So the Discord age verification thing isnt a rumor anymore, its just live, and it caught me right in the middle of something stupid. I was trying to post a meme in a server Ive been in since 2016, around 11pm last night, half paying attention to a show in the other window, and instead of my meme going through I got a full screen interstitial telling me I needed to verify my age before I could keep talking to people Ive known online for a decade.
The options were a selfie scan or an ID upload, routed through some third party verification vendor whose name I didnt even catch because I closed the tab out of spite the first time. Came back to it twenty minutes later because I actually wanted to see what people said about the new patch notes, and this time I did the selfie thing. It failed twice because my kitchen light is apparently not "liveness detection" friendly, which is a phrase I now know exists and resent knowing.
Heres my actual opinion on this, not the hedged version: I dont think this is mostly about protecting teenagers. I think its about Discord getting ahead of regulators in the UK and now apparently a handful of US states, and the easiest way to do that is to make the actual humans on the platform do a bunch of work so the company has a paper trail saying it tried. Thats not a conspiracy theory, its just how liability works, and Ive watched enough of these rollouts now to recognize the shape of it. Age gates have never once stopped a determined 14 year old. They mostly just annoy the 36 year old who forgot her ID was in her other bag.
And look, Ive done this dance before. Earlier this year it was a different site asking for the same thing because of a different law in a different country, and before that it was some forum I barely use anymore that decided a selfie was the price of admission. Every single time the pitch is the same: quick, secure, we dont store your data, trust us. I believe the "we dont store it" part about as much as I believed the Hot or Not website in 2003 when it asked if I was 18 and I just clicked yes because there was no other option. That button asked nothing of me. This one wants my actual face matched against a government document, processed by a company Ive never heard of, on behalf of a platform I use to talk about video games.
What bugs me more than the privacy stuff, honestly, is how little choice there is in the failure mode. If the scan doesnt work, youre not locked out gently, youre just locked out, full stop, no messaging your friends to say "hey the bot thinks Im lying about my birthday." I ended up texting a friend from the same server on a different app just to tell him why I went quiet, which is a genuinely funny way to end up back on SMS in 2026 but here we are.
Some of the pushback in the server I was in was pretty funny too, people posting old screenshots of their Neopets accounts as a bit, somebody joking that their driver's license photo is worse than their actual face which, fair, mine is too. But under the jokes there was real annoyance, and a few people I talk to regularly just stopped posting entirely rather than go through it, which tells you something about where this actually lands. It doesnt filter out bad actors. It filters out people who have better things to do on a Tuesday night than hand their license to a chatbot.
Im verified now, for whatever thats worth, and I guess Ill get the prompt again in a year or whenever they decide trust expires. I still havent figured out what server that original meme was even relevant to by the time I got back in. Patch notes werent that interesting either, for the record.