Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software
fortune.com177 points by robtherobber 4 hours ago
177 points by robtherobber 4 hours ago
I'm glad to see "Peter Thiel-backed" becoming a widely-recognized epithet.
Why is there a mass hysteria over Thiel-backed but not Soros-backed entities?
Why should there be mass hysteria over Soros-backed entities? What entities are those?
I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.
(This is a joke in case that wasn't clear)
It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.
The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.
Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are real philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on.
> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america...
So someone is evil because they answer questions by thinking through them? There are no questions in the universe that can’t be stopped and pondered over. In fact, it’s dangerous to even suggest that, that’s the exact mechanism that propaganda runs on.
A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their language or whatever you want to call it, so they can’t even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and paranoid man children with no scruples.
They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.
Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him palatable?"
>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.
They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.
Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.
it is truly amazing how much damage one person is able to do to civilized society
if you expand the scope to a handful of adjacent figures, the catastrophe is truly amazing
I’m hearing this a lot but never with any substance, would you care to elaborate with a hard action or idea with a direct result?
Thiel is one of the more public faces of what is now known as the "Epstein class" of societal predators. But one of many and certainly not the epicenter.
There is certainly a shadow cabal of these elite billionaire types that avoid all public exposure yet are working very hard to destroy society and profit
Some people are trying to use a different word than "cabal" because of the racial associations and history.
Oligarchs/y are among my choices, but I have supplanted that with Epstein Class now, to be more accurate to whom I refer
Yep Epstein class. It’s a great phrase for the billionaire elites who have corrupted our society through their wealth. We need heavy taxes on them now to preserve our democracy.
And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked with destabilizing America.
That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its merging with the state behind much of this). We can't centralize our communications without major concessions in significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats, and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?" Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or your loved ones.
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
Everyone needs to cut ties with those companies. Not just with Persona but any service linked to Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. The entire MAGA cultist ecosystem.
Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and won’t care. It’ll be up to other companies and consumers to punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you quickly check if you should or shouldn’t use some service based on the investors.
I'm getting there. Just a few more. I've found myself kicking my not so distant past self for not listening better to my even further distant past self...
The referenced write-up based on the Persona front end code is here:
https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona
I definitely recommend reading this primary source before drawing conclusions about the code as most of the secondary reporting is quite low quality.
Submitted 6 days ago but flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059129
@dang can this get a second chance?
Seems to be down for me. https://web.archive.org/web/20260220192124/https://vmfunc.re...
Good article but the web site gave me eye and ear cancer.
Please make it actually readable and don't steal my audio!
The people that pretend there is no reading mode in every browser is insane. 'I couldn't read it because of the website design.' we are on HN. Have some self respect and stop bitching.
There is more than “unique web design” that cause reading issues with that article. For one the lowercase and as well as arcane keywords and organization. I have communicated this to the author and they shrugged it off.
Reading mode doesn't work on Safari for me... I get a paragraph and sod all else.
So respectfully, do not make assumptions. And if you want someone to read the content, don't surround it with shite.
Aww shit my mistake text extraction is such hard task nowadays. I am sorry. The original thread got probably flagged because of the hybris of people like you instead of it's content... I think there is even something about that in the HN rules.
damn. why did the website stole my audio?
Some of the most interesting authors in tech on the internet have just absolute awful websites. Blinking animations everywhere, weird sounds, "cute" little javascript animations like it's 1999 again.
the last time the website was submitted, over half the comments talked about website design instead of the actual content. we can probably skip doing it again.
different people have different tastes. people complain about boring websites, people complain about websites with animations or colors. the only guarantee is that the conversation isnt interesting.
if you are on the side that doesnt like music, animations, whatever, i recommend a combination of noscript and using reader mode.
The layout and design is a matter of taste. I actually find websites like OP refreshing to see.
Blasting music or sound on auto play when you aren't directly navigating to audio or video content is just rude.
It's the same as playing your speaker on the subway.
Ah man, just tried to submit this with the title "Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed SaaS once code tied to US spying found" which is slightly better I think, and fits exactly within 80 characters :)
I think the whole "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new and wasn't known before, so feels important to have in the title too. Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.
> once code tied to US spying found
New and also should be the big story.
"Butcher cuts ties with supplier when steaks found to be human meat" shouldnt be a story about changing suppliers ...
Is this actually a thing that is true?
I don't think HN titles are judged by "is it true?" but rather how close the submission title is to the original title and otherwise represents the content of the submission.
the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now because of this whole thing.
Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
Why did the internet en masse fall for it again?
Slack sold out, changed the deal, and threw every small group under the bus. Most of those people ended up on Discord
Discord is a cancer on the open internet anyway.
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it.
The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people have to create an account for each forum. Most people are using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of rich text chat wins out.
Yes. And likewise for all those other walled gardens. I shouldn't need a Facebook or a Twitter account to read what some politician wrote.
Everyday someone cuts ties with Palentier's Peter Thiel (or the rest of the digital mafia), it's a good day for society as a whole.
Related: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245
They sacrificed one, but was it to save the rest? Surely Theil didn't act alone or in a vacuum
So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users, or imply they’re no longer using this 3rd party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn’t too clear on that.
> So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users,
No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.
Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
probably find out the new identity verification firm is just a shell around the Thiel company
Well, until the upcoming batch of laws goes through classifying discussion of lgbtq people as inherently mature content. This is one half of a two part strategy by the american right to make queer content de facto illegal again without running into first amendment protections. Getting the payment processors banning "mature" content is the other leg of this stool.
Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to access pornography.
The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.
It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".
No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.
Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.
K-id is the vendor they were proposing which did on device processing. They were trying to downplay the initiative by saying all the k-id data stayed on device.
This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring people that it was ok because you didn’t save data but also be trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled. (Though it does call into question discord’s judgment that they thought this was a good idea).
Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government links were discovered and also probably a part of this decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad idea
This name is turning radioactive. Not a bad thing.
>Nearly 2,500 accessible files were found sitting on a U.S. government-authorized endpoint, researchers pointed out on X. The files showed Persona conducted facial recognition checks against watchlists and screened users against lists of politically exposed persons.
>Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including screening for “adverse media”
im sure everyone assumed this, but its good to know it.
>And the information was openly available. “We didn’t even have to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was just on the doorstep,”
it is kind of scary how often these types of situations are only found out because of wild incompetence. you have to imagine that most similar situations dont suffer from the same incompetence (and thus arent known)
>“At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority.
please, i wish companies would just stop saying this obvious lie. you know that you dont care. we know that you dont care.
>It’s dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to everyone to be real online.
.... says the ceo of the company that you have to send your face ("facedox", if you will) to
For some reason, discord has never asked more from me than a verified email address. No phone number or anything else. Maybe I'm being monitored and they don't want to spook me off the honeypot? Half joking..
Same for me, and my account is almost a decade old. I think it depends a lot where are you from and the kind of activity, as i read stories of people being asked to register a number out of nowhere. Many servers requires you to have it tho, due to spam protection. I just don't talk on those.
It’s tragic but I have the “verified” setting turned on my public server because it’s literally impossible to stop a determined spammer with the tools Discord has. They can make new accounts faster than you can ban them, and there’s no like “IP ban” equivalent
Discord bans are IP bans by default, but new IP addresses are cheap. Even phone numbers are cheap for a determined spammer.
Each discord server can decide whether they only will allow people with a phone number on. When you hit one of those, Discord will ask you for your number.
Those require a phone for you to send messages and interact. It will ask you to 'Verify phone', but you can chose not to and stay on the server as read-only, Discord itself won't bother you about it. I am on a few like that for quite some time.
> According to Discord, only a small number of users were part of this test, in which any information submitted could be stored for up to seven days before it would be deleted.
Ah yes, we only store it for 7 days. During those 7 days, we pass it to Persona, and who knows how long they keep it!
Discord's previous statement:
> "Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation"
So now it's not "immediately" but 7 days? I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these guys.
The way I read that is Discord would delete your data, but they were taking an intentionally hands off approach to the data broker they subcontracted to identify you.
"I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these guys."
this is the fun part, you can't!
The one thing you can trust is this:
If a tech company says something to you, and they don't give you the means to verify it on your own, they are lying to you. Do not trust anything they say, ever.
Who IS still using this verification software?
This does not cure the face scanning nonsense. I deleted and am not going back.
Do not believe them.
Too fucking late, eat shit Discord. We’re all moving to E2E encrypted platforms.
What's the point of E2E on a chatroom/channel/"""server""" that anyone can join?
Yes, I'm making (another) argument in favour of IRC. IRC has optional client-server encryption, and you can set channel modes to only allow encrypted clients access. So that way you at least prevent eavesdropping.
I just nuked it and didn’t replace it. Bloated piece of shit full of misery.
We decided to just meet up in person twice a month and play board games instead.
where we definitely will not be moaning about the same thing in 18 months time
Joke's on you, once I finish setting up my P2P tin can network I'll be invisible.
[dead]
> politically exposed persons
I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern trend of calling inmates “justice involved individuals”?