alt.hn

2/14/2026 at 3:49:18 AM

Oh, good: Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder

 https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/

by absqueued

2/14/2026 at 6:06:15 AM

Matrix/Element seems the best drop-in replacement for Discord. Can set up chatrooms in Discord "server"-style, or as persistent DMs with others. In the chatrooms, you can make text chat spaces and call spaces. No dedicated voice chat space, you just dont turn on webcam for the call spaces. Pretty sure it uses same voip tech. Selfhostable if you want. Encrypted. Really it is just a barebones but functional Discord. Matrix can be bridged to Discord as well so you can talk between either, should help ease the transition period for anyone jumping ship.

by remslave

2/14/2026 at 7:07:30 AM

Stoat, Zulip, and Mattermost are other options.

Element was a bit too raw for me - mobile wasn’t great either. Ymmv

by conception

2/15/2026 at 7:35:51 AM

Hasn't Mattermost already done one bait and switch?

I don't use it but IIRC there was an uproar a couple of months ago about them just switching up message history and deleting conversations.

by happymellon

2/14/2026 at 9:11:14 AM

Zulip is definitely not an alternative to discord but I'll check out the others.

by hackable_sand

2/15/2026 at 12:30:04 AM

I don't see why not. I like Zulip. Its is self-hostable and OSS and they're the only ones who have "public channels" that allow your channels to be indexable by search engines on the internet if you want. One of the biggest complaints I hear on HN is how Discord killed the openness of the internet that forum-based communities supported

I wish more communities used Zulip.

by culi

2/14/2026 at 11:05:21 AM

There are different types of communities on discord. Zulip will be a good idea for some of them.

by viraptor

2/15/2026 at 4:49:17 AM

Fair enough

by hackable_sand

2/14/2026 at 7:42:21 AM

For mobile, you can use FluffyChat, it's another Matrix app

by foxrider

2/14/2026 at 6:05:32 PM

I like matrix and use it but it is no where near a Discord replacement. Setting up the modern Matrix auth and call are not easy and its just not as good or easy as Discord.

by soupbowl

2/14/2026 at 7:25:04 AM

The age verification is pushed (lobbied) by the same companies which collect data: Palantir, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and others.

How do you think EU and UK came to this idea ? Google was pushing it from some time but they needed a "legal framework".

In the future they will not need your phone anymore for border or house searches.

by hulitu

2/14/2026 at 11:31:11 AM

Something I don't quite understand about this Discord fiasco.

Every single thing you ever put into discord via text or voice has already and was already being sold to advertisers. If you were ever logged into Google simultaneously while on Discord it's already linked up to the real information they have about you.

I've just seen numerous things I've talked about or typed about with friends promptly appear on my YouTube feeds.

So like.. ?

by Madmallard

2/14/2026 at 1:01:24 PM

1. Citation needed. Why would Google be secretly ingesting all of your Discord messages and be using it for... YouTube recommendations? Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a more likely explanation

2. Already collecting a lot of data is not a reason to collect even more sensitive data. Plenty of people use Discord differently than you do. Anonymously participating in projects that use Discord and never saying anything personal over it, for example. This would possibly remove the ability to do so, for example if Discord's secretive AI decided that an LGBTQ+ project's Discord should be age restricted, and you would be forced to submit enough information to be fully identified and deanonymized, and now some foreign government could build a database that includes your full identity and your affiliation to such project

by a2128

2/14/2026 at 11:38:07 AM

So like what? There's clearly a difference. The new thing is worse, and stacks with the already bad stuff. So like... fiasco.

by kgwxd

2/15/2026 at 4:20:31 AM

Advertisers versus law enforcement... they're entirely separate concerns. The former cannot lock you up; the latter can.

by OutOfHere

2/14/2026 at 10:41:01 AM

Is there an actually good alternative? I guess we're gonna swap to something on top of Matrix but I would really really like something that has the same streaming/voice chat capability and idioms. Probably half the time I'm using discord I'm in voice chat, and probably half the time I'm doing that I'm screen sharing, is there some way I can keep doing that?

by thot_experiment

2/14/2026 at 12:00:05 PM

Just my take but if a company is using anything other than RTA server headers [1] for age verification then there are shenanigans afoot. This should be assumed. If it's not palantir it will be some other dark pattern and will only spread like a virus. Numerous entities are salivating at all the opportunities "age verification" will give them. With time a persons PII will end up being shared with a myriad of shady entities and leaked to all-the-bad-people leading to the creation of even more artificial business models that should have never existed in the first place. Do not accept this behavior otherwise a fascist 3rd party will eventually be required for all internet access.

Ideal Solution (that has existed for a very long time): Legislate the requirements for most clients used by young children to look for the RTA server header and trigger parental controls if the parent thinks they should be enabled. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes thus feeding the prison industrial complex. Parents are already legally responsible for their offspring. If parents are having difficulty with raising their children that is a different problem and would require a different solution after significant critical thinking.

Less Than Ideal solution: Create a maintain multiple deny-lists of domains that are using 3rd party age verification or gathering personal data in any way shape or form. Incorporate the deny-lists into uBlock and related add-ons.

Non starters: Anything that suggests the 3rd party verification is anonymous and includes cryptographic terminology. It may start off anonymous and with time the verification will include a unique code that can be reversed through some obfuscated method. Anything involving a 3rd party whether directly or indirectly must be entirely rejected.

Previous Discussion: [2]

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

by Bender

2/14/2026 at 4:57:44 AM

[flagged]

by jauntywundrkind

2/14/2026 at 8:07:02 AM

Because grima wormtongue the prediction engine whispers of horrors to come in the kings ears? Take the catastrophic eain flashfloods. They have ramped up hard recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/10/german-v...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/237420/economic-damage-c...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/one-de...

And then there was the morroco, greek and italian floods.

Its expected to hit mountanous areas the hardest, devaluing cities in valleys like they are in a warzone. And this is the smallest, obvious event series kept on the downlow, because society already falls apart, loosing its structure.

The panopticon is a desperate attempt to controll the only thing controllable in situations to come.

by assaddayinh

2/14/2026 at 4:59:09 AM

what does this have to do with gamergate? If you smell the same thing everywhere you go, you might want to check under your nose.

by nofriend

2/14/2026 at 5:33:08 AM

Because these things are linked

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...

by MengerSponge

2/14/2026 at 5:44:55 AM

You must be new the internet was toxic before their was an internet. I've seen BBS fights where people would find out where someone lived and shoot up the place, set it on fire or attack another person. Some BBS scenes attracted some shady characters.

by ipaddr

2/14/2026 at 6:01:49 AM

The ways that data has been weaponized to amplify insecure people's fear of social change and "others" in order to vote against their own economic interests are novel and fascinating. Yes, obviously the pattern has played out before the internet. But if you approach it with curiosity rather than writing it off because it looks similar on the surface to something you've seen before, it's actually very interesting.

by add-sub-mul-div

2/14/2026 at 11:16:03 AM

That existed sort of largely outside the public sphere. There was a digital dual in those old times.

Now, there is no digital dual. https://www.roughtype.com/?p=2090

And worse here, the very worst have figured out how to keep making reality pay attention to the absolute garbage misery show. A newsgroup dust-up might have caught some small coverage, but the way the troll-forces of the world have mobilized and radicalized their shitizens at scale, and the stochastic terror they have focused on creating: it keeps the rest of reality all too glued to the sick farce programming the aggressor forces against the world anti-campaign on.

by jauntywundrkind

2/14/2026 at 5:57:32 AM

[flagged]

by intermerda

2/14/2026 at 2:12:17 PM

Someone who is clutching pearls at trolling shouldn't be trolling others. It makes you look silly and makes your point moot. If trolling is the worst thing then why troll? It sounds like you are fighting a battle within yourself.

by ipaddr

2/14/2026 at 7:32:46 AM

[flagged]

by ta8903

2/14/2026 at 5:53:34 AM

People speaking out against immoral behavior and people in power/media trying to cover it up by dismissing their claims and trying to undermine their argument by misrepresentation? Gamergate was just the internet hitting a critical mass of people where the clamoring of people was big enough to make news outside of the bubble.

by ecshafer

2/14/2026 at 1:19:20 PM

Reminder that HN is SV centered and therefore everyone and everything is oriented around tribal group think.

Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.

The CCP has technology that dwarfs Palantir, but a ton of people in this thread use TikTok, because they don't recognize fascism unless it's perpetrated by somebody that looks like the Nazis they see in movies.

I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. I hated it. Everything was this moralistic condemnation and guilt by association game, played by people who had absolutely no sense of perspective and had zero interactions outside of there group think circles. Constantly condemning people they don't know and have never met and don't understand.

I've been on HN for 13 years now. It looks more and more like that every day.

This comment will be down voted without any substantive critique other than "I guess you're a fascist too."

Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.

by JPKab

2/14/2026 at 3:16:50 PM

> Reminder that HN is SV centered and therefore everyone and everything is oriented around tribal group think.

Don't such absolute statements (everyone, everything) remind you of religion as well?

> Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.

I imagine it might be as true as:

- most people in this thread also using Discord, despite criticizing it and

- most people using Meta criticize its products.

That is, You can use something and criticize it, and it probably happens both with Discord and e.g. Facebook.

> The CCP[…]

I'm happy to see in the political threads there's very often in the very least a significant presence of critique against China and maybe even overwhelming the defenders of the regime.

> I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. […] moralistic condemnation […] [HN] looks more and more like that every day.

I think it's good religious zealots don't have the monopoly on moralistic condemnation. Just because A is bad, and B has feature x just like A, doesn't mean the feature x is bad.

> Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.

Discord is not going to delete users, and few people care to request their account to be deleted. If Discord asked me to provide ID, I'd probably at least try to resist by not using it and maybe eventually succumb by providing a fake ID - but as far as I know, Discord will just set my account to a teenager mode, so instead of speaking about a drop in user numbers, we should speak about a drop of activity in adult interactions (or interactions/activity in general) on Discord.

by Etherlord87

2/14/2026 at 3:08:06 PM

Spot on. I wish this site was never associated with the term hacker because under the thin veneer of people doing cool things with tech, there is today nothing more authoritarian, narrow minded, overconfident and establishment than SV tech culture.

by mingus88

2/14/2026 at 4:33:57 PM

> Constantly condemning people they don't know and have never met and don't understand.

> therefore everyone and everything is oriented around tribal group think

You can be more convincing if you don't group everyone into one bucket and throw insults at it.

A reader can pull your claims out - meta bad, thiel bad, ccp bad, sheeple bad - but there isn't anything substantive there (WHY are these bad; it's all ad hominem so far) and we have to sift through a bunch of insults in order to do it ( 1. Tribal group thinkers. 2. Can't recognize fascism. 3. Looking like religious zealots blindly condemning people we don't know. 4. Going to downvote without thinking or participating.)

Your comment looks a LOT like insult #3 up there, with some whining thrown in on top.

If you want a substantive conversation or debate about the different facets of data privacy then lay the groundwork with some good faith place to start. If you instead just post mini screeds pre-insulting everyone then lamenting that nobody engages then nothing is going to change for you.

by collingreen

2/14/2026 at 8:05:56 AM

Yes, and? This sounds like a guilt-by-association accusation with no relevance.

Anyway, people are free not to use Discord if they don't like their age verification feature. It is one chat service amongst many, not a monopoly.

by smongly

2/14/2026 at 9:23:23 AM

"You're free to use something else" doesn't work when it was legal pressure that introduced age verification. All the something else's will eventually be forced to follow.

by like_any_other

2/14/2026 at 8:21:50 AM

We need to hold people to account for the company they keep. If your largest investor is known for mining data for fascist regimes and you are in the business of verifying data authentication then it not guilt by association it is the smoking gun and best to avoid

by xbmcuser

2/14/2026 at 12:02:33 PM

Yes, and? people are free not to be concerned if they don't think it's a problem. They're free to say they're not concerned. They're free to suggest others shouldn't be concerned. They're free to phrase that suggestion in a highly dismissive way. They're free to add distracting noise by pointing out the obvious. They're free to draw attention to noise by pointing at it. They're free to feel bad about doing it. They're free to click the submit button anyway. Sorry.

by kgwxd

2/14/2026 at 8:32:35 AM

the vast majority of the rich got to their position thru sheer ruthlessness. is it irrational to you that this garners distrust ?

by Aeglaecia