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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

My problem isn't with the phone verification. I totally understand why they do that. I don't even have a problem with not accepting VOIP. I get why they do that too.

My problem is that they don't have an alternative, and there is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to know how many people can't get in because of their choice.

They should either have an alternative way to verify oneself, or a way for the channel admin to allow you in without the verification, or both.

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The alternative is to have an admin/mod assign you a role. If you read the the text under "Verification Level" https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe... you will see that members with role don't need to have phone verification.

That being said, anecdotally I have heard Discord locking/terminating accounts without verified phone numbers (usually if suspicious activity has been detected).

Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed verification method. Something better needs to be created, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same or different flaws.

There’s an ID verification service, at least in the US, where you go to webpage A who wants you to confirm identity, A then redirects you to the service. The service asks a bunch of questions like ‘which of these cars have been related to you’ or ‘which of these addresses belonged to you when you lived in town x?’

That generates a score where the service determines if you are who you say you are and returns the result to the calling web page.

But I assume it uses background check/credit check information which may be limited to the US and is a paid service as compared to phone validation.

I've had good luck answering those questions by pretending I know nothing about my own life, and using only information I can find from search engines to answer those questions (eg "What city is LAKE STREET in" - search for each option they give you to see if it has a Lake St). The few times this has failed (probably 70% success rate), they usually just want to send you a letter in the mail instead. I'd much rather wait a few days than end up confirming their surveillance records about me.

Pay $5 via crypto, venmo, whatever to add a similar cost barrier. Make it separate from nitro.

I will abandon a piece of software before I pay five bucks to join their non-archivable support channel.

The difference though is that verification through phone numbers relies on money that you've already spent, which is a lot more reasonable for the majority of users. People would still be unhappy if they had to pay 5 bucks if they didn't own a phone.

Its about increasing the cost of spam right? For some money is better than using your phone number, for others, they can continue to use the phone. Neither is exclusive of the other.

I know for some they would definitely choose the $5 over the phone for very good privacy reasons.

i wonder how many hours have already been wasted by people solving captchas...

everything old is new again :)

Less unhappy than the current situation where they can't use the site at all.

Also there's precedent of sites doing this. MetaFilter charges $5 to create an account. The bitcoin wiki used to require a fee (in bitcoin)[1]. Something Awful forums have a fee.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/10932

Admins can just lower the verification level for the server, can't they?

https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe...

Isn’t that an all-or-nothing choice? What if I want to manually allow a single user who can’t pass the phone verification routine?

That's possible: Users with roles don't need to be verified, so you can just give the user a role.

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