Hey everyone, Bit here. Seems like tech companies can’t get enough of being public enemy #1, eh? From “AI-first” to age verification, there are so many things that are shooting companies’ reputations in the foot.

This time, we have Discord on track to introduce age verification. Basically, they’re going to make it where all accounts will lose access to communities marked as age restricted unless they go through AI selfie verification or ID verification.

Discord took to Twitter to tell people about it, and they very obviously got roasted in the comments.

The descent onto the Anti-Discords

After this announcement, there was a very obvious trend to start making accounts on other Discord-like platforms or entirely different chat platforms.

Two big receivers of this exodus were Matrix and Stoat, and I happen to have accounts on both.

On the Matrix side, they were experiencing 10 times more signups than usual because of Discord’s problem.

“this just in from #synapse:matrix.org: matrix.org is currently receiving 10x more registrations than usual due to discord” – someone in the Matrix HQ room

Also, Stoat’s servers were experiencing some lag, but not as much as happened to Polytoria when Schlep and famous Roblox users mentioned it. Still, one person on Bluesky commented about the lag that Stoat was experiencing.

The wider shift, and why it’s bad

It seems like every tech company around the corner is trying to implement age verification. The panic was initially caused by the Roblox controversy, and has caused age verification to appear on Roblox and it seems to be spreading across services. Also, nations and US states have been trying to force age verification upon sites for some time now, especially in places like the European Union and Australia.

The main reason that this is happening is that it seems that parents don’t care about the safety of their children online anymore and expect the services themselves to keep kids safe. Sadly, there are infinite possibilities on the internet and services like social media can’t keep your kid away from everything. The best solution to this for parents who don’t want to become overbearing on their child is to set up content filtering so that children can avoid well-known naughty sites, and it might be a good idea to check on your children every once in a while without standing over them constantly (being a helicopter parent just leads to a loss of trust between both the parent and their child).

Just use common sense. As with anything in life.

A word of caution about proprietary software

For some people their anti-Discord of choice is Root. However, Root is proprietary closed-source software. Stoat and the Matrix network are both open-source technologies.

Open-source matters because it means anyone can see the source code and even make forks of it if the project has a sudden unwanted change in direction. Also, open-source projects are often built by both a corporate entity and a wide network of contributors, as opposed to just being built behind the closed doors of one corporation.

Also, when something is open-source there is less incentive for the people running the service to do something anti-consumer, as someone could just fork the project and make a new version that has anything anti-consumer removed.

Just read the fine print of whatever proprietary service you’re signing up to, especially the privacy policy. Many proprietary services that are free end up profiting from selling data to advertisers, and because of privacy regulations in some areas this has to be outlined in the company’s privacy policy. Also, don’t say I didn’t warn you if an app like Root ends up becoming just like Discord is now in the future.

In conclusion

I wish that big tech companies weren’t trading their good will with the internet for some extra money to appease the investors. Although, I do like to see that open-source projects are being furthered along by the deterioration of big tech companies’ reputations. We’ve even seen an uptick in Linux users because people are disillusioned by Microsoft and Windows, even if their computers are new enough to run Windows 11.

This has been Bit, and I’ll see you next time.

Replicated on Leaflet and Nostr.