical like the alcohol). I think that would work a lot better than upload your government id and face to random app/website.

Maybe I'm old school but I was always told "don't make a copy of your ID" by the government, a photo was included in that definition.

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.

Why is this such a big thing? Who cares about the face scan?

It'll basically create a unique hash of your face, to be tied to all your comms. I can think of a dozen ways this could be misused by a nation-state.

Oh wow that’s something else…

Take a picture of your debit/credit card back and front for me. I won't use it to buy stuff, but I wouldn't mind a picture of it for safe keeping.

Goodbye Discord.

The usual "to protect the kids" bs. Only people who does not understand the implications of this, will provide personal information.

Watch:

A) Discord relaxing its rule because of mass exodus B) People moving elsewhere where no personal information is required

Looks like it might be opt-in by server.

Wow

Delete!

ENOPE.

No thanks

can't wait to beat it with a face-swap or some random driving license found on the internet

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.

Amazing how this coordinated attack on internet privacy has been so effective, the amount of people in my country who see this as an attack on "Big Tech" or even "The Tech Bros" is astonishing. I do not even know what one can do about people who are so unaware of what behooves them especially given the recent coverage of Epstein and just how prevalent all sorts of blackmail is and how useful this would be for gather kompromat not just by their government intelligence agencies but also foreign intelligence agencies and even just scammers come blackmailer.

not to mention the recent prevalence of so called sextortion on teenagers.

disturbing stuff, hope the kibosh gets put on all these policies and their is a public push-back, but that is really seeming like a fantasy.

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.

I don't trust any government clerk with my personal data, let alone Discord. What a joke.

Yeah good fucking luck with that. Time for the "discord alternatives" search on Google.

meh, discord hasn't done anything interesting in years. i'm mostly on Sup these days https://sup.net/i/rgc-fnqc43h

What interesting things does Sup offer?

bye Discord.

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.

Discord has 150 million monthly active users.

They’ll be fine. To them, this is just another internet boycott, with all that entails. Reddit survived a worse one and grew afterward.

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

[removed]

There's this thing called the Wayback Machine, but I lol'd at your response. It's not untrue. xD

> 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.

This is not OK.

> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners

Fuck you

after discord then what ???? fb,twiiter,instagram etc ???? hell nah

do we really need to do this EVERY FUCKING SERVICE that we would like to use ????

What are the chances this is being implemented solely as a tool of control by Trump, eg to target his paramilitary attacks?

Well. Goodbye Discord. I'm leaving.

Technofascism. Do not comply.

Yeah, no. Account gone in advance.

(( This is a repost of what I shared on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment... but I think the context will be helpful for this group, too. This article title is very misleading. ))

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!

> we're designing to respect privacy

Orly?

> we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know

Ah so.

Kids can create accounts only at age 13+, adulthood is at age 18 (at least in my country) which means any account older than 5 years should automatically be marked as an adult's account. Please tell me that's the case.

If you still require an ID for those accounts, that means you don't really care about age verification, you just want to tie people to a government ID.

right now someone is vibecoding a locally hostable discord clone.

Finally the kids will be safe. We did it everyone! /s

another one bites the dust.

No thank you, get fucked

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."

Good, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".

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.

* SCREEN Act age verification with huge implications for all online privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

* Abolishing Section 230, the law that protects platforms like this from being sued for user content (just published today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

* UK online safety act (it's not just the U.S.) - interview with the lawyer defending 4chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJr...

Any business or community that keeps using Discord as their main channel after this is complicit in helping build another ICE database.

This age verification thing is being overblown if you understand how they're implementing it. You still shouldn't use Discord, but this isn't why.

Finally, but done wrong. This should be done by 3rd party app (probably owned by government) with access token without sharing one's identity.

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.

Is it open source?

It looks interesting but no source availability is a red flag for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com