You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna upload ID to use a “shitposting about video games with friends” service.
Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.
So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious" that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord (a private commercial corporation)?
The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain some financial gain by providing false information. There is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it probably violates some rules around unathorized access to computer systems.
In my jurisdiction, it's clear- cut: yes, that would constitute a forgery.
Of course I agree this doesn’t worth it. If they force an ID I would just abandon the platform.
Of course I highly doubt they'd sue. They either just don't let you in or you abandon them. I'm with the latter.
> A document in the classic sense requires an embodied declaration of intent that identifies an issuer and is suitable for providing proof in legal transactions. In the case of a lawyer's letter, the signature is an essential part of the standard repertoire of authenticity.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Document-fraud-via-email-Why-th...
So removing some parts to make it _could_ make it safe, to Not create a "risk of confusion":
> Even if computer processing creates the appearance of a genuine document, the typical characteristics of the original must be present to establish a serious risk of confusion. Likewise, the BayObLG did not consider the offense of forging evidential data according to Section 269 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) to be fulfilled.
Obviously you can go further: What if you just draw up the whole thing with a pencil? What if it's an ID identifying you as a citizen of Nowhereistan? Where does freedom of artistic expression end and a forgery start?
Again, IANAL, but I suppose it would qualify at least as fraud once you try to use even an obvious fake as "proof of identity" in place of a requested government issued document. In that case, there's an intent to deceive that's hard to deny, even if it's just about age verification for access to a digital platform.
I could imagine in court it might come down to details, like whether it's sufficiently similar to a real ID at a glance, or whether tamper-proof marks of an official ID were copied as well.
In any case I wouldn't want to risk up to a year of jail time over a joke.
Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.
Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.
But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber, but probably won't ever use it again, either.
But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.
These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.
I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.
- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces
- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)
- Waves of unwanted interactions
Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.
[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.
Then all this will be synced with govs so can read all your messages. And sell to ad companies to spam you later. (They can link your phone number, email etc to you as you provided real id on all those).
And if you travel to some country that doesn’t approve what you ever said, maybe you broke their law, so you deserve a few years in prison.
Further, if in some contrived scenario we had to lose HN to get rid of all social media, I'd happily do it.
There's no perfect solution but some are significantly better than others.
It's wise to limit use under different conditions from these, but these conditions are seriously positive. I've never had such a positive experience with social media before. The fedi came the closest, but my experience was limited to interacting with technically inclined people who weren't the most socially skilled. Bluesky is approachable enough that anyone who can figure out mainstream social media can figure it out, so there is a much more diverse set of people.
A subtle but important distinction
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.
But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!
It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.
If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.
The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.
What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.
Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.
Whether or not it's "better" is orthogonal to the point at hand.
I don’t use any of these platforms, except HN. But the distinction between social media and social networks is pretty clear.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/answe...
In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.
Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.
Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.
Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.
In the 2000s, 'forums' were forums, and 'social network' was the dominant term for products like FB and Myspace. A movie even came out with that name. Both were also 'communities'. These are verifiable on Google trends.
In the 2010s, 'social media' became the preferred term, mainly because it contrasted with 'the media' as the other major source of information available, but also because it was just an easier to use and more generic term than 'social network'. 'Forums' were still largely forums, tho like all activity online, on occasion it got lumped into 'social media'.
Sometime in the 2010s we started to delineate 'social network' from 'social media' as distinct eras of social products and properties of how the products work. This became extremely clear once the era of video took over in ~2020, as video is historically 'media' in a way that exchanging text never was.
The term 'networking' is/was its own thing and mostly unrelated to 'social networks'.
FWIW I did market analysis for Yahoo's online communities division in 06 and worked on two FB app startups, one which was a college social network, and interfaced a lot with FB in 08-12. All of these words and fine delineations were essential to my work and part of the research I was doing at the time. I looked over my notes to confirm.
I was there, just go to the official phpBB forums and search my name..
We also considered myspace to be a social network (due to the friend graph) while forums were not.
The chans were a weird almost edge case. I think they qualify as social media but the lack of persistent identities significantly changes the dynamics (obviously).
Nobody.
I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)
In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?
> On a network, people interact with each other.
On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.
I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.
Most successful Twitter and Facebook posts are visual anyway.
Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.
A social network exists between people, it does not require a platform or technology. Social media is a medium where people correspond.
I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".
Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind bars.
This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.
Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.
Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all day on end?
Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.
Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.
Don't like social media, fine, nobody is forcing you to use it.
I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at this point.
Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.
It's the worst of both worlds.
It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.
People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.
More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.
1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;
2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;
3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;
4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.
This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.
The problem isn't the platform, it's getting a critical mass of users. Until everyone is using it, nobody is.
>> nobody should escape the consequences
There are no consequences whatsoever for this.
>nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.
We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.
Lots of servers just hit the nsfw checkbox to avoid the discord nanny tsk tsking them all the time.
I would have to verify my ID to talk to those friends.
Or they uncheck that box.
Privacy and all that jazz aren’t that important to an average person. Everyone’s IDs are already circulating in a mix of Tinder, AirBnB, Twitter, <any random other app that just requires it>.
I don't most people will even notice, as they are not in age restricted servers or channels.
WRT the stickiness, I just use Discord as a site to chat with my friends. Based on other comments, some folks use it as more like a social-media site. So, maybe I just don’t see the roots. If it is more like a social media site, it might survive in that lingering state that sites like Facebook have.