I know, I know, two blog posts in one day what's become of me - but I had some disjointed thoughts about the discord announcement today that I needed to put somewhere. Enjoy.

Today Discord announced they're going to be moving towards mandatory photo ID for users and locking all features down to a “teen” age level unless an ID or face scan has been added.

This is hugely problematic for a lot of reasons (least of which is them accidentally letting over 70,000 government IDs get leaked) but in theory this is to comply with laws and as someone who has seen horrendous shit go down with unsupervised kids online (including myself as a teen) I can understand a tiny sliver of why someone might be fooled into thinking they want this or that it's actually helpful for kid's protection.

It's not, but that's how they get you.

The thing is, changing these policies is not gonna keep predators away from kids and it's not gonna keep kids from finding things that either they shouldn't, OR they SHOULD / NEED to find. It'll just push everyone further into less safe places. To elaborate a bit:

Every conversation in major media surrounding kids on the internet usually boils down to “it's a ripe avenue for predators to groom children” (as if that's a thing we actually care about given the pedophile in the highest political office in my supposedly major world power country) and things that don't often factor in these conversations:

1. Parents should be doing a better job helping their kids navigate the internet and having an interest and dialog in what they're up to - while also giving said kids privacy to become people. It's my job as a parent to help my kids understand red flags and how to be safe, not panopticon over their activity logs

2. The flip side of the above where abusive, horrendous bigoted parents have queer kids who need access to resources outside of the home with a guarantee of safety and anonymity

The inclusion of photo ID requirements is not gonna serve the point that allows queer kids to get help if they have a hostile home life, and it's not gonna encourage lazy parents to be more involved in their kids online activity if "oh they don't have an 18+ ID, I don't need to worry about what they're up to".

That's even as an aside when you consider that there will be plenty of illicit circumventing of these policies that I can already imagine (and probably plenty that haven't even been thought up yet).

So where does that leave us? Who fucken knows, man. Shit is only gonna get worse for people by locking it down.

As an aside to the age conversation, Discord has become a monolith in a way it never should have. As a group chat app / friends list chat program? Sure. That's its main purpose. But it's moved on to replace community forums, websites, even fucking FILE hosting; I travel in a lot of emulation and modding circles and there's nothing more bonkers than “Join our Discord to download the latest update”. I legitimately hate being put in a situation where I long for a goddamn github link.

Will this photo ID thing be the "death" of Discord? No - but like Twitter being bought by a maniac with a humiliation kink that I shouldn't be forced to know about, a lot of the people who I'd trust to make good calls in this space have wanted to distance themselves from the platform for a while and I think the addition of the ID policy gives the extra push to start making that happen. And hopefully not to just one new or alternative platform.

Maybe it's because I went through this with the death of twitter and then cohost (DAYS SINCE COHOST MENTIONED ON THIS BLOG: 102?? no, that can't be right) but I don't want one place for everything. One login, one platform etc. If my band's group chat needs to be in a different app than the one where I share shitposts in a channel called [checks notes] #cloaca with fellow audio people? That's ok with me!!

I know I sound like a fucking grumpy old bastard all the time when it comes to discussing modern internet but god damn - we had it so good and we didn't even know it. Back to websites. Back to forums. Back to RSS. Back to competing platforms that don't have a monopoly on fucking everything. I know this sounds rich coming from a Website League sicko, but even that platform I don't use monolithically. If anything, I blog first and then go to various socials. It's pretty freeing, tbh.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's a cat. Her name is Skitters.