Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
Come to Lemmy. We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.
We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it’s flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that’s like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won’t be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that’s gonna be rough for users. I don’t envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.
Something I never see anyone talk about, is how, with all the ‘fingerprinting’ and data collection/analysis these companies do, they already know whether you’re 18 or not. I know this isn’t actually about “protecting the children”, but I’d still like to hear more discussion from the angle of: they already surveil us enough for this purpose.
Me -> NAL. So I’m only guessing.
One prob might be that fingerprinting IDs a device. There could be a 70 yo and a 7 yo using the same dev in the same house. It prob wouldn’t stand up in court when Little Billy, 7, became a victim because Grandpa Wilson, 70, used the same device. Or the old dev fingerprint gets used with a new account. They let the account in b/c they know the fingerprint. But they never knew the dev was sold to a new owner who is 15.
Fingerprinting is way more powerful than most ppl realize. But it does have limits. If the EU, or the US, comes at them, they need something straighforward and easy to explain to a jury. If Little Billy forged a photo ID, that’s a solid defense for the co. But if they screw up with hard to explain statistical methods, they have more legal risk.
I understand this argument, but I don’t think it’s anymore “foolproof”. How often are you going to have to present ID? Every hour?
Just received the e-mail myself… now I am here! Hopefully more users with migrate soon.
Welcome!
I just dropped reddit some time ago… Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
why are people blaming reddit instead of EU ? (i dont like reddit either )
I live in the EU, this his honestly the first I’ve seen age verification on any platform.
uhm, youtube started requesting documents years ago. temu does it too
Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).
oh yeah i agree , the eu governments can implement a service where they do the age verification themselves but i think they do this on purpose because they work for US and the whole thing is for surveilling and spying on people
The whole Stop Killing Games debacle clearly showed us that the EU, despite its rhetoric, isn’t interested in championing consumer rights in the slightest.
Reddit wants me to reset my password or my account is locked.
So. I’m locked.
But I don’t use it any more so not really bothered.
I wonder how that’ll work with RSS and old Reddit. That’s all I use when reading Reddit
I read somewhere recently that old reddit will require you to be signed in. 🫤
Edit: found it.
The website includes a quote from a Reddit employee:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
I didn’t realize casually browsing a website is “abusive scraping”. Isn’t that the equivalent of claiming that reading a news article online is “abusive scraping”?
Read-only use of old reddit was the only way I use it. There are actualyl some good resources for niche topics. You can search, like how do I disassemble my electric toothbrush to replace the battery the mfg sealed into the unit. Somebody prob posted about it. Or weird game trivia. W/e.
Read only searching was the best remaining use for reddit. Which will now die.
Same. That is all that I would use Reddit for nowadays
😏
I already deleted my 15 year old account, all of my posts, and all of my comments. Fuck Reddit and their shitty policies.
FYI, you didn’t actually really delete any comments, they still have them and will often even restore them when accounts do mass deletions.
Those comments are theirs now.
Yeah it’s impossible to really remove much of anything from the internet. They’re welcome to restore them. It took no effort on my part. I used a browser extension. When it was done, I deleted my account. Most of the comments were just answering Linux questions or commenting on music and guitar posts.
I don’t even click search results from Reddit. When they started turning over info on users who had negative things to say about ICE, they lost me for good.
Where was that reported?
I don’t remember where I originally read it but here is the first article I found: https://gizmodo.com/reddit-meta-and-google-voluntarily-gave-dhs-info-of-anti-ice-users-report-says-2000722279
Over-write first, then deletes. Optionally, allows you to do download your comments first for archival.
Thanks. Too late for me but might help someone else.
God fuck this
No mail yet, but I’ll delete my account before i participate in that bs
Indeed and to “celebrate” this I deleted the 5 accounts I had (was project related) still.
I already deleted my main years ago but those ones were just unused for 10 years. Good time to signal (if anybody cares checking through usage data) that I’m not supporting this.
A day may come when I upload my ID, and verify my identity online, but it is not this day.
Wow can’t wait for the influx of 12-17 year olds on Lemmy.
Some really valuable perspective… They can tell us when it’s curtains for Zoosha
So “13 year olds, immutable secure setting because you are a child and we cant get as much wealth from you anyway.” But “16-17 year olds, you’re still a child, but if you wanna do some more stuff we’re not gonna stop you.”
Fuc reddit… I just got banned for favoring Ukraine over Russia. Seriously. Some Russian dude posted a video saying that Russians should take pictures of all their air defense to show Ukraine it’s still there and very strong. I said, “Ukraine would love for you to do that.”. BANNED. So yeah, fuck reddit.
Same for me 2 years ago now, when Russia hit the big shopping centre, I suggested it was maybe time for Ukraine to start hitting the Kremlin, permabanned.
Yeah. See now it’s to the point that i didn’t even say anything about hitting them, or attacking at all. So it has progressed to the point that purely favoring Ukraine constitutes a ban if they find out. But I figured I’d get banned for one thing or another eventually though lol. Was just a matter of time.
I mean. There’s some places here like that too
