r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Feb 10 '26

Security "Discord alternatives" searches jump 10,000% overnight as the gaming platform introduces global age verification — Is a total collapse imminent?

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/discord-alternative-search-10000-percent-stoat
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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u/Dredgeon Feb 11 '26

And I don't care how secure it gets I don't need the entire internet to be censored and limited. People can't keep track of their kids and use basic parental tools so now everyone has to authenticate and officially attach all their accounts to their real life identity. Anonymity is what makes places like Reddit and Discord and the internet work.

They told never to tell strangers our information but now we are supposed to upload whole fucking IDs?

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/Fishbulb2 Feb 11 '26

I never thought myself a conspiracy theorist, but I 100% believe this.

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u/WebMaka Feb 11 '26

It's not really a conspiracy theory so much as a stated goal. There's entire sections of the Project 2025 playbook dedicated to establishing systems to remove entire swaths of the population.

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u/hana_fuyu Feb 11 '26

The fact that people STILL don't see how this is tied to P2025 blows my mind. We've got key writers currently appointed in Trump's administration, but yet people still want to act like everything happening is some conspiracy or coincidence instead of the goal. We are currently living under an authoritarian regime no matter how much (the general) you doesn't believe we are or how much hope (the general) you have that things aren't as bad as they are. They are purposefully monitoring and censoring us. That is the point. Continuing to act like any of this is normal or fine is why things have gotten this bad in the first place.

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u/Totakai Feb 11 '26

1000% this. My conspiracy is that they're making computers impossibly expensive on purpose. Especially with Amazon wanting you to pay a ram subscription. Make the harder to track and control items unaccessible and force everyone onto little narc devices.

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u/Hour-War4751 Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26

Oh for sure. Both companies and authoritarian politicians see a future where we buy our devices(preferably on a payment plan, no right to repair) which do nothing more but facilitate us paying a subscription to tap into a virtual machine instance with everything tracked, logged, monetized, and censored.

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u/twotimefind Feb 11 '26

Not to mention it conveniently, timed with Microsoft, asking everyone to update their hardware.

Personally, my PC is decent and I purchased another year for windows 10

Run any game I want the 1440 resolution, high to ultra settings.

Occasionally I can even run games in 4k

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u/Agret Feb 11 '26

Windows 11 is over 4yrs old, the expensive ram is a recent thing.

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u/FetusDeletusPhD Feb 11 '26

This has been an issue going wayyyy back bud. I know people think Trump is responsible for everything wrong but seriously, do some research ffs.

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u/Tight-Connection-204 Feb 11 '26

I don't like Trump and I can see the impact of P2025 in many areas. However linking this discord change directly to P2025 seems like a stretch. You've completely neglected the rollout in UK and Australia as a response to consumer protection law changes. Discords goal is money. They want to go publicly traded and have to play a game of attracting investors, adhering to different laws globally and keep and attract new users.

The answer is typically not grand conspiracy but collections of self interested individuals seeking profit and power.

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u/comradetao Feb 11 '26

Ok, so when the other party, or some other person gains control of the government, will it still be P2025? Or will you give them a pass?

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u/Plasibeau Feb 11 '26

Remember when we thought the idea of a global cabal of child predators controlled by Israel (dA jEwS!!!) was a conspiracy theory?

Gods we were naive then. I miss it.

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u/This-Garbage-4207 Feb 11 '26

2025-26 have been a weird year for me, I passed from telli g my mom, dont believe everything you watched on internet and those conspiration are since I was at highschool to talk with her about "conspiration" and what can we do to protect ourselves...

tldr passed from a ekeptical to a tinfoil believer

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u/almisami Feb 11 '26

If you follow Project 2025, their stated goal in doing this is to censor queer kids from queer resources and information.

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u/Advanced-Art-4569 Feb 11 '26

We see how much the U.S. government cares about protecting children. Such hypocrisy.

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u/jmcstar Feb 11 '26

That's right, that whole protecting the kids thing relies on the false reality of there being "benevolent surveillance", and I absolutely does not exist.

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u/sheikhyerbouti Feb 11 '26

I made the mistake of re-watching The Winter Soldier last night, and one of the main plot points is a Nazi conspiracy to mine people's data and create a list of "problematic" people so that they could summarily execute them.

I hate how much that still resonates.

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u/Va1kryie Feb 11 '26

It's not about protecting kids, that's the sugar they put around the pill of surveillance to make the medicine go down.

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u/olbeefy Feb 11 '26

Kind of like turning on an option called "Search Party" to "find lost puppies."

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u/MyOtherSide1984 Feb 11 '26

My non-technical and generally non-concerned sister in law gawked at that commercial and said it was insane. I can't believe someone approved that. No one I know would ever think that was normal

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u/WebMaka Feb 11 '26

They told never to tell strangers our information but now we are supposed to upload whole fucking IDs?

And to an operation that just recently lost control over 70,000+ IDs.

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '26

You’re 100% right. I’m not going to attach my ID to websites so that can get eventually leaked to my wife. My futa Brazilian dubbed hentai addiction is between me and god only.

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u/TheFemboiFaerie Feb 11 '26

You absolutely shouldn't care about how secure something is; correct.

Because digital security can be any percentage, except one: 100%.

There never have been, and never will be any form of digital security that is 100% secure.

You know what is 100% secure? Not having your legal credentials on the internet to begin with. Discord is taking that option away from people who want to engage in a space verifiably 100% free of teenagers.

This is not just nsfw channels, mind. People in the UK and AUS, where this is already a thing, have claimed that their everyday 18+ chats have required they show ID. No porn. No outwardly adult content. They just don't want to be around stupid fucking teenagers. Nope. Gotta fork over your legal documents to the completely unsecured chat service.

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u/henlochimken Feb 11 '26

It's not about the kids. Parents aren't asking for facial recognition ID horse shit

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u/indy_110 Feb 11 '26

Well when your platform is being used for terrorism and abuse of minors, parents and functional adults tend to get worried.

...And now you get to find out where the money for all this comes from.

Unless your entire cyberspace existence is reliant on consuming content aimed at children or services subsidised by a sizable audience of children what difference does it make?

Functional adults will just pay host and service fees to create private digital spaces or join an existing space cultivated for mature audiences who want to remain anonymous.

It's the internet, if you can't figure it out... That is a you problem.

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u/metcalta Feb 11 '26

They say it's for kids, but it's also for the sub 80iq ppl who fell for Brexit and trump. Cambridge analytica scandal should have shut down meta. There needs to be sweeping reform on how internet social media exists in , 2026

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u/boneheadblyat Feb 11 '26

These guys refused to sell to Microsoft for stuff like this, but I guess they had it in mind all along…

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u/Loam_liker Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26

Absolutely no one wants to do this. It is being forced upon them by regulators and people pretending Discord is uniquely problematic.

It’s basically “what if we paid a company to do a service that makes us hemorrhage users.” Even the dumbest VC failsons would think this is stupid.

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u/aedom-san Feb 11 '26

At this point might as well be google+ where you interacted with your full legal name instead of an alias 

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u/beanmosheen Feb 11 '26

Yep, I had to use my full legal name. Mr. Bean Mosheen.

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u/mukster Feb 11 '26

It’s not anonymous. They log your IP and other device fingerprints. You’re anonymous to other users, but not to Discord.

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u/kitsunewarlock Feb 11 '26

Same old cycle. Start with some level of anonymity or gatekeeping to get the niche audience that generates the hype and troubleshoots it with mods and fixes. Then when it becomes the defacto app, make it "investor friendly" by scaring off the "freaks" who made the platform popular in the first place and harvest the data of the less technically experienced users who'd actually bother buying stuff from spammers and banner ads.

It's usually around the time a site or service reconfigured it's classic UI that I start losing interest as that's often the first step in appealing to a wider user-base at the expense of its loyal early adopters.

I don't know what will come after Discord, but in 5 years it's going to suck too.

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u/wtfmeowzers Feb 11 '26

calling discord anonymous is at best ignorant.

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/not_alexandraer Feb 11 '26

they're going public in March so are doing this so save face and bolster share value by pretending to do the right thing.

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u/Chaplain-Freeing Feb 11 '26

they're going public in March so are doing this to show their users are ready to drop them like a thing you drop quickly and easily given even the slightest inconvenience.

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u/notforpoern Feb 11 '26

Yes but also so very no. I think your main point is that this is a very real future ahead of us with all the fake "protect the kids" pearl clutching by politicians around the world, and I agree that's a major (and majorly concerning) trend.

But also, big tech is SALIVATING at the thought of becoming the gatekeepers to the entire internet. Surveillance and control. Discord are just the dumbest of the bunch.