Discord's CTO addresses community concerns about age assurance: no mass ID collection, new vendor transparency commitments, and a delayed global launch until second half of 2026.
I’m without question one of the 90% and I never thought they were going to require it for everyone. But I don’t like the idea that an algorithm is constantly writing a dossier about me to determine my “age” because I wasn’t fucking born yesterday.
Open source your shit and make it auditable or I’m not fucking using it anymore.
The ‘internal system that accurately determines your age’ line is doing a lot of work. What it’s describing is behavioral age inference — classifying users by activity patterns, message timing, content signals, server membership. That’s the mechanism behind the 90% claim: they already have enough behavioral signal on most users that they don’t need to ask. The disclosure buried in the blog post is that continuous behavioral profiling is already running. ID verification would have been a one-time check. This is permanent. The ‘we won’t collect your ID’ framing is technically accurate and completely misleading.
I’m without question one of the 90% and I never thought they were going to require it for everyone. But I don’t like the idea that an algorithm is constantly writing a dossier about me to determine my “age” because I wasn’t fucking born yesterday.
Open source your shit and make it auditable or I’m not fucking using it anymore.
The ‘internal system that accurately determines your age’ line is doing a lot of work. What it’s describing is behavioral age inference — classifying users by activity patterns, message timing, content signals, server membership. That’s the mechanism behind the 90% claim: they already have enough behavioral signal on most users that they don’t need to ask. The disclosure buried in the blog post is that continuous behavioral profiling is already running. ID verification would have been a one-time check. This is permanent. The ‘we won’t collect your ID’ framing is technically accurate and completely misleading.