Discord Age Verification
Discord and Age Verification
Recently Discord announced that it would roll out age verification for all of its users sometime in early March. This is following their roll out of a similar policy in the U.K. and Australia, where law makers implemented age verification laws under the guise of "protecting children." But like the many times this excuse has been used before, this is just a poorly disguised effort to limit expression and crack down on free speech.
This newest effort on Discord's part seems to be company bending the knee preemptively to the authoritarian efforts the U.S government is taking to crack down on free speech of people who disagree with the far right direction the country is taking. Very recently, the Department of Homeland Security indicated that it wanted social media platforms to hand over the information of users who posted negative things about ICE. And all across the internet and the U.S, websites and companies are giving their best efforts to try and further de-anonymize the internet. All to gather even more data on people to sell and feed to their algorithms and "AI."
There are people more qualified to speak on the legislative and wider cultural impact these policies will have. I have thoughts, but I don't have all the right information, so I think I'll reserve that research to the future. Right now I just want to talk about how much this all sucks. I feel like the way these changes are going to affect me are going to affect many other people in the same way. So I want to get my frustrations out, in part to cope a little bit with my disappointment and frustration.
I really don't look forward to losing my online friends. Maybe it was inevitable and I just never accepted it. Hell, I've lost contact with tons of people I know and have been IRL friends with, whose phone numbers and addresses I have. But in the back of my mind, I figured that some way, some how I'd be able to keep in contact with the people I knew online with some consistency. And Discord was a convenient way to do so.
For the most part, the changes that were coming with this new policy didn't weigh heavy on my mind until people I know started talking about how they were going to delete their accounts or stop using social media all together now that Discord was taking a turn for the worse. It finally dawned on me that I was going to lose out on the advice, input, and company of a lot of people that I really respected and enjoy spending time with. That a lot of the communities I was in would become husks because the regulars decided, rightfully so, that the platform didn't warrant handing over their bio-metric data to who knows whom. This is especially going to wreck the more niche communities and groups I'm in. And I'm sure these issues and more are going to affect hundreds, if not thousands of other users in similar situations to me.
There is probably something to be said of the monopolization of attention and resources that resulted from social media. Reddit killed forums, and then when Reddit inevitably took its own turn for the worse, a lot of information was lost when users purged their accounts and subreddits. Discord did the same, but for chat clients. I see a lot of people talking about using IRC again, and I've given it a look. But on the surface it seems overwhelming. And I don't see most people going from the ease of discord into something that has a slight learning curve like IRC and IRC clients. There are other alternatives out there like Matrix or Stoat or Fluxer as well. But for a lot of folks, migrating over is too much effort anyways.
I feel like it's wrong to say that I have accepted what is coming, and I'm definitely not OK with it. But at the end of the day, I can only do so much when it will come to staying in contact with friends. Or when it comes to finding more communities and forums for advice and guidance. The decline in quality of service that got us here is simply the nature of monopoly. I don't think the wider internet is going to learn that lesson anytime soon. I hope that there's a decent alternative that pops up, because I would like to point to a more pain free avenue for my friends who do want the convenience that discord provides. And in the meantime, I'll try to maintain my relationships as best as I can.