Except, why? Or, rather, why not, exactly? Because we don't trust them with our data?
But who do we trust? Who hasn't had a "breach"? We give this stuff out and it gets stolen or sold all the time.
I used to have an app (Well, it was before we called them "apps" so I guess it was a program or maybe just a service.) that was supposed to tell me every time one of my many, many email addresses turned up in some Dark Web fire sale. It was a bit of a concern back then, which must have been a decade ago. Haven't thought about it for years. Certainly haven't had any updates in as long as I can remember. Of course, they might be going to one of those email addresses I never look at any more...
It's not just the security, though, is it? It's the principle. Who are these people to question whether we're old enough to be looking at adult stuff? Why do they get to be the gatekeepers of our maturity? It's the thin line at the end of the wedge. Or the thick end. The something end of something, anyway.
People knew their place then. Or, rather, most people didn't even know the internet was a place. It was all 14.4kb dial-up modems and we were happy! Then in came the Worldwide Web and there went the neighborhood.
I may have got some or indeed all of that wrong. I was there but not there. I certainly wasn't paying attention. I was an incomer to the just-born web in the very early '90s but not a digital native. I strongly suspect some of the people making a big to-do about the good old days were barely born when I arrived in about 1992. A lot of the nostalgia seems to come from a decade later by when the digital fields had already been marked out for redevelopment.
Getting back to Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users, except for the users it already can somehow just tell are old enough, although no-one's saying exactly how just yet; if it's not incompetence or the breaking of tradition we're worried about, is it some basic objection to the concept? Should the internet at large be free from mundane concerns like who exactly uses it? Ought it to be a free-for-all where, as the old New Yorker joke has it, "nobody knows your a dog"?
I guess not or we wouldn't all be making such a fuss all the goddam time about Roblox and X and all the other reprobates messing with our kids. We love to give them a hard time about it, don't we? Only it's a bit different when someone tries to do something.
Except, is it? I seem to hear a virtual round of applause every time another government or court passes a law restricting the sale of lockboxes. All that EU legislation concerning digital safety seems to get a lot of praise. Well, some of it does. It depends.
Only it's a bit different when the lawyers and policeman come around peering over our fences into our walled gardens, apparently. It's all well and good for there to be restrictions on who can do what so long as they don't get in the way of those of us who know what we're doing, humming along, minding our own business. Nothing to see here. Move along please, thank you very much.
It's all a bit fuzzy, too, because it's Discord. Do we even like Discord? I mean, we all use it. It's the default now, isn't it? We pretty much have to. But do we want to?
There's a sentiment I've seen that says if Discord thinks it's so special, can do anything it likes and we'll all just have to put up with it, Discord just might have another think coming. Elon thought he could do what he liked with Twitter and look how that worked out! Watch out, Discord! Don't push your luck!
How did that work out for Elon, come to think of it? Didn't he sack 90% of the staff and rebrand the whole thing so the value of what he'd bought vanished overnight? And didn't everyone say the whole thing would fall apart and no-one would be able to fix it because everyone who knew how had been sacked? Wasn't Twitter finished?
Except X is still going and I keep seeing links to it in my news feeds every day just like I used to see links to Twitter. And while there are alternatives, have any of them replaced X/Twitter in the big world outside the tech-insider niche? Doesn't feel like it.
Are we going to have to go through that whole "Alternatives to Discord" phase like we did with Twitter, until eventually one winner emerges, proud possessor of a fairly distant second place to Discord itself, as it carries on as if nothing much happened? Does anyone care enough about Discord to bother?
I belong to... wait, let me count them... thirty-three Discord channels. In a good month I look at two of them. Blaugust, in which I link my posts here and TAGN, where I check what's up with the Fantasy Critic League. Very occasionally I visit one of the others to check some specific gaming announcement I've heard about through other channels but that doesn't happen often.
According to MassivelyOP, Discord has reassured everyone that
"For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities."
In other words, if you've been acting like a dog for a while they'll assume you are a dog. And anyway, as some wag in the comments puts it, if you don't live in the EU or the UK, where there are enforceable laws about this sort of thing, you might just find you're an adult automatically, no matter what you've been up to until now.
If you don't pass that test, which is probably being administered by an AI agent, I just bet, you get marked down as a teen. What does that mean?
Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Doesn't affect you personally so you're fine with it. Very socially conscious. Bloody solipsists. You're only one step up from narcissists, you lot.
Yes, fine, okay, sure. Only I am kind of in favor of age restrictions on the internet, by and large. I mean, I'm in favor of them offline. Aren't you? Don't you think there should be some age limit on when you can drive a car or join the army or get married or vote? And don't you think you ought to have to be able to prove you are the age you say you are before you can do any of those things?
Maybe you don't. Maybe you're that much of a libertarian or an anarchist you think the only rule ought to be no rules.
Probably not. Some of the people I've seen complaining about this seem to have quite firm views on other kinds of rules and restrictions. There are all sorts of things they think people shouldn't be allowed to do or say. They just seem to think rules ought to apply differently on the internet, particularly for people who, you know, belong there.
That does tick me off a little. I removed someone's blog from my RSS feed yesterday after reading a rant about age verification. It was the repeated use of the pejorative "normies" that did it. I'd be very happy to have a filter that caught offensive slurs like that.
I hope this doesn't come over as a rant in the same way. All those rhetorical questions are a rhetorical device (Is that ironic?) designed to dilute the rage. I'm pretty sure there are bigger things to worry about than whether you have to send Discord a selfie. Is it really worth getting worked up over?
I'm not that bothered about it either way. It certainly doesn't feel like any kind of hill to die on. Discord is just an app. If people don't like the terms of use they can just stop using it. I'd guess for most people having "teen" filters would make next to no difference anyway. Or maybe I underestimate how much people swear in Discord channels.
Personally, I propose to do absolutely nothing about it. I'll just carry on as I am. If all the fuss hadn't kicked off I very much doubt I'd even have known anything had happened.
What I do think, though, is that maybe there should be some requirement for all internet users to prove their age at a much more basic, fundamental stage than through individual apps. Something akin to a driving license, perhaps, that could be incorporated into the education system and verified in a much more practical way. In person.
Why the internet should get a pass on it, when so many other aspects of life don't, beats me.
Notes on AI used in this post.
Just the header image, produced at NightCafe using QwenImage SD. The prompt, taken directly from the text, was "Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users." To this I added the further instruction "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration. Full color, line art."
I can't say I can see the Moebius influence and I don't actually know who Syd Mead is, although the name rings a bell. Looking him up, I probably should have known who he was.
Out of curiosity, I ran the original prompt through the same model again but with the AI "Prompt Magic" that expands on the prompt switched off. That got me the image above, which appears exactly as it was generated. It looks like I cropped it, badly, but I didn't.
Looks like I either need to keep Prompt Magic switched on or write longer, more detailed prompts.
Posts
The amusing thing for me was Discord was fairly smug about the whole thing on Monday. When asked about users leaving over the requirement, which was being pitched as universally mandatory at the moment, their PR flack said they expected it but “we’ll find other ways to bring users back.”
ReplyDeleteBy Tuesday they were emphasizing that they would be using AI to track meta data and account activity in order and claiming that most people would not have to provide government issued IDs for them to lose in another security breach.
Just the way it was done seemed like a deliberate attempt to rile up users, so was very dumb. Like you, the penalties for not being verified seem fine. Make me a teen, it sounds like nothing will change for me. The TAGN server, which I see on your list, will remain.
I did, however, cancel my recurring server boost. It turns out you need two boosts for a server to get any benefits, so it wasn't doing me any good. But the fact that this all started is what made me look into that and then cancel. So good work Discord!