PC Gaming

If governments

America has left the chat.

Honestly, we should start doing hardware-based age verification instead. Have the government run a simple yes/no service for individuals to be able to verify their age. The service simply asks if you’re over 18, and the government responds with a simple yes/no.

You verify your identity on the device once when setting it up, it asks the government if you’re over 18, and then your user account is verified as an adult when the “yes” response is returned. The only time it would need to be repeated is when someone turns 18, which would be something the user would need to manually prompt their device to retry. And notably, the government isn’t being pinged for every site you visit, they only got pinged for the initial device setup. So they don’t get access to any of your browsing data.

Now your phone can automatically send a “yes, I’m over 18” signal to any site or service that asks. And kids won’t be verified, meaning they won’t even be able to see the “are you over 18” prompts; they’ll simply be booted off the site (or in Discord’s case, restricted) as soon as it automatically asks their device for an age verification. No action is required on the user’s part, and the site/service didn’t need any invasive info about who you are. As far as an adult is concerned, they got direct access to the site without any kind of annoying “are you over 18” prompt. And as far as a child is concerned, they got automatically redirected right back to Google’s home page as soon as they clicked the porn link.

For shared devices (like computers) it could be handled on a per user basis. You verify your age on Windows/Linux/MacOS when creating the account, and then whenever you’re logged in, any site can simply ask if you’re over 18. Don’t want your kid to stumble across porn? Don’t verify their account. Now safeguarding kids on the internet is as simple as parents safeguarding their computer password and refusing to verify their child accounts.

It’s basically the best of all worlds:

• The government/private data brokers don’t get free access to your browsing data, like what would happen if every individual site asked the government for verification. This is our current reality, with data brokers hoovering up photos of IDs to feed to their data scientists.
• The adult user only needs to take action once to verify their age, and then after that the age gates are automatically opened. You don’t need to verify independently with each site, because your device handles that automatically during the initial handshake.
• Sites don’t get any additional personal info about you, except for the automatic pass/fail hardware response saying that you’re over 18. They don’t need to collect your info to pass to a third party verification system. They don’t need to ask the government, because that has already been done. And they don’t need to worry about things like GDPR compliance for collected info, because there is no additional collected info.
• Your browsing info isn’t shared with third parties, because the sites/services you use have no need to ask third parties for verification.

Of course it’ll never happen though, because it would restrict what kinds of info data brokers could collect and sell.

They have and they don’t want it because it doesn’t give them access to everyone’s biometric data.

I could see this coming a long way off with Discord. It’s a honey trap. They swallow entire communities whole like some gargantuan leviathan of antiquity.

I am on matrix partially and am going to go on stoat.

Something is busted because I wanted tonregister, it said it would verify my email, the verification expired before I even got the email, hours later.

Stoat seems to be very early in development still. Matrix has gotten easier for non-technical users recently.

I doubt it. this doesn't really affect the majority of people, it just makes all accounts "teens" by default which blocks suspected nudity and age restricted channels

Yeah just like Reddit and Twitter and Threads etc. etc.?

Is there a way to get it to look like discord?

If not, I've been looking into Root and Stoat instead. Those both look nearly identical. Stoat can even use discord bots.

Is that an open source alternative?

Does Matrix support screen sharing yet? IDK why I'm having such an issue getting a solid answer other places.

Also cancelled mine. I don't suspect this change will actually directly affect me personally, but it's the final straw on a big pile of straw. I know plenty of people here will admonish those of us that were paying for it in the first place, but better late than never I say.

Not entirely sure what I'm going to transition my group to. It's quite likely we won't actually have one replacement, but many. We used text, voice, video, and screensharing on Discord (plus many other, though less important features). I don't know of an alternative that does all of it.

Discord's filters are kind of infamously bad about what they detect as "adult content." I, for one, will not be supplying an ID to anyone. They've already given me several compelling reasons not to to give them money, but it seems that this one finally pushed me over the edge.

Which includes many of the wargaming, traditional art, and queer Discord servers my partner and I use. Never assume that when a bad actor says “adult content” they mean hardcore porn and snuff, they mean everything that doesn’t conform to their ideal christofascist ethnostate purity. And now they have a list of all the “dangerous” nonconformists while blocking everyone else from being exposed to “dangerous” ideas. This should chill people to the bone. Nobody should be okay with this anywhere, in any capacity, in any quantity, whatsoever.

And the "stone the gays" people are the ones who get to decide what is and isn't adult content

Who doesnt love getting spearphisted by all these random girls on discord that send friend requests without ever talking to you?!