Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.
I keep thinking about some of RPs I’ve done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn’t just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn’t work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn’t matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.
I’m nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.
amongus
That’s a subject many never talk about: it assumes we (1) have morality all figured out and (2) it’s the same for everyone, everywhere.
Something similar happened In China recently. A female author of homoerotic texts was charged for it.
Meh, just upload a dick pic.
I’ll never forget how he changed users’ text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
For those unaware, this isn’t something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users’ comments, turning them into insults to other users.
I don’t care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people’s mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users’ age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won’t know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won’t keep users’ uploaded images more than seven days.”
Press X to doubt.
Time to go to LemmyNSFW
Under the new UK law, lemmynsfw would also need to have some kind of age verification for UK users.
This. Can’t believe we’re seeing “lol Reddit sucks” when this is a country-wide implementation and has nothing to do with Reddit in particular.
So, the UK sucks.
Something similar is coming to Australia as well.
Beware USA :(((
Supreme Court’s ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online (July 4, 2025)
[commented the same a few days back]
Happy birthday, USA
This is why many adult sites are banning access if your IP is from TN or any of the other american states that love jesus more than freedom.
Explains the sudden advertisement in vpns, but I’m afraid they will have to shell out more proxies eventually
You are correct. But this doesn’t lessen the extent to which reddit sucks.
Real talk - or what? If LemmyNSFW isn’t based in the UK, what can they do?
Block it? I’d rather have that than deal with processing users face data.
Even though LemmyNSFW is outside of the UK the admins of any instance will be responsible for verification of UK users because of this law. This is why .zip (Lemmy and PieFed) have geoblocked the UK. It’s a lot of work and responsibility to take on.
Here’s the post from Demigodrick explaining this situation better than I can.
Yeah only if the UK can actually manage to enforce any consequences to site admins outside the UK. I’ll wait and watch.
I believe if the UK finds a site that doesn’t comply with the law, they will block it from their side of things. I haven’t read anything about websites needing to be proactive to block the UK if they don’t plan to comply.
Honestly I have no idea. I guess they could just block it if they don’t comply?
deleted by creator
Well as a Lemmy admin I’ll see if they seriously enforce this on international sites. If not, I won’t worry about it. If so, the UK gets blocked. 🤷🤷🤷
I doubt they’ll be going after niche sites anyway. Big dogs like reddit, sure. Sites dedicated to porn probably. Everyone else? Doubt it.
Just curious, how would this happen in practice? As I understand lemmy instances are defederated across the globe. Who would they send their demands to? Also there is already some nsfw content in lemmy, are those expected to respond now in some way?
Maybe they’ll just make the Fediverse illegal in the UK. Or all non-corporate sites that can’t afford to pay a company like Persona.
Or it can just defederate from UK based instances.
.zip has already been trying to figure out how to handle this law, its also UK based.
Lemmy.zip blocks uk users on its front end but I think its contents is still federated.
.zip blocks users from the UK iirc.
That’s always down when I want to use it :(
It’s always up when I use it … Oh you meant the site, sorry
It’s always down for it :)
It is not just that, I don’t trust Persona security, if a malicious actor installed a silent program that monitors users and sends it to a command and control center they probably won’t know for months or even years. Cyber security is very bad in most companies.
Google uses reddit for its AI training. Just saying.
God help us all.
Why doubt, I mean they promised?
Presses X furiously
Oh the cute little corpo is promising to delete your data, how can we not trust him🥺🥺
Very careful wording there to switch between Persona and Reddit to conveniently omit one from the justification given by the other.
I’m a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I’m so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.
It’s not even about protecting kids. It’s about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We’re the 6th richest economy in the world and we can’t even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can’t see a pair of tits on Reddit.
Hm, I’m going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It’s a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you’re over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you’re from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to
https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verifywith the site’s API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying “Yep! This is a valid key!” and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it’s you! If you don’t have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.As a result, you can both prove that you’re over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn’t get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record “Oh this key was used to verify on this site”, they’d have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he’s ever sold to.
So… Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.
But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they’ll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.
There could be some “Netflix account sharing” style work to deter that, of course.
Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.
Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.
people are going to share keys,
get ahead of it and sell discounted bukkakeys
you could probably even have a bundle called the “family plan” for the real sickos
I should get into masturbation regulation marketing!
Hungry for Adams Apples? Try our limp biscuits!
I’m a security dev and this is a good idea!
How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?
Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you’re on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don’t need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can’t verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?
You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can’t be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make ‘best efforts’ to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you’d have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.
Kier Starmer voice: “We are an island, of wankers”
“I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. But we … we were colonized by wankers!”
Next in the news: “500k Usernames, Passwords and biometric data leaked in the latest hack”
Remember those are just the ones you hear about. Plenty happen and are never talked about by either side for obvious reasons.
Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)
So…coming soon: an app that can match up images of friends or colleagues with a summary of their pornography preferences.
This could at least liven up some boring meetings or dull parties…
Like father, like son, I guess.
POV: You’re the intern tasked with reviewing the selfies.
It’ll almost certainly be an AI model doing it.
Yeah, this is showing up at roughly the same time we can get (almost) free 5 second video generation from some services, and fast still picture generation on consumer grade hardware. It’s the perfect combination of useless, stupid, and obsolete, all in one very pricey and very dangerous precedent-filled package.
That brings up an interesting thought. What if people uploaded AI generated selfies?
So long as its generated by the same (or a better model) it shouldn’t be able to tell.
It’ll almost certainly be an AI model backed by 1000s of “trainers” in 3rd world countries doing it, but only until the model is fully trained.
thats not what pov means, upload a selfie as punishment
POV = point of view. The intern’s point of view. They’re looking at the selfies submitted by gooners. The picture is a gooner. Idk what you’re talking about.
That could very well be the POV of the intern having to approve career gooners
There’s a bunch of AI face generating pictures. I wonder if you can just use those. Or maybe this is just to create a new law to arrest people of uploading fake pictures…
Are they asking for selfies, or selfies of the user? Important difference.
And it would know the difference how?
They can force you to use your phone’s camera. Due to faceID, modern phones have fairly sophisticated cameras that can tell the difference between a static image and a 3d physical face.
I don’t use my phone for shit like this. If anything that could be just a website can only be used through an “app”, I just don’t use it.
Edit, also, what’s stopping me from holding my phone to a computer screen?
Modern facial recognition cameras project a grid of infrared dots on your face and use the distortion of them to sense the depth and contours of your face. You’d have to 3d print a head to defeat it.
That said, Reddit is probably doing the bare minimum to comply with the law and will probably just use an uploaded 2d image.
Meh, it’s just software
I’m not the person you were replying to but maybe the limit of using the websites like the ones I posted is you can’t reuse the same face (at least not than I’m aware of).
So if you are in the UK and you upload 2 selfies from the site and the facial recognition pattern is different from each other, then the system which Reddit is using might reject it.
This is only a guess though.
It should be trivial to generate a stack of similar enough selfies to fool these systems. Still, any site that starts requiring this shit isn’t worth going on.
Agreed. I hope more people leave that dumpster fire.
Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.
Oh dear. What a dreadful business.
Anyway, this is mine.
Yeah, I will definitely trust an internet stranger with my face so they can verify that I’m not underage to access content which could, in case of being leaked, damage my reputation or even destroy my life.
DEFINITELY
u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.
what’s the topic of r/jailbait?
I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.
The speed they banned r/pizzagate was illuminating.
Lmao when the “anonymous” online forum requires de-anonymizing, I want to hope everyone leaves
Some people will leave, the rest will ride it out as Reddit continues to transform itself into Facebook
To be clear, this is a UK law now applied to any website that serves UK citizens. Anything that hosts adult content requires UK citizens to provide some form of age verification. Like a photo (for AI age estimation), credit card, utility bills, and so on. The government is dumb, and I guess it’s time to just sit on VPNs 24/7 now.
To your point, it’s insane how much data reddit collects about you.
Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it’s not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever…
Good take. You are right. Still fuck this.
Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?
I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.
Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.
I think it’s good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.
I guess what I’m not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.
I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I’m not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.
I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person’s age and then giving a kind of authorization token that’s cryptographically secure that basically says “the owner of this cryptographic key is of age”.
