Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won’t be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it’s a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, said in an interview with The Verge that those servers will be “obfuscated” with a black screen until the user verifies they’re an adult. Users also won’t be able to join any new age-restricted servers without verifying their age.
I use the audio rooms feature with some friends quite a lot, where anyone can join and leave. Don’t know the official name. What’s an alternative for that? Will stoat work?
Tired of so many discussions being locked away in Discord, so hopefully they ramp this up and require identification to do anything so everyone will move to a more open platform.
What discussions happen on discord? I’m late 20s and play video games regularly and I have never used it. Thought it was where people streamed themselves playing video games or selling bathwater or whatever. Back in the day my home boys and I used to chat on teamspeak while gaming, but who has time for that shit anymore? My gaming is almost all single player or with the wifey 3 feet to my left lol.
What discussions happen on discord?
You ever have an issue with anything and you find the answer on some random reddit discussion that ends up in your search results when you’re looking around?
Discord isn’t really like the older methods of chatting, where people used platforms to chat for the sake of chatting. Entire communities from forums decided to just upend everything and move into discord. Niche software and other files are often shared among discord communities, or assistance for said files and programs is offered only through specific discord communities.
The platform is still better than anything we had back in the day, it’s just that for some reason people have decided that everything needs to be stored in there.
Anyway, I don’t see much changing. People will probably attempt to take this culture onto whatever new platform they move onto.
Man I miss when we had real forums. I used to go on nasioc for Subaru info now everybody is on FB pages. I have not yet found a need for downloading discord but I’m sure I’m bound to run into it eventually…
A ton of game companies (especially indies) have moved bug reports and patch notes over to discord. Suggesting something on the steam forums often gets you redirected to their discord server. And it’s not just gaming companies. I’ve got several pieces of software that the easiest way to find out about betas and updates are to use their discord server. It feels fairly unavoidable if you want to stay informed.
Glad you’re willing to share her with all of us
The cybersecurity certification companies use discord for support exclusively, and no you can’t use a different company because they are the ones the market recognizes. Offsec, Altered Security, for example.
Discord and github are the two platforms barely anyone dares to speak about. The Foss community barely mentions the usage of such platforms, despite nearly all of projects use discord as the support line.
It is really such a shame, since those projects make a significant contribution to open source software in one area. but just shits itself in the other.
Codeberg ftw!
At least public githubs aren’t difficult to access and/or crawl. The big issue with Discord is that there is a wealth of information locked behind a proprietary system.
Unlike forums or even reddit, there is not way to get to most of the information posted on discord.
I don’t understand, of course we can access it?
A lot of discord content is private, and those that aren’t require you to have discord to search. On top of that, I’m pretty sure you need to join a server before you can search it’s contents.
Since I don’t use discord, there is no real way for me to access content hosted on it. Compared to Reddit or a Forum, I don’t need to be a member of the community to access information shared there.
But the data is accessible and a migration can be done by those who posted it? Depends on local laws I guess… their eula states everything you send in discord now belongs to then, but that is not allowed in the eu and many other countries
You can only access it if you install Discord.
No, GDPR laws allows me to download all data and also enforcing its deletion without using the app ever again
It would mean a lot to me if open source projects used op n source coms for discussions. I tried discord recently and couldnt even get prast email verification. I went into a server, asked questions and couldn’t check to see if they were answered. Sorry people I ghosted!
Free software contributors I hang out with do mention the likes of irc, matrix, codeberg, and activitypub’ising git a lot.
No time to waste mentioning inferior software that’s abusive.
Let alone use it.
Globally? Have they read GDPR?
Always hated discord mostly as a technology, now i just hate it as is.
Badalich also says after the October data breach, Discord “immediately stopped doing any sort of age verification flows with that vendor” and is now using a different third-party vendor.
Oh thanks, it’s fixed
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.
Suure
If this was true, then they would have no problem with agreeing to paying us $50 mil each in the event of a data breach, since it could never happen, right?
Oh yeah it’s totally deleted from that one server! Of course all information is kept for “quality and training purposes” and to hand over to palantir and whoever is willing to pay.
Just like they deleted it from the last provider
Now what sort of unethical corporate greed machine would do that?
. . . All of them?
Oh. Oh dear.
“we use industry standard privacy practices”
e.g. your privacy is our payday.
I usually just roll my eyes when I see that corpospeak, but now I’m going to translate it as “payday.” Thanks!
And for advertising so that they can bucket you accordingly.
Gotta juice the B2B spigot for the upcoming IPO
Of course, but they also derive demographic information from all the texts, links, communities you interact with.
Now they’ll have verifiable racial characteristics to target you with customized ads that look like you. It’s definitely more effective.
It’s a horrible company that preys on youth.
Well, you need to understand, Palantir needs a library for their facial recognition software. What if those young people refused to take advantage of the smartphone biometrics? Don’t they know it is for their security??? /s
So, they WANT to render themselves obsolete?
I really hope they do. When a support forum says “join us on discord” I immediately nope the fuck out. I have never used discord and I don’t plan on it.
Even as a discord user, support forums, wikis, and QAs should not be done in discord. Their search feature is utter ass, and without tabs navigating forums is utter hell
I HATE discord. It’s way too complicated. The rules within chats are ridiculous.
Sorry but this is like saying the Internet is too complicated because different forums have different rules
And it’s obscure, why use a chat like a forum? Why keep knowledge there? It’s not even encrypted so it’s insecure and blinded from the regular internet.
More like they are being forced to by Governments who are pushing kid safety as a way to achieve their final goal which is a drivers license to use the Internet.
But you can’t have a provider abo until you’re of legal age…
What governments? The US government isn’t making them do it.
The US government isn’t making them do it.
The Feds aren’t making them do it, but plenty of states are working on it.
Yeah, asshole states.
Dunno why this is worldwide, then. Why should I have to comply with what some states in the US want when I’m not even in the same country, and my country has none of these age verification laws? Whole world shouldn’t have to give up their privacy just because Tennessee said so.
Because Discord wants your data, any excuse they give is just a rationalization to get it.
The Heritage Foundation and New World Order want to make sure there is a real life identity tied to discord since it is being looked at as a probable collaboration source for resistance. Every other social platform like Meta already does this and I can see Reddit requiring this next.
It’s to track the future dissidents once the winter of discontent arrives. It’s why China requires a real life ID sign in for every single site and every single file hosting site there
Probably because it’s easier than making EULA for every state and county
UK, AUS to name a few, but many others are doing this, and its only a matter of time before the US gets in on the action.
The US is busy violating people’s rights and executing civil dissidents. They’ll get to it when they grow bored of terrorizing everyone.
They are choosing this over banning porn on their platform.
Yeah, I’m not doing that.
Luckily i never understood what discord was for, so i never joined. But yet another company that will crash and burn because they hate consumer privacy.
Doesn’t really sound like it’s going to affect me but maybe this will make more of my mates join matrix
The day an app/service (be it Discord or anything else) asks me to upload my ID, is the day my account gets deleted.
Thank you for your account deletion request. For your safety, we have to confirm you are the owner of the account you are trying to delete. Please upload your government ID below.
Time for me to review Revolt Chat again to see what has updated.
Wow, apparently they change their name entirely. I am way behind
It’s dead. The development has been as fraught as Tox and it has no feature parity. Not sure it’s worth forking.
Right now your best options are jitsi for video or good old mumble for voice and simplex or matrix for text chat.
It’s Stoat now! https://stoat.chat/
I recently joined! It’s very close to Discord.
Anyone else not receiving the verification email? Doesn’t seem to work for me.
I think it took a long time for me the first time. They seem way smaller than Discord, so I imagine they don’t have the fastest infrastructure. Also, I signed up with a non-gmail account and their verification email did make it through eventually.
Wow! I had checked these guys out a long while ago. It seems they’ve gotten a fresh coat of paint. I should revisit it. Maybe convince my friends to switch…
No VOIP? That’s the only reason I ever use discord, when my friends force me to so I can talk while we play games. Guess teamspeak is still king
If you don’t care about audio on screenshare you could use matrix, that’s what I do.
They have voice chat channels in Stoat, or are you wanting p2p calls?
No just voice channels, I’m glad they have them but it was completely missing from their marketing on the website. Just says “text channels done right” and there isn’t a single line about voice support
Edit, found a reddit post from about a month ago which is copied below. So it looks like it barely supports voice so far.
"Apparently The voice chat feature has been brought back in stoat
It only works in the desktop version though. Mobile devices you’re going to have to wait a bit longer though.
Otherwise the quality of it is really really good but you will experience a massive delay in your voice being sent through the voice medium. It’s about 800 millisecond delay even with the fastest speeds. But at least it’s something. "
Ah, I could see that being confusing.
I will say compared to discord the voice channels sound rough and I’m not sure I remember that many options to customize the experience
I’ll take rough around the edges over potential ID theft tbh
No video call or screen share either from what I can tell, which is uhhh pretty major to day the least. That said, it’s not like I need only use one platform at a time. I’ll probably get on that and start using it and hope that they add those things in the future. But yeah, I’m not sure if I would call it close to Discord right now.
Now Discord users are furious and canceling Nitro. I wonder where they will go if the update gets released.
I’ve heard the two main ones people are looking at are Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Matrix. Honestly, I don’t mind having multiple chat clients, we did back in the 90/00s.
I just found out about the AGPL’d Fluxer today
We were using multiple chat clients up to 2015.
The day where platforms enshittify so bad they implode can’t come soon enough
I think we’re watching it.
Good. Can’t wait for discord to go away.
Ok, rare to see such an explicit kind of Great Filter / Idiot Test play out at scale, but here we go!
Anybody who is still using Discord after it requires you to personally directly link your drivers liscense or w/e to it, well, they’re fine with every government apparatus of any kind knowing everything they say and do on Discord.
Good luck to those glorious morons, truly, good luck.
You are going to need it.
Super, duper hope you’re not queer or trans or neurodivergent.
… you… think the 23 concentration camps currently being built by ICE / FEMA are … only for migrants?
Brown people?
Well you trust the current fascist regime a lot more than I do.
First they came for…
First they actually came for the trans people, but the poem author didn’t care to notice because he was a Catholic Priest.
But ya know. Its like that again.
Here in the UK Discord has been requiring this for a while already. I never did the verification, because I don’t access any NSFW Discord servers anyway. Unless you use Discord for porn (or speak on “stages”, whatever they are), there is no reason to do the verification.
Well theres also the near certainty that they’re reading everyones messages with some kind of LLM agent that is their ‘system that runs in the background’ that attempts to auto-determine if you are a kid or not.
Thats regardless of whether or not you also give them your ID or face.
And, if you have connected Discord to any other apps? Other apps that you maybe pay for things with? Or you pay for Nitro?
They know who you are.
Yeah absolutely, Discord is terrible for privacy either way. What I’m saying is that the verification “requirement” is not actually required for what I would presume the majority of people use Discord for.
