Discord’s CTO put out a blog posting regarding how they “missed the mark” on their global age verification system which drew widespread criticism (especially once security/privacy focused researchers began digging into the test performed in the UK with their partner, Persona; where they found that Persona was doing far more nefarious things).
No one outside the company will really know how severe the backlash was in terms of things like Nitro cancellations (I cancelled mine – the main reason I had Nitro was to server boost an ArcheAge emulation development Discord where I learned after the fact that I could obtain access to a non-public version of the server emulator). While that Nitro sub was paid in advance and expires in September, cancellations nonetheless will still show up as a data point since it removes the recurring subscription component.
This has also pushed the usual fringe niches to look at other Discord clone options (including those which can be self-hosted such as Stoat, Matrix, and Fluxer; which I wrote briefly about). It remains to be seen if any of these will gain enough traction beyond the vocal minority who have made it clear they are done with Discord. Again, I will be realistic here; the average user of Discord will not care, nor want to be inconvenienced with having to setup elsewhere. It’s even more problematic for the owner of a community because there really isn’t an easy path to migrating all of that data to another service (people tend to forget that messaging history can play a psychological factor with not wanting to change things).
Nonetheless, everything taken together was enough to cause Discord to temporarily push back the rollout until the second half of 2026 (and that is all this is, a temporary pause until they can regroup/try to recover with better overall messaging). It’s a decently written piece filled with empathetic takes that no one should buy (because this is still a company that has a planned IPO where that original underwriting was heavily dependent on whatever projected revenue stream that would come from this data harvesting. The CTO can write that it isn’t about that, but the underlying actions always speak volumes of the actual reality.
Both companies and governments should be pushing for better parenting and making sure that the parental controls that are widely available in both hardware and software products, are utilized as that first line of protection IF they were really serious about protecting children and/or providing appropriate experiences for teens. The rule of law (in various countries) should also be putting actual predators in jail (this whole Jeffrey Epstein thing reveals just how many powerful/influential people have been long protected).
Again, Discord isn’t rolling back the actual implementation portion. This is more about better messaging and trying to reassure users that most (they predict at least 90%) will see no changes because their backend machine learning setup is supposed to be able to guestimate an age range for most. Furthermore, if a user isn’t accessing an NSFW channel, they will never really know if their account is age restricted in the first place.
The biggest part in his blog post is regarding the transparency with their partners. Again, take this with a grain of salt. These partner companies have their own agendas and will run their business in whatever ways they see fit, while giving lip service to partners like Discord. Remembering, if a user is one of those that ends up needing to submit a valid picture ID, that partner vendor will be capturing that info. Discord can have these contractual limits on data use, strict retention and deletion requirements, but it has been ignored too often where the ones affected are the users (companies simply lose their contract IF they are publicly outed in one of these breaches).
Discord serves as the host for users and therefore has a front row view to those usage patterns (info that is valuable to advertisers and data brokers). And unless someone is using appropriate tracking blockers, Discord can gather more information that way. And anyone who has a payment method on file (versus say purchasing a Nitro subscription code that is redeemed for that Nitro subscription like what I’ve done), already has given Discord information that can be monetized.
His short blurb at the end about re-establishing trust via their actions is going to prove to be an uphill climb at least for the outspoken demographic (because from my own POV, the damage is done). But we are realistically much smaller in numbers where the larger majority see this as a nothing burger (I have a hard time seeing these other platforms being anything but fragmented niches).
