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from the I've-got-a-Bad-Thieling-About-This dept.
Ten days ago, the social chat app Discord announced that it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves privacy and meaningful connections, the platform said.
This, of course, means that to use Discord the way you are used to, you’ll have to let it scan your face, and the internet wasn’t happy. Many communities quickly announced their move to other platforms. Others, like the security researcher Celeste, who goes by the handle vmfunc, were convinced there would be a workaround.
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
More at The Rage
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday February 21 2026, @05:32PM
Alternate interpretation:
Keep in mind that according to Dead Internet Theory x% of internet traffic, where x is larger than you think, is paid bot traffic for propaganda or disruption or whatever purpose. On some sites x is a surprisingly large percentage.
On one hand, "stock market value" depends on monthly users being "number always goes up" on the other hand ad revenue depends on having a low enough percentage of ad viewers being bots.
Bots don't have faces or it costs more to fake humanity to create bot traffic.
I think that natural balance of opposing market forces means the system can never go to an extreme. Some of the internet will always be private because bots need privacy, some of the internet will be somewhat securely verified to be specific individual humans. Currently the system is balanced and people seem mostly happy-ish with it. The main risk of "infinite low cost AI" is massive disruption to that balance.
Remember when comment sections were removed from dead legacy media? Expect more of that type of stuff. At some point, Youtube will HAVE TO remove sub counts and comments because it would be very risky for the advertisers to know that X % of ads are being served to bots paid to increase counts to increase individual revenue. So I would not expect YT to aggressively request human verification of users if that would destroy their ad revenue. Yet they can't completely give up and make YT a pay to win online game (although they are getting closer to that...).
There is no "the internet" there's a thousand sites with a thousand business models mostly trying to get humans to look at free content wrapped with ads while not wasting money on AI bot parasites. Those business models don't align now and probably never will align much better than they do now.