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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 "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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 used to be that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. ;)
The perfect reply. Hats off to you, good sir.
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.
wdym, how did your dog driver license even pass before AI ?!
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.
The tech used some variant of OCR, presumably
well, any dog can pass the driving exam in US
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
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?
Absolutely. Social media and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Ban it for everyone.
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.
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.
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".
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.
It was renamed from social network to social media by business executives, who hijacked the social networks built by us
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Blueskys only difference is that it hasnt been enshitified yet.
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.
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.
define 'social media' .. were BBSs social media? usenet? email? aol instant messenger? physical community bulletin boards? classified ads? newspapers?
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.
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.
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.
While we're architecting the lives of millions of strangers what other reasonable things would you personally like to disallow?
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.
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?
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brilliant observation! I would like to make the statement more precise: not hate/hatred but jealousy.
This is the kind of thing I would have posted while in High School.
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>.
Discord hasn't been video game only for a long time
Then use that server without age verification?
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.
> 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...
That’s not a reasonable societal expectation. That should be an expectation of the parents to follow through on.
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.
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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
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.
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
You don't have to, you just can't access NSFW channels and servers.
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.
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.
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.
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.