"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them.
And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them.
I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go right back to them once the heat dies down.
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street.
One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for verification is uncountable
I have two older coworkers in my workplace alone that had criminals make fraudulent unemployment claims in their names. Fortunately they noticed and stopped it quickly. Undoubtedly the information used came from data leaks.
Now all these sites are implementing face scans, which would be perfect for such criminals to harvest and use AI to create fake videos of you saying anything that suits them.
At what point does legislation step in, here? Because so far, it's only moved in the direction that worsens the issue.
The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.
Yeah let's trust them this time. Nobody's ever lied about that in the past and there's never been a breach of data that reportedly didn't exist. I'm sure this time it'll work out
The risk in effect is that every message sent on Discord will make its way to Palantir with copy of your ID. This is not a risk that any user should accept. Discord fooled its users once, and it should not be trusted to not fool them again.
And because of how broadly and frequently people use Discord, it will be super useful when correlating with other data feeds. That might be even more valuable than the discord activity itself.
Article title, which was a lot clearer than this one: "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Ties To Palantir’s Peter Thiel Surface"
Not sure why you changed it but it makes quite the difference to the meaning.
It’s a network. You can move but will your community?
We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them?
Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]
We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.
Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.
> you can even change which app you want it to be.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat
I agree that it would take something catastrophic for people to move off of the service they currently use. I disagree however on the premise that the move will be from one proprietary service to another. Us tech savvy people can and should self-host the things we believe can be valuable - now or down the line.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
Not sure why you're being down voted but the answer is yes, it is the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ and if the down voters think you might be exaggerating or misleading them I encourage them to search this up.
Edit - I searched to refresh myself, ok he didn't say she was the literal antichrist. He said she's literally a legionnaire for the literal antichrist. I cannot stress enough that he was very clear that he was not using these terms figuratively, I mean "literal" in the literal sense of the term.
Yeah, he definitely has gone off the rails lately with all the talk about the antichrist being a literal existing being with emissaries on earth. I haven't been watching his stuff but the little I've seen was unhinged.
for which Gretta is the litteral, antidote, as she has NO money, or such vanishingly small personal funds as to be of no account, yet hiches rides on sailboats to show up and berate parliments in there well worn lairs, her speach to the british parliment bieng a clear sign that she wont back down , and much worse, has such impecable manners that she mistook there talking and joking to be a technical mallfunction with her microphone.
And now after her capture by the ZGF (zionist genocide force), and stare down with there chief torturer/jailer, she has vanished from all major media.
So that Gretta and that Peter, are in fact
polar oposites in almost every sense.
I don’t have a strong opinion on Thunberg herself, but no, truths aren’t always in the middle. Thiel is clearly a complete fruitcake, so it does not make sense to triangulate based on any position that he holds.
Oh completely. I think you missed my point. Divisive narratives are almost entirely always wrong. The truth generally sits way away from the fruitcakes somewhere in the middle.
The problem these days is we give fruitcakes a stage. Or they buy one.
Right, but if you are using Thiel as a point of reference, you’re going to find a midpoint between sanity and insanity, which isn’t the truth. Say what you will about Thunberg, but she is not insane in the way that Thiel is.
Garry is a good person and smearing people over their church is a disgusting thing to do.
I am now going to sit here and listen to this talk because I guarantee it's not saying what you think it's saying. And I don't want to listen to it. It's not a topic that interests me. But I guarantee you are completely distorting what was stated in that topic for maximum effect, entirely motivated by left-wing politics.
I imagine you are not done listening to them yet as the total over 8 hrs. But my research is showing that OPs are largely correct. Theil gave several talks to his church where he did in fact say these things.
In your post you state you are ‘not sure’, but also that that the poster is ‘wrong’.
> My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
Sure, he eventually goes on to say stuff like..
> One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave
But I don’t think this is the win that you might think it is. The dude is a loon.
Going by your comment history any criticism of Thiel and the administration is just left wing politics, but hard to hear you over the sound of drowning yourself with kool-aid.
Weird that you seem to support this administration that Thiel is very much associated with but find it offensive when there's a very clear association between Thiel and Garry. He's just going to this specific church to pray or whatever? Paying no mind to the anti-christ talk happening next door. I do hope this is the last breaths of religion in the western world, it needs to die.
I've been on HN for well over 10 years. I literally volunteered for Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and my comments in that time period clearly show my politics. I taught free web scraping workshops at the Center for American Progress to journalists back then. None of my policy preferences have changed. What's changed is the frothing at the mouth radicalism and moralizing of the team I used to support.
I'm not religious, and hate religious radicals, but ideologues act identically, just with secular idols. I didn't see that until I watched what the leftist ideologies did to the quality of life in two places I used to live in:
SF and Boulder.
I'm a 2012 Democrat, which makes me a fascist to a 2026 Democrat.
You have made a false claim. What is your evidence that I am religious, let alone a religious radical?
I mean, if we're going to make accusations based on perceived political tribal allegiances, I can say to you with equal certainty that you're a neo-Marxist.
Of course I don't know that. And you don't know anything about me.
You are wrong. Thiel's talks are as insane as we're saying. Also, it's not "disgusting" to tar people for belonging to a known toxic community of lunatics. It's completely rational. Cut the fake outrage. Idiotic religious beliefs don't have the same sacred value to most of us as they do to you.
"yes I'm right. Not sure why you are being downvoted. Do your own research"
Does research and now admits that he wasn't right, and understands why he and others were being down voted and hopefully learns from this and moves on.
Kudos for the edit and honesty: it's rare to see learning actually happen in fiery threads! I've been in your shoes and learning and change is possible.
If someone is saying that there are literal actuql existing legionnaires of the literal actual existing antichrist, and X person is one of them, it's not the "X person is one of them" part that I have an issue with.
Maybe you can help me out, I listened to him talk about this and I couldn't make head-nor-tail of what he was trying to say. It feels like he's so tied up in concepts and metaphors and similes and allegories it's impossible to tell specifically what he is asserting to be true. If you could explain to me like I was five I'd be grateful. Not looking for an argument.
>
Well, she openly supports islamo-supremacists and facists as long as they have the right skin color.
yea... I'm gonna call bullshit on that.
> are not just busy hating jews,
ah there we go. the standard strawmen dogwhistle. we stopped bying it sometime after you all called doctors without boreders, amnesty international and the ICC antisemetic. let me guess, you support zionism and the genocide in palestine? I bet in backrooms you refer to them as human animals too right?
You must misunderstand what Anti-christ behaviour looks like. Antichrist behaviour is having one of your agents organize a worldwide cabal of child rapists and baby-organ eaters just so one day they can all be blackmailed into enabling the mass industrial holocausting of tens of thousands of other children in an open air prison - dropping thermobaric bombs onto schools so as to gas the victims of your demonic holocaust upon them .... oh wait turn them into a fine mist... and then attempting to shapeshift into members of a historically oppressed abrahamic monotheistic (antichrist followers - zs - are literal false-idol worshippers) faith so innocent anti-zionist Jewish people get framed for your demonic babybloodletting.
Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment".
> "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do."
People have already validated this fyi. When k-ID was first added you could send a bogus age result to discord from your local device, which probably still works. There's no evidence your facial scans leave the device.
> "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification."
Which isn't true, it was a UK-only experiment being run for a small subset of users, which has now been discontinued.
I get people are outraged, but this is sensationalism at best.
After the last screwup, by the same company, why would you trust the data to stay on your device?
> Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.
And by same company, I don't mean discord. I mean Persona.
was it “uk only” or was it the only place that required them to notify users theyre being experimented on?
we know US law allows tech companies to experiment on us without notifying at all. facebook was caught experimenting on users to see if a timeline full of sad posts would cause the users to become depressed.
im guessing his companies will get ahold of discord users data in most other countries. i’d be shocked if he only wants data from a tiny number of UK people.
Discord probably still claims they weren't hacked. How they handle incidents like this matters to a lot of folks, and that's what this is about.
3 months after a major breach, how could anybody possibly believe that they fixed all their wrong organizational policies and security measurements within that time, while still not even acknowledging the incident?
I don't want to defend Discord, but that's just not true. That announcement did not say all processing would be on-device, only when you use the face scan.
> Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device
> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it.
Meanwhile they're also clear that uploaded IDs do get sent to "partners":
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
Ah, I assumed that Persona is being used for face scans too. I haven't been able to find a screenshot of the actual flow, but based on this article [1] with a screenshot of the message UK users are receiving, I suspect they are:
>The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth... [emphasis mine]
To me, that implies that Persona is/was doing more than just IDs.
Don't forget teenagers can be extremely skilled technically. Plus they have a lot of time!
But you're on the right track.
I think of a solution like:
1. Browser does one-time age verification through 3rd party service, without disclosing any details about which sites you'll access.
2. Browser stores your age, signed by that service.
3. When a site requests it the browser passes that signed age over. The site simply has to check if it has a valid signature by a trusted authority's public key.
The browser could even use Palantir in this example - but they would never get any data about what users are accessing.
It'd be best to create a standard for this using wallet apps. You can obtain an age certificate from any trusted provider (decentralized chain-of-trust similar to TLS CAs), which you can then load into any wallet app of your choice on any OS, and use it with any online service which supports the standard. This should use anonymous, unlinkable(!) proofs, with the only certified data being `is_over_age`.
Though I'd prefer the way proposed by Mark Camilleri Gambin (EU politician). Have parents enable Child Mode during device setup, then expose `isMinor = true` to all websites and apps, require a parental control PIN to disable. This is a much better and cleaner solution. Requiring age verification of all adults gets it backwards.
My passport has biometrics, the government knows everything about me already through the tax system which is "digital". All my other interactions with the government are through digital services.
What exactly would a digital ID allow a government to do that it can't already? Apart from solve all the issues with having to provide scans of (my already digital) ID documents to every bank/solicitor/mortgage broker/estate agent/etc i interact with, where in many my personal ID documents probably sit on a company file share or some random persons One Drive.
A government digital ID with a one-time code to complete verification would solve all of this nonsense.
On control, again, what possible super power would a "digital ID" give a government that it doesn’t have already to control you?
Digital ID to interact with government services is great. It becomes a problem when they add something like OpenID4VC to it, with the intention of linking it to all your online activity for "age verification". This would create one giant government metadata silo on every individual's online activity.
Like the real world there a services online that need age verification, unless we want kids to continue to be exploited by social media and freely access porn.
We aren't living with the internet of the 90's any more, it's now owned by corporations and bad actors. Yes, i know it's impossible to stop those that are determined to circumvent restrictions (just as can happen with alcohol or movies) but clear restrictions give parents that want to do the right thing cover when setting rules in their own family.
In the end society raises children not just individual parents, and society need to take some responsibility too.
Personally i don't see how an API call to complete a government ID verification could be used to create a giant "metadata silo", unless the companies using the API are voluntarily sending more data than some sort of one-time challenge token. If the companies are coerced into feeding the government with your account activity history, what is stopping the government forcing that to happen now without bothering to draw attention via a digital ID?
Debank you for wrong speak or think, leaving you with no alternatives. The more cuntries implement digital id, the more they'll sync with each other, making life more and more miserable for anyone who doesn't want to go along with whatever nonsense is currently being pushed as the new thing.
The browser could also emit the age, which sites could check to block, and parents could manage via parental controls.
But that's no fun: can't assure control of the children (bad), monetization (even worse) not share with government (the worst, given the current administration).
True, and that'd be the best method by far. A European politician recently proposed this.[0] The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
> The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".
It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.
What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
Eh, you're trying to boil the ocean. This functionality built into the browser would cover 99.9% of the use cases. Applications can be monitored separately, and I'm at a loss for why my OS needs to know about my age.
None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.
Even better, the site could just tell the browser that there's age-sensitive content and the browser could check it. There are already standards for this!
The problem is, it doesn't give a legally-enforced monopoly to any rent seeking data brokers, and it doesn't act as a foot in the door for requiring government-ID attribution of all internet activity everywhere.
k-id, owned by epic games, which is one of the age verification companies used by discord, already does something like what you proposed. of course, our favourite infosec twitter zoomers already dissected it. https://github.com/xyzeva/k-id-age-verifier
children have access to 4chan and ChatGPT. hacking the macOS kernel driver to disable the LED that says the camera is on should be out of the technical realm of children, but, well, it happened and was abused by children against other children.
Even a face scan is a hard no for me. I have no desire to make it easy for companies to start linking me (the person) to anywhere else, directly via my face metadata.
I very hesitantly used discord occasionally because some projects I wanted to keep up with moved there
I gave up a few times since I kept getting autobanned by a broken algorithm (i.e., based on my ip or phone number, not anything I'd said) until I contacted their devs and they manually fixed it.
Obviously, I am never going to consider using discord again after this shit-tsunami. Back to irc and signal groups.
After Reddit API drama, a lot of people left it to avoid using its app and terrible position from the CEO. I am happy to be out of it to be honest, it is an utterly toxic place.
Reddit is there but no longer what it used to be, I will call it Skype 2.0
Discord has been having a rough time, data breach recently and now this.
After this massive backlash and how bad the company is involved into wrong doing, Skype 3.0 is strong on this.
One of the most destructive ideas of the last century in the West (particularly the US) has been the idea that private industry is a better replacement for the government to provide services.
We see this with Internet and telecoms service where municipal broadband dominates national ISPs at a fraction of the cost. We see the sell-off of utilities and water, which just leads to massive price hikes, so much so that private equity is getting in on utilities because it's a captive market [1]. All these privatization schemes (including so-called public-private "partnerships") are simply schemes to transfer wealth from the government to the wealthy. And the real problem is a huge number of people who will never benefit from any of this think this is a good idea.
The only entity who can be trusted for identity and age verification is the government. This is how it works in China [2]. I can already hear the cries of "we can't trust the government with that". We already do. Who do you think issues drivers licenses and SSNs?
Another like objection: "the government can monitor your activity". Um, they already do [3][4]. In some cases they're doing this voluntarily. An administrative subpoena is not enforceable. That requires a court order. Yet Google, as just one example, complied anyway.
A government, unlike private corporations, is accountable to its citizenry.
Let me give you a concrete example of how disturbing this all is. Leon Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that owned Shutterfly. Shutterly owns Lifetouch, which is a company that manages school photos for children for a huge number of schools in the US. Leon Black has links to Jeffrey Epstein [5].
As of now, there's no concrete accusation of wrongdoing here or of information (such as stored photos) being passed to Epstein or affiliates. But do you want an unaccountable private company owned an Epstein affiliate having the names, school, age and photos of your children? Yeah, me neither, which is why now a bunch of schools are distancing themselves from Lifetouch. Investigations are ongoing.
As for Discord even doing age verification, there are two angles. The legal one is easy to dispense with. Countries like the UK require it. I'm surprised Discord escaped the Australia under 16 social media ban. I expect that to change. There's going to be more of this. And I understand why. Predators inhabit these spaces and Discord, unlike "public" social media platforms, seem to have way less monitoring and scrutiny of what goes on there.
The second angle is should you be able to remain anonymous online? Call it the ethical angle. Reasonable people can disagree here. I just don't think it matters because there will be increasing pressure for Discord and others toc omply with legislation.
"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them.
And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them.
I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go right back to them once the heat dies down.
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street. One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
Ding ding ding. Matter of time, this is merely damage control until the news cycle fades into the next.
Just realized Discord uses Persona, which is also used by LinkedIn for verification.
Who cares where they outsource the age verification to?
They have no business keeping my ID scan or face in any case. Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket.
That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for verification is uncountable
I have two older coworkers in my workplace alone that had criminals make fraudulent unemployment claims in their names. Fortunately they noticed and stopped it quickly. Undoubtedly the information used came from data leaks.
Now all these sites are implementing face scans, which would be perfect for such criminals to harvest and use AI to create fake videos of you saying anything that suits them.
At what point does legislation step in, here? Because so far, it's only moved in the direction that worsens the issue.
The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.
Yeah let's trust them this time. Nobody's ever lied about that in the past and there's never been a breach of data that reportedly didn't exist. I'm sure this time it'll work out
> Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket.
They already ended up there: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
That’s only 100% tho
The risk in effect is that every message sent on Discord will make its way to Palantir with copy of your ID. This is not a risk that any user should accept. Discord fooled its users once, and it should not be trusted to not fool them again.
And because of how broadly and frequently people use Discord, it will be super useful when correlating with other data feeds. That might be even more valuable than the discord activity itself.
Article title, which was a lot clearer than this one: "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Ties To Palantir’s Peter Thiel Surface"
Not sure why you changed it but it makes quite the difference to the meaning.
That's too long of a title for a HN submission, i think.
Ok but this title is literally fake news.
Feel free to suggest a better one that can fit into 80 characters!
"Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Palantir ties"?
No. It’s literally has exactly the same meaning.
They did test the water, they will be back at it again. We have seen this over and over. If you use that bloated software, time to move.
It’s a network. You can move but will your community?
We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them?
Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]
We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.
Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.
[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
> you can even change which app you want it to be.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Network effects, man.
Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat
I agree that it would take something catastrophic for people to move off of the service they currently use. I disagree however on the premise that the move will be from one proprietary service to another. Us tech savvy people can and should self-host the things we believe can be valuable - now or down the line.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
> For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good.
Kind of, but in the past. It isn't good for today's web, otherwise we wouldn't be in this discussion.
Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t realize just how powerful it would be. Same with addictive stuff like engagement maxxing algorithms and infinite scroll.
Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down.
This always happens.
Is this the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ?
Not sure why you're being down voted but the answer is yes, it is the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ and if the down voters think you might be exaggerating or misleading them I encourage them to search this up.
Edit - I searched to refresh myself, ok he didn't say she was the literal antichrist. He said she's literally a legionnaire for the literal antichrist. I cannot stress enough that he was very clear that he was not using these terms figuratively, I mean "literal" in the literal sense of the term.
Yeah, he definitely has gone off the rails lately with all the talk about the antichrist being a literal existing being with emissaries on earth. I haven't been watching his stuff but the little I've seen was unhinged.
Thiel lost the plot long ago, just like his PayPal buddy did. The money went to their heads.
300 years into the future some historian will publish a book: "The downfall of the USA traced back to the PayPal Mafia".
for which Gretta is the litteral, antidote, as she has NO money, or such vanishingly small personal funds as to be of no account, yet hiches rides on sailboats to show up and berate parliments in there well worn lairs, her speach to the british parliment bieng a clear sign that she wont back down , and much worse, has such impecable manners that she mistook there talking and joking to be a technical mallfunction with her microphone. And now after her capture by the ZGF (zionist genocide force), and stare down with there chief torturer/jailer, she has vanished from all major media. So that Gretta and that Peter, are in fact polar oposites in almost every sense.
This almost as bonkers as Thiel. Just the other way around.
Truths are always somewhere in the middle.
I don’t have a strong opinion on Thunberg herself, but no, truths aren’t always in the middle. Thiel is clearly a complete fruitcake, so it does not make sense to triangulate based on any position that he holds.
Oh completely. I think you missed my point. Divisive narratives are almost entirely always wrong. The truth generally sits way away from the fruitcakes somewhere in the middle.
The problem these days is we give fruitcakes a stage. Or they buy one.
Right, but if you are using Thiel as a point of reference, you’re going to find a midpoint between sanity and insanity, which isn’t the truth. Say what you will about Thunberg, but she is not insane in the way that Thiel is.
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Truths are definitely not always somewhere in the middle.
Lately?
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." 2009
He is just executing on this, and some of religious technocratic nonsense beliefs just leaked a bit.
And should not forget that Garry Tan the ycombinatior CEO attends the same church where Thiel held his Greta antichrist talk.
Garry is a good person and smearing people over their church is a disgusting thing to do.
I am now going to sit here and listen to this talk because I guarantee it's not saying what you think it's saying. And I don't want to listen to it. It's not a topic that interests me. But I guarantee you are completely distorting what was stated in that topic for maximum effect, entirely motivated by left-wing politics.
I imagine you are not done listening to them yet as the total over 8 hrs. But my research is showing that OPs are largely correct. Theil gave several talks to his church where he did in fact say these things.
In your post you state you are ‘not sure’, but also that that the poster is ‘wrong’.
> My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
Sure, he eventually goes on to say stuff like..
> One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave
But I don’t think this is the win that you might think it is. The dude is a loon.
Going by your comment history any criticism of Thiel and the administration is just left wing politics, but hard to hear you over the sound of drowning yourself with kool-aid.
Weird that you seem to support this administration that Thiel is very much associated with but find it offensive when there's a very clear association between Thiel and Garry. He's just going to this specific church to pray or whatever? Paying no mind to the anti-christ talk happening next door. I do hope this is the last breaths of religion in the western world, it needs to die.
I've been on HN for well over 10 years. I literally volunteered for Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and my comments in that time period clearly show my politics. I taught free web scraping workshops at the Center for American Progress to journalists back then. None of my policy preferences have changed. What's changed is the frothing at the mouth radicalism and moralizing of the team I used to support.
I'm not religious, and hate religious radicals, but ideologues act identically, just with secular idols. I didn't see that until I watched what the leftist ideologies did to the quality of life in two places I used to live in:
SF and Boulder.
I'm a 2012 Democrat, which makes me a fascist to a 2026 Democrat.
You ARE a religious radical.
You have made a false claim. What is your evidence that I am religious, let alone a religious radical?
I mean, if we're going to make accusations based on perceived political tribal allegiances, I can say to you with equal certainty that you're a neo-Marxist.
Of course I don't know that. And you don't know anything about me.
You are wrong. Thiel's talks are as insane as we're saying. Also, it's not "disgusting" to tar people for belonging to a known toxic community of lunatics. It's completely rational. Cut the fake outrage. Idiotic religious beliefs don't have the same sacred value to most of us as they do to you.
"yes I'm right. Not sure why you are being downvoted. Do your own research"
Does research and now admits that he wasn't right, and understands why he and others were being down voted and hopefully learns from this and moves on.
Kudos for the edit and honesty: it's rare to see learning actually happen in fiery threads! I've been in your shoes and learning and change is possible.
I don't know, man. How much of a distinction do you want to make between "literal anti-christ" and "literal legionnaire for the literal anti-christ"?
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The same Peter Thiel mentioned multiple times in the Trump-Epstein files.
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If someone is saying that there are literal actuql existing legionnaires of the literal actual existing antichrist, and X person is one of them, it's not the "X person is one of them" part that I have an issue with.
The issue you have is that "literal" is doing all the work for you.
What work is it doing? He believes these things literally, that the antichrist exists like Taylor Swift exists.
Maybe you can help me out, I listened to him talk about this and I couldn't make head-nor-tail of what he was trying to say. It feels like he's so tied up in concepts and metaphors and similes and allegories it's impossible to tell specifically what he is asserting to be true. If you could explain to me like I was five I'd be grateful. Not looking for an argument.
Is this the ‘oh he was just joshing about, he didn’t really mean what he said’ defence?
No. Read it again.
so he said she’s the literal legionnaire of the antichrist?
that doesn’t really sound a whole lot better.
"The insane person didn't say _that_ insane thing, they said a _different_ insane thing!"
I mean, not sure it helps much.
I don’t see how that’s any less insane.
Are you one of those that say that trump is doing 5d chess?
seems you are the one with a rent free room
You are seeing quotes where there are none.
Every billionaire has massive mental health issues.
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> Well, she openly supports islamo-supremacists and facists as long as they have the right skin color.
yea... I'm gonna call bullshit on that.
> are not just busy hating jews,
ah there we go. the standard strawmen dogwhistle. we stopped bying it sometime after you all called doctors without boreders, amnesty international and the ICC antisemetic. let me guess, you support zionism and the genocide in palestine? I bet in backrooms you refer to them as human animals too right?
sorry mate, we ain't fallin for it.
"openly supports islamo-supremacists and facists"
You must misunderstand what Anti-christ behaviour looks like. Antichrist behaviour is having one of your agents organize a worldwide cabal of child rapists and baby-organ eaters just so one day they can all be blackmailed into enabling the mass industrial holocausting of tens of thousands of other children in an open air prison - dropping thermobaric bombs onto schools so as to gas the victims of your demonic holocaust upon them .... oh wait turn them into a fine mist... and then attempting to shapeshift into members of a historically oppressed abrahamic monotheistic (antichrist followers - zs - are literal false-idol worshippers) faith so innocent anti-zionist Jewish people get framed for your demonic babybloodletting.
Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment".
1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
As Argento Dragone said in the Kotaku comments:
"Face scanning is used to do ID verification on your device and then deleted immediately."
"By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do."
"By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification."
"Persona clarified that by 'immediately' they mean 'after seven days.'"
"And given their ties to Palantir, it's probably fine. You trust us, right?"
And by "Deleted immediately" they might mean they delete the image but keep the hash.
> "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do."
People have already validated this fyi. When k-ID was first added you could send a bogus age result to discord from your local device, which probably still works. There's no evidence your facial scans leave the device.
> "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification."
Which isn't true, it was a UK-only experiment being run for a small subset of users, which has now been discontinued.
I get people are outraged, but this is sensationalism at best.
After the last screwup, by the same company, why would you trust the data to stay on your device?
> Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.
And by same company, I don't mean discord. I mean Persona.
https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
How many people in how many countries does it take before the lie becomes sufficiently flagrant?
What good does this do for people who have already had their faces enrolled in Thiel's venture now?
"oh sorry, we said it's local but forgot to tell you about the experiment that sends you data to Thiel"
Trust is fragile.
was it “uk only” or was it the only place that required them to notify users theyre being experimented on?
we know US law allows tech companies to experiment on us without notifying at all. facebook was caught experimenting on users to see if a timeline full of sad posts would cause the users to become depressed.
im guessing his companies will get ahold of discord users data in most other countries. i’d be shocked if he only wants data from a tiny number of UK people.
Enter into Google: Discord breach october 2025
Discord probably still claims they weren't hacked. How they handle incidents like this matters to a lot of folks, and that's what this is about.
3 months after a major breach, how could anybody possibly believe that they fixed all their wrong organizational policies and security measurements within that time, while still not even acknowledging the incident?
I don't want to defend Discord, but that's just not true. That announcement did not say all processing would be on-device, only when you use the face scan.
> Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device
> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it.
Meanwhile they're also clear that uploaded IDs do get sent to "partners":
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
Ah, I assumed that Persona is being used for face scans too. I haven't been able to find a screenshot of the actual flow, but based on this article [1] with a screenshot of the message UK users are receiving, I suspect they are:
>The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth... [emphasis mine]
To me, that implies that Persona is/was doing more than just IDs.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/discord-advises-uk-users-that-they...
Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID.
I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.
Don't forget teenagers can be extremely skilled technically. Plus they have a lot of time!
But you're on the right track.
I think of a solution like:
1. Browser does one-time age verification through 3rd party service, without disclosing any details about which sites you'll access.
2. Browser stores your age, signed by that service.
3. When a site requests it the browser passes that signed age over. The site simply has to check if it has a valid signature by a trusted authority's public key.
The browser could even use Palantir in this example - but they would never get any data about what users are accessing.
It'd be best to create a standard for this using wallet apps. You can obtain an age certificate from any trusted provider (decentralized chain-of-trust similar to TLS CAs), which you can then load into any wallet app of your choice on any OS, and use it with any online service which supports the standard. This should use anonymous, unlinkable(!) proofs, with the only certified data being `is_over_age`.
Though I'd prefer the way proposed by Mark Camilleri Gambin (EU politician). Have parents enable Child Mode during device setup, then expose `isMinor = true` to all websites and apps, require a parental control PIN to disable. This is a much better and cleaner solution. Requiring age verification of all adults gets it backwards.
Ummm, i don't think teenagers on average can be extremely skilled.
Unless you think of some extreme outliers. Most of these I met can't READ and follow the step by step procedure.
It's not about age verification but control and digital id.
Doesn't everyone have a digital ID already?
My passport has biometrics, the government knows everything about me already through the tax system which is "digital". All my other interactions with the government are through digital services.
What exactly would a digital ID allow a government to do that it can't already? Apart from solve all the issues with having to provide scans of (my already digital) ID documents to every bank/solicitor/mortgage broker/estate agent/etc i interact with, where in many my personal ID documents probably sit on a company file share or some random persons One Drive.
A government digital ID with a one-time code to complete verification would solve all of this nonsense.
On control, again, what possible super power would a "digital ID" give a government that it doesn’t have already to control you?
Digital ID to interact with government services is great. It becomes a problem when they add something like OpenID4VC to it, with the intention of linking it to all your online activity for "age verification". This would create one giant government metadata silo on every individual's online activity.
Like the real world there a services online that need age verification, unless we want kids to continue to be exploited by social media and freely access porn.
We aren't living with the internet of the 90's any more, it's now owned by corporations and bad actors. Yes, i know it's impossible to stop those that are determined to circumvent restrictions (just as can happen with alcohol or movies) but clear restrictions give parents that want to do the right thing cover when setting rules in their own family.
In the end society raises children not just individual parents, and society need to take some responsibility too.
Personally i don't see how an API call to complete a government ID verification could be used to create a giant "metadata silo", unless the companies using the API are voluntarily sending more data than some sort of one-time challenge token. If the companies are coerced into feeding the government with your account activity history, what is stopping the government forcing that to happen now without bothering to draw attention via a digital ID?
I'm not sure where you live but a lot of countries don't have this (yet) or it is optional.
Debank you for wrong speak or think, leaving you with no alternatives. The more cuntries implement digital id, the more they'll sync with each other, making life more and more miserable for anyone who doesn't want to go along with whatever nonsense is currently being pushed as the new thing.
Restricting content you access, or using that to shape what is offered to you on the internet.
They are not trying to stop children, they are tying to vet verify and collect information on anyone adult or kid.
The browser could also emit the age, which sites could check to block, and parents could manage via parental controls.
But that's no fun: can't assure control of the children (bad), monetization (even worse) not share with government (the worst, given the current administration).
True, and that'd be the best method by far. A European politician recently proposed this.[0] The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
[0] https://democrats.eu/en/protecting-minors-online-without-vio...
> The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".
It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.
What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
Eh, you're trying to boil the ocean. This functionality built into the browser would cover 99.9% of the use cases. Applications can be monitored separately, and I'm at a loss for why my OS needs to know about my age.
None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.
Even better, the site could just tell the browser that there's age-sensitive content and the browser could check it. There are already standards for this!
The problem is, it doesn't give a legally-enforced monopoly to any rent seeking data brokers, and it doesn't act as a foot in the door for requiring government-ID attribution of all internet activity everywhere.
k-id, owned by epic games, which is one of the age verification companies used by discord, already does something like what you proposed. of course, our favourite infosec twitter zoomers already dissected it. https://github.com/xyzeva/k-id-age-verifier
It's even easier to just not do it at all
The problem that then you need hardware attestation and of course they will exclude linux, because why not.
children have access to 4chan and ChatGPT. hacking the macOS kernel driver to disable the LED that says the camera is on should be out of the technical realm of children, but, well, it happened and was abused by children against other children.
Source? I thought the LED was hardwired to the camera power.
They are now.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Shows that it was certainly possible, so the question is: do you believe in the power of 4chan?
Is a face scan accurate enough to do that with 100% accuracy?
Face scan is a total dice roll full of bias, whatever you do. With or without ML.
Even a face scan is a hard no for me. I have no desire to make it easy for companies to start linking me (the person) to anywhere else, directly via my face metadata.
Especially if it lands in hands of Thiel. He's selling his services to governments, law enforcement and abusers like ICE.
HELLO
I very hesitantly used discord occasionally because some projects I wanted to keep up with moved there
I gave up a few times since I kept getting autobanned by a broken algorithm (i.e., based on my ip or phone number, not anything I'd said) until I contacted their devs and they manually fixed it.
Obviously, I am never going to consider using discord again after this shit-tsunami. Back to irc and signal groups.
Nobody believes that.
Why can't we just write a nice IRC client?
Oh, the irony of Peter Thiel being involved in age verification, after lunching with Epstein (post-conviction).
And given his penchant for information control, I dont doubt he knew everything that was going on.
"Distances itself" lol what does that even mean? Did they step back from the admin console or something?
Skype 3.0 is here folks.
After Reddit API drama, a lot of people left it to avoid using its app and terrible position from the CEO. I am happy to be out of it to be honest, it is an utterly toxic place. Reddit is there but no longer what it used to be, I will call it Skype 2.0
Discord has been having a rough time, data breach recently and now this. After this massive backlash and how bad the company is involved into wrong doing, Skype 3.0 is strong on this.
Too late. Trust is gone.
Not trusting should be you're default stance. Then you can be pleasantly surprised when they do the right thing.
Who owns Discord?
One of the most destructive ideas of the last century in the West (particularly the US) has been the idea that private industry is a better replacement for the government to provide services.
We see this with Internet and telecoms service where municipal broadband dominates national ISPs at a fraction of the cost. We see the sell-off of utilities and water, which just leads to massive price hikes, so much so that private equity is getting in on utilities because it's a captive market [1]. All these privatization schemes (including so-called public-private "partnerships") are simply schemes to transfer wealth from the government to the wealthy. And the real problem is a huge number of people who will never benefit from any of this think this is a good idea.
The only entity who can be trusted for identity and age verification is the government. This is how it works in China [2]. I can already hear the cries of "we can't trust the government with that". We already do. Who do you think issues drivers licenses and SSNs?
Another like objection: "the government can monitor your activity". Um, they already do [3][4]. In some cases they're doing this voluntarily. An administrative subpoena is not enforceable. That requires a court order. Yet Google, as just one example, complied anyway.
A government, unlike private corporations, is accountable to its citizenry.
Let me give you a concrete example of how disturbing this all is. Leon Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that owned Shutterfly. Shutterly owns Lifetouch, which is a company that manages school photos for children for a huge number of schools in the US. Leon Black has links to Jeffrey Epstein [5].
As of now, there's no concrete accusation of wrongdoing here or of information (such as stored photos) being passed to Epstein or affiliates. But do you want an unaccountable private company owned an Epstein affiliate having the names, school, age and photos of your children? Yeah, me neither, which is why now a bunch of schools are distancing themselves from Lifetouch. Investigations are ongoing.
As for Discord even doing age verification, there are two angles. The legal one is easy to dispense with. Countries like the UK require it. I'm surprised Discord escaped the Australia under 16 social media ban. I expect that to change. There's going to be more of this. And I understand why. Predators inhabit these spaces and Discord, unlike "public" social media platforms, seem to have way less monitoring and scrutiny of what goes on there.
The second angle is should you be able to remain anonymous online? Call it the ethical angle. Reasonable people can disagree here. I just don't think it matters because there will be increasing pressure for Discord and others toc omply with legislation.
[1]: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t...
[2]: https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
[4]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
[5]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifeto...
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You should seriously consider believing Mr. Thiel when he named the company Palantir.