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I agree with you but;

> I don’t understand why we need age verification in Discord. Why should people who play games have to prove they’re old enough to talk to others? It’s not like anyone ever forced anybody else to join your Discord community, it’s all opt in!

Discord doesn't require age verirication for voice chat, it requires it for access to "sensitive media", or when yuo try to access a channel that has self opted in as age restricted [0].

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...

A lot of servers have the equivalent of a #nsfw channel where you post dank stuff. I don't agree with the age verification approach, but I see why it concerns people. Discord naturally attracts a very diverse crowd, of which many are quite young. Walking into a random channel in your random all-ages jrpg server and finding horse porn might concern a parent. (This is a concrete example that I have experienced, not a theoretical one.)

The random porn in a JRPG chat is concerning but how does age verification prevent that?

Channels have to opt in and participants have to follow the rules, right?

Isn’t the real issue that you don’t know and trust all the participants personally?

And almost all of those servers have those channels marked as such. But when I set it as an NSFW channel, I didn't agree to demand my users' privacy be invaded. Now, I just remove the NSFW flag from those channels. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah. I did the same.

> Politicians shouldn’t be meddling in this kind of personal interaction.

Broadly I agree. I think there is room for good regulation here, though. Specifically, a legal obligation to hook into parental control systems to enable effective parenting in our increasingly complex digital world. While it would be nice if everyone were individually responsible enough to put in the effort to figure out the specifics of what their kids might be exposed to and the control mechanisms available to them, realistically that's probably expecting too much. There's no perfect solution, but intervention focused on obligating (especially large) organizations to empower users and make safety easy to understand and act on is infinitely preferable to obligating companies to restrict and police their users.

It's similar to needing ID for purchasing alchohol. You could use the same excuse that parents shouldn't buy alcohol for their kids, but there is the obvious workaround of kids buying it themselves.

Yes it’s similar, which is the point. Age restrictions have been normalized regardless of effectiveness.

> Age restrictions have been normalized regardless of effectiveness.

For the record.

A law doesn't stop anything.

All a law does is says "If some behaviour meets definition X AND the state becomes aware of it, then consequence Y will be applied by the state"

The hope is that people will see that and make a choice that ensures that they aren't liable for the consequence.

It's also, like everything, as effective as the enforcement. If it's not enforced well, nobody will abide by it.

> All a law does is says "If some behaviour meets definition X AND the state becomes aware of it, then consequence Y will be applied by the state"

Might be applied, and the terms are negotiable.