this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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with mass adoption of enshitification. and with the world in general. calling things a slippery slope fallacy is a long and losing gamble.
if the field was put in because of a law, then it’s for a reason, if the data isn’t important, or enforced, then it is useless and should not have been added.
I wonder if it was put in for the same reason CA passed a self-reporting law recently. I wonder if it's an attempt to repel through malicious compliance far worse age verification that's forced at a federal (US) level.
This isn’t even malicious compliance. It’s just compliance. The owner of the system can set ages for system users. Smart people will set it to what they want.
Commentary like this is exactly what grinds my gears.
This isn’t analysis, it’s implication, conjecture, and conspiracy framed as insight.
The age verification laws are objectively bad. They do nothing meaningful to protect children, degrade the quality of the internet, and hand more authority to a government that already has too much.
But your line of argument is also flawed. I’ve already stated my position clearly. Repeating “it’s probably worse” adds nothing of substance.
More importantly, the fundamental architecture of Linux makes this entire premise irrelevant. It is open source and inherently resistant to centralized control. Governments can pass whatever laws they want; they cannot meaningfully enforce them at the system level in an ecosystem designed to be forked, modified, and redistributed at will.
the laws are bad, and you can push fighting for anonymity and freedom down the road because letting the camel stick its nose under the tent don’t bother anyone, and it’s too easy to just ignore…. but the laws are made for a purpose, and they will change. and uh oh, the camel has flipped the tent, you can’t fight to remove it because now systems are built around it being there. now it’s a much harder fight because we didn’t fight when it was easy.
again after seeing everything that has happened you call sounding the alarm for this as a slippery slope… i am sorry, but i question either your motives, or your foresight.