Wow, this is... kinda like the Noita engine but without the exploding yourself every 5 seconds. Probably going to spend the next several hours getting zero useful RL tasks done now, thanks again Neal.
*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.
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.
`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`
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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]
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
>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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read the article and was disappointed that the full "word" got cut off, but I know that somewhere, there's a German out there who will post something even longer.
I’m German and think the idea to compound words into one should not really count as the longest / a long word. I mean yes it is but also it isn’t. Like: “ Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung” In the end it’s just slapping words together and count it as one.
I really, really, really wish this sequence of words did not exist in modern society.
/my unsubstantiated reddit-tier comment which I'm only posting because I'm sure someone will piggyback off of it with something related and actually insightful.
I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".
And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
Your ancestors probably had plant-based cures like garlic or walnut hulls for the same infections. Modern medicine improved on the spectrum of parasites that can be treated but there's still some caveman-level stuff that works reliably for some species.
I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction:
I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat."
...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.
Demon has some interesting additions to the ongoing “Gaea fucks with Scirocco” relationship but is mostly about Gaea getting senile and watching too many old 1950s movies. Varley was clearly enjoying writing the latter part but it dragged for me.
Titan introduced the setting and went through different parts of Gaea. Wizard summarized the basics of this, if you want more details of what happened to Scirocco’s whole crew then they are in there.
Question for both you and GPP; is this fear limited to real life depictions, or basically anything? E.g, if you ever played Skyrim or a game with spider-like enemies does it have the same effect as a real spider?
Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.
Spider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary.
I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.
I did play Skyrim, and I was fine with it. Something about video games takes the fear out of it. I mean, they're definitely a little bit more unsettling than other video game creatures, but not by much, so I don't get a fear response. I'd react more to a "jump scare" in a game than a 3D spider.
I'm also really afraid of snakes, but spiders are okay.
Movies with snakes are quite painful to watch too, and I'm very uncomfortable with snakes in video games, but at least I have some control (compared to TV) so it's a significantly better experience
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