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

my experience is exact opposite

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

>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.

Term limits for congress.

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.

Sortation.

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.

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.

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.

The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.

Moo.

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?

Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.

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 politicians should be the least privileged people in a society except those in prison. Any protections or exceptions for them alone are unconstitutional.

They will have that exception on their phones.

He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create child porn with grok on X.

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.

'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.

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).

it's just sarcasm.

Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that, though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+

I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.

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.

It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of personally identifying information.

Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at "14-28 year olds".

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.

> 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.

He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted procuring a child for prostitution.

He pled to Procuring Person under 18 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

The fediverse already exists.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

That won't guarentee that you get your account back. Many times it's used to permaban you later.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.

How convenient.

"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.

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

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”.

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.

As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.

Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.

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.

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.

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.

For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.

That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people went to mastadon/bluesky.

> 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.

Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/

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.

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.

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.

There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.

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.

atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue

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?

So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?

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...

Stoat has screen sharing / video calling in the pipeline at least: https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat/issues/313

Jitsi does that well

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."

Jitsi handles this very well.

I personally would advocate the combination of Zulip for text chat plus Jitsi for calls and screen sharing.

Same, depends on what you expect in terms of features and so on, but for chat, IRC works perfectly.

Currently financed on user donations. The future plan is to intoduce further features which are costly to provide behind a paywall to remain sustainable.

Element’s awful, but I’ve found FluffyChat, another matrix client, to be a lot better, albeit with a very silly name.

Requires hosting of the private server (security/privacy implications) or renting it from the third party.

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 .

"[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.

It's open source, I'm tempted to fork it and do nothing other than change the branding.

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.

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)

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.

They don't have to comply in advance.

> panic at losing years of history

I used to be like that. It was unsustainable and ultimately mentally unhealthy.

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.

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.

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.

How do I know that this message isn't divisive propaganda posted by a bot?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

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'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)

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.

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...

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.

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.

Then you decided to cave in and forego your privacy. Don't assume others will falter in the same fashion.

>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.

"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."

Your solution is subservience.

I don’t sign up for those accounts, and I change my mobile number every 90 days.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> prior fakes

But they assured me my biometrics are deleted after uploading!

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.

Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I'll have to revisit it.

> 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.

They'll now have kompromat associated with a name, address, and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your country calls it)

I'm curious to know what this "model" actually means. A real-time AI monitoring for conversations?

How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?

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 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.

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.

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?

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...

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?

Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.

HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2 things are bad.

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.

It's wild that this nonsense is still floating around by people pushing "credentialed doctors", whatever the fuck they think that means. No one with any vague degree of credibility would now or ever has supported "very large number" and all of the "externalities" (are you sure you're using the right words) have been vastly outweighed by the things the vaccine provably did.

So tired of this shit.

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 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.