Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
The problem with steam is that it will eventually go the same way.
At the moment the internet is being used by big tech similar to a sheepdog rounding up sheep. Hopefully most will refuse this and move platform, that platform will eventually attempted to be broken down and register a few more users etc. If you have younger siblings or kids, they’re fucked. Unless you educate them about their privacy and how important it is.
Well, Valve hasn’t done so for about 20 years now, how long do people have to give a company that has proven again and again that they are not in the game for extracting maximum value out of their client base? I’d love for a FOSS solution to pick up the slack, but none are currently in a state where they can pick up millions of non-technical minded users in a heartbeat. Valve has those users already, so they are able to provide a solution NOW, not in a few years.
Should Valve eventually start enshittifying, which would require going public first, maybe there will be a readily usable FOSS solution. For now, it’s one of the easiest routes out of Discord (and the content on the Steam Forums is scrapeable over the web, so it’s pretty easy to transfer out, not like discord)