Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

age-verifier.kibty.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 494 posts

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#361

Post by Kelteseth »

miav wrote: post #342

The reaction to Discord age verification fiasco once again makes me believe that HN users just don’t have friends. There is no alternative for Discord for bigger groups. If there was, I still couldn’t move multiple social circles to it, no matter how much I evangelised. The “just don’t use the less morally aligned platform” argument has always been valid only for those without a strong need for it, whether it’s X or…

Self hosted TeamSpeak for communication & gaming and a signal group for chatting.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#362

Post by vintermann »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #308
luke727 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration aimed at Discord et al is largely misplaced. I'm sure these companies don't mind gathering extra data about their users, but the primary impetus for age verification is government legislation. Moving to alternative platforms is not a long term solution because it's attacking the problem from the wrong direction.

Not just government legislation, but also lawsuits. I'm confident that Discord is a hotbed of all kinds of abuse and inappropriate / adult content, a lot targeting younger generations, and most of their resources are spent on that. Age verification doesn't solve that problem per se, but it makes things a bit easier. The challenge with "protect the children" is not only evildoers targeting them, but targets actively s…

It seems to me that also if you succeed in making child-only spaces, those spaces become a magnet for adult abusers. They become an all the more desirable prize for them. Whereas spaces like this - hacker news, that is - don't need any age verification because although it's a safe bet some users are underage here too, the abusers would have to search a long time for them and the seemingly most common manipulation techniques (like pretending to be a child yourself) probably wouldn't work.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#363

Post by sva_ »

miav wrote: post #342

The reaction to Discord age verification fiasco once again makes me believe that HN users just don’t have friends. There is no alternative for Discord for bigger groups. If there was, I still couldn’t move multiple social circles to it, no matter how much I evangelised. The “just don’t use the less morally aligned platform” argument has always been valid only for those without a strong need for it, whether it’s X or…

I mostly use Telegram with my friends circle. You can have groups with individual topics. But we don't do group calls. I don't really see the appeal of group calls unless you are a gamer maybe. If I want to talk to them, I go meet them.

Signal for direct messaging and calls

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#364

Post by vladms »

ctz wrote: post #359
throwaway_53123 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.

There were ~16mn users of the internet in 1995. As of 2025 there are 5.56bn. Are you saying paedophilia has dropped by 99.7% over 30 years? If so, please provide a source for that claim.

I think what matters are the percentages. Out of the 16mn users where there more or less than in the general population? I think it is reasonable to think they were as many percentage wise, if not more - because internet provides anonymity which is an advantage.

Nowadays with the number of users of the internet converging slowly to the total populations, the percentages are probably converging as well.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#365

Post by boelboel »

well_ackshually wrote: post #332
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network acce…

In what universe do you live where children have enough disposable income to buy a smartphone ?

You can get smartphones for 80 dollars (like the moto E15)

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#366

Post by lesostep »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #309
supermatt wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them. If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websit…

> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network acce…

>> This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive

Not if the rule includes easy rule circumvention. For example, if you could parent-control lock the camera roll to a white list of apps.

Want to post on social media so your friends would see? No can do, but you can send it to them through chat apps. Want to watch tik-tok? Go ahead. Want to post on tik-tok? It's easier to ask parent to allow it on the list, then circumvent, and then the parent would know that their child has a tik-tok presence, and — if necessary — could help the child by monitoring it.

The current options for parent control are very limited indeed. You can't switch most apps to readonly, even if you are okay with your child reading them — it's posting you are worried about.

But in ideal world there would be better options that would provide more privacy and security for the child, while helping parents restrict options if they fell their child isn't ready to use some of the functions.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#367

Post by vintermann »

Barrin92 wrote: post #120
Gigachad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term solution would have to be some kind of integration with a government platform where the platform doesn’t see your ID and the government doesn’t see what you are signing up for. I don’t this will happen in the US but I can see it in more privacy responding countries. Apple and Google may also add some kind of “child flag” parents can enable which tells websites and apps this user is a child and all age c…

this is already how the EU infrastructure for digital ID works, basically. Using public/private keys on your national id, the government functions as a root authority that you (and other trusted verifiers downstream) can identify you with and commercial platforms only get a yes/no when you want to identify yourself but have no access to any data. South Korea also has had various versions of this even going back to ~2…

Yes, it has been possible for a long time to provide anonymous attestations. But somehow, they also always seem to require that you have something like Google play services running for you to ask for the attestation in the first place. And with PKI, even though they could do with just the public key, they somehow also always insist on generating the keys for you (so they have the private key as well).

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#368

Post by ninalanyon »

well_ackshually wrote: post #332
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network acce…

In what universe do you live where children have enough disposable income to buy a smartphone ?

You can get a usable smartphone for well under 100 USD on AliExpress or a reasonable secondhand one from a reputable brand for about the same price here in Norway on online trading sites. Don't teenagers get pocket money or do weekend jobs any more? My sons were grown up by the time smartphones were affordable but No. 2 son bought his own Siemens C65 with saved up pocket money when he was in his early teens.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#369

Post by [deleted] »

airstrike wrote: post #262
dark-star wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you massively overestimate how many people actually care. My guess is that 95% or more of all Discord users do not care and simply upload their selfie or ID card and be done with it. I know I will (although they did say that they expect 80%+ to not require verification since they can somehow infer their age from other parameters)

Remember digg? I've already cancelled my Nitro account. I'm quite active on a ~5k member programming server and we're giving Zulip another try. I think it's unlikely we'll stay on Discord. Obviously anecdotal, but eventually this adds up.

[deleted]

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#370

Post by lossyalgo »

airstrike wrote: post #262
dark-star wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you massively overestimate how many people actually care. My guess is that 95% or more of all Discord users do not care and simply upload their selfie or ID card and be done with it. I know I will (although they did say that they expect 80%+ to not require verification since they can somehow infer their age from other parameters)

Remember digg? I've already cancelled my Nitro account. I'm quite active on a ~5k member programming server and we're giving Zulip another try. I think it's unlikely we'll stay on Discord. Obviously anecdotal, but eventually this adds up.

Also cancelled my Nitro after 5 years.

This whole thing being "for the safety of kids" is obviously a farce just to get more user data because Nitro users supposedly will have to do the ID check as well, but if you're paying with a CC/Paypal, you are obviously of sufficient age to not require an ID check.

Post reply on HN