obsidian says this takes 4 minutes to read.
I knew from the moment that Discord started to introduce age verification back in 2024 or so, to comply with the Australia and UK’s social media teen ban, I knew it would only be a matter of time for that system to be implemented everywhere, and now Discord announced today that they are planning to implement the same age verification globally. I am so fucking angry at this, because like, a large chunk of my friends I met use Discord and now I would need to prove my age to Discord to keep having the same access I already have. From what I can tell, Discord plans to also monitor your messages to make sure you are the age that you say you are. By default, if you get tagged as a “teen”, Discord will now filter messages for you, any places that may be NSFW now require verification, DMs from unknown users now are now routed to a separate inbox, which is a setting you cannot turn off without verification. Age restricted servers will now be obfuscated and blackened out until you verify your age.
Discord plans to implement a stupid “Teen Council” or whatever the fuck this is, which I feel it will be literally useless, and to join, guess what! You pretty much need to give away your full legal name, address, date of birth, and other cool tidbits of information, the same information, which I remember getting drilled into my fucking head as a kid, to never fucking post or share on the internet. It gets worse since the people expected to be part of this council are all from ages 13 to 17. Jesus fucking Christ. I also think it is funny that Discord thinks this age verification system is somehow “privacy forward”, like “oh yeah the IDs submitted to our third party vendors are deleted fast!”. You know what would be more private? Not having age verification in the fucking first place.
I think most people fucking hate this. This recent change has gotten my friend groups in like a scramble on trying to find an alternative for if, and when Discord hits the shitter. Revolt/Stoat seems to be the preferred option, even if it is very fucking undercooked. Matrix/Element also is thrown around as an alternative, as well as Teamspeak and maybe Mumble, and sometimes non-Discord-likes (aka Signal or maybe Telegram for some reason) are thrown around as possibilities. Point is, there is a lot of alternatives, but none really come to what Discord was. And I fear now I need to keep multiple chat clients on my PC or phone just to keep up with what my friends are doing.
I wonder why Discord even bothers implementing a system that can be foiled by fucking Gmod. Or an ID verification system that is so secure that Discord had 70K IDs leaked. Do you trust Discord, out of all companies, Discord, the company that doesn’t treat anything seriously? Do you really trust Discord or whatever third party company Discord uses to verify the ID cards, to keep that information safe? I must admit, only Discord would be insane enough to announce global age verification after that hack earlier, lmao.
I am just tired man, I am tired of having to switch to platform, to platform, and then switch again because it turned out to be a massive pile of shit. Or because some shitbillionare purchased it and turned it to shit. Or when a company is like “oh would you think of the kids?” and proceed to get 70k id cards leaked and stolen by hackers. Maybe this will bring a new era of like, people actually discovering that there is more to chat programs than just Discord, or maybe it will bring a new era of open source Discord-likes, or maybe, this will just make talking to your friends harder. I, for certain, will not fucking submit my ID to Discord, nor will I show my face to the AI machine that they use for the verification. If Discord really double downs on this, well, guess it is time to look elsewhere. What a shame.
Also this would be a cool reminder to stop paying for Nitro. Use third party clients instead of paying for the stupid emotes or for 1080p streaming. Shit talk Discord on whatever social media or blog you have access to. Make them fucking regret it.