hello. there have been a lot of misinformation going around about age verification so i want to write down my thoughts about it. im aware im biased (i use discord a lot and own a large server a bot), and i dont expect this to change anyones opinion, consider this me venting with a small hope someone will learn something from this.
- aaaa everyone will have to verify
most people will already be verified based on existing usage patterns which doesnt include your messages1 (!!) additionally only a small portion of features will require verification, most important being speaking on stage1 despite poor wording friend requests or dms wont be limited1
- discord wants your id
everyone saying this knows there is no proof discord will be storing/sharing/using your id2. i understand that you probably shouldnt share it in general but some people are 101% convinved discord is selling ids straight onto dark net
additionally during verification you can pick between face verification and id scan1, face verification doesnt leave your device1 (this has been verified by knowledgeable people and is the reason why there briefly was an exploit to bypass verification3)
id scan gets sent to a server but is instantly deleted1
they could lie but like you are aware that violates like every law imagineable??
- oh now hackers will hack in to steal it
have you EVER noticed that you have a payment method attached to discord which even includes your billing address? i would argue thats more valuale to hackers and it hasnt been leaked once since discord existed
- the 70k incident
this pisses me off so much aaaa
ok so what happened is that age appeals back then4 were done by sending your id to discord’s zendesk (zendesk is a platform to manage customer support) to be manually verified by someone.
one of the support employees was hacked and the hacker could access the pending age verification tickets.5
this isnt even remotly comparable to the new system because:
- there is no manual review, you cant compromise someone to view it
- its not done by stretching capabilities of a third party platform never designed to deal with that kind of personal data, and is instead built into the app
- faces never fucking leave the device and ids get instantly deleted even if you hacked it you wouldnt find shit1
- the alternatives & the impact
there are currently no good clear single alternative to discord.
most projects are very primitive chats made by someone as a hobby which wont last more than a few months, and have a very limited feature set (dont even think about bots)
you have to realize that by the nature of chatting/social apps you cant switch to another one alone, you will need to convince your entire friend group, and large servers wont be able to move at all
this is combined with the fact you are vocal minority. discord has over 250 million monthly active users6 and most discord users dont know age verification is coming nor will care or even notice once it does (see point 1).
for someone to move you have to convince them that the fact they might have to scan their face on-device is bad enough that they need to install and setup another app which probably has a lot less features
this is the reason “inferior” chat apps still have a lot of users, like whatsapp, facebook messagenger, (you probably can think of more)…
discord makes around ~50 million USD a month in revenue6, even a couple thousand people cancelling wont significantly impact this figure
https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens & https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/38332670254231-Age-Assurance-Update-FAQ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
you can still appeal via support but its primarily done in-app nowadays: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041820932-Help-I-m-old-enough-to-use-Discord-in-my-country-but-I-got-locked-out ↩︎
https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service ↩︎
