alt Hacker NewsWe get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
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Most of this has to do with GitHub relying on a benefactor with a de facto monopoly in order to subsidize their massive business failures and loses. I'm sure if GitLab never IPO'd and was in bed with a trillion dollar corporation the situation might be more comparable.
All you're doing is making a profound argument why GitHub should be divested from Github, WhatsApp from Meta, or AWS from Amazon. It's clear many tech companies would not be in dominant positions without the massive advantage of their respective monopolies.
These companies need to be broken up radically and it needs to happen soon.
"Any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content."
Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.