It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.

Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

The industry clearly prefers a system in which using the internet requires full identification. There are many powerful interests that support this model:

- Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.

- The advertising industry prefers verified identities for better targeting.

- Social media companies gain more reliable data and engagement.

- Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase tracking.

- Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity verification.

In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments often favor identification because it increases oversight and control.

Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that voting often does not require ID, while accessing online services does. The usual argument is that voting is a constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution, but in practice it functions as an essential right in today’s society.

There’s some nuance here.

Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to children now and should have a means of keeping them out is distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything.

A better implementation would be to have a device/login level parental control setting that passed age restriction signals via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and privacy friendly.

There's a high chance the government is attempting to influence public opinion by using botted comments, which is easier than ever to pull off.

I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal" Internet usage.

That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.

When ID checks are rolled out there is immediate outrage. Discord announced ID checks for some features a couple weeks ago and it has been a non-stop topic here.

From what I’ve seen, most of the pro-ID commenters are coming from positions where they assume ID checks will only apply to other people, not them. They want services they don’t use like TikTok and Facebook to become strict, but they have their own definitions of social media that exclude platforms they use like Discord and Hacker News. When the ID checks arrive and impact them they’re outraged.

Regulation for thee, not for me.

This is what I was wondering too. It doesn't seem genuine. Most people in tech I know will strongly oppose ID checks for internet use, rightfully so.

There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-adulthood checks in a lot of contexts.

So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them.

We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.

We have a Scylla vs Charybdis situation, where lack of ID leads to an internet of bots, while on the other end we get a dystopia where everything anyone has ever said about any topic is available to a not-so-liberal government. Back in the day, it was very clear that the second problem was far worse than the first. I still think it is, but I sure see arguments for how improved tooling, and more value in manipulating sentiment, makes the first one quite a bit worse than it was in, say, 1998.

It's very odd. I see it everywhere I go.

I think a lot of the younger generation supports it, actually. They didn't really grow up with a culture of internet anonymity and some degree of privacy.

It does feel like a shift, and sometimes coordinated signaling. This post was at the top of this thread not long ago. Now it's all pro-age verification posts.

I think it's complicated by the turning tide on the health effects of social media.

So people are kind of primed for "makes sense to keep kids from these attention driven platforms"

But I think the average person isn't understanding the implications of the facial/id scanning.

A lot of people are unhappy with the state of the Internet and the safety of people of all ages on it. I believe we should be focusing on building a way to authenticate as a human of a nation without providing any more information, and try to raise the bar for astroturfing to be identity theft.

There's absolutely some astroturfing happening, but I wouldn't discount that there is some organic support as well. Journalists have been pushing total de-anonymization of the internet for a while now, and there are plenty of people susceptible to listening to them.

> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

Actually, yes, it seems to have shifted quite a bit. As far as I can tell, it seems correlated with the amount of mis/disinformation on the web, and acceptance of more fringe views, that seems to make one group more vocal about wanting to ensure only "real people" share what they think on the internet, and a sub-section of that group wanting to enforce this "real name" policy too.

It in itself used to be fringe, but really been catching on in mainstream circles, where people tend to ask themselves "But I don't have anything to hide, and I already use my real name, why cannot everyone do so too?"

Could be astroturfing

It's inauthentic at best. The four horsemen of the infocaplypse are drugs, pedos, terrorists, and money laundering - they trot out the same old tired "protect the children!" arguments every year, and every year it's never, ever about protecting children, it's about increasing control of speech and stamping out politics, ideology, and culture they disapprove of. For a recent example, check out the UK's once thriving small forum culture, the innumerable hobby websites, collections of esoteric trivia, small sites that simply could not bear the onerous requirements imposed by the tinpot tyrants and bureaucrats and the OSA.

It's never fucking safety, or protecting children, or preventing fraud, or preventing terrorism, or preventing drugs or money laundering or gang activities. It's always, 100% of the time, inevitably, without exception, a tool used by petty bureaucrats and power hungry politicians to exert power and control over the citizens they are supposed to represent.

They might use it on a couple of token examples for propaganda purposes, but if you look throughout the world where laws like this are implemented, authoritarian countries and western "democracies" alike, these laws are used to control locals. It's almost refreshingly straightforward and honest when a country just does the authoritarian things, instead of doing all the weaselly mental gymnastics to justify their power grabs.

People who support this are ignorant or ideologically aligned with authoritarianism. There's no middle ground; anonymity and privacy are liberty and freedom. If you can't have the former you won't have the latter.

I don't support ID for internet use, only for adult content specifically. There's things on Discord that would shock you to your core if you saw some of it, I don't think children should be blindly exposed to any of it. Specifically porn. Tumblr almost got kicked out of the app store over porn, they went the route of banning it and killing what to me felt like a dying social media platform as things stood.

Do you think strip clubs and bars should stop IDing people at the door? I don't. Why should porn sites be any different?

I think the word you're missing is fatigue.

The average tech literate person keep seeing their data breached over and over again. Not because THEY did anything wrong, but because these Corpos can't help themselves. No matter how well the tech literate person secures their privacy it has become clear that some Corpo will eventually release everything in an "accident" that causes their efforts to become meaningless.

After a while it's only human for fatigue to build up. You can't stop your information from getting out there. And once it's out there it's out there forever.

Meanwhile every Corpo out there in tech is deliberately creating ways to track you and extract your personal information. Taking steps to secure your information ironically just makes you stand out more and narrows the pool you're in to make it easier to find you and your information. And again you're always just one "bug" from having it all be for nothing.

I still take some steps to secure my privacy, I'm not out there shouting my social security information or real name. But that's habit. I no longer believe that privacy exists.

To the extent we ever had it in the past was simply the insurmountable restrictions on tracking and pooling the information into some kind of organization and easy lookup. Now that it is easier and easier to build profiles on mass numbers of people and to organize those and rank them the illusion is gone. Privacy is dead. Murdered.

And people are tired of pretending otherwise.

I mean there has always been some part of the tech literate people that were like that, they were just less likely to post about it on forums. Heck after the eternal September it wasn't uncommon for 'jokes' about requiring a license to use the internet.

> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

HN has largely shifted away from tech literacy and towards business literacy in recent years.

Needless to say that an internet where every user's real identity is easily verifiable at all times is very beneficial for most businesses, so it's natural to see that stance here.

The audience shifted from tech-literate to the opposite.

I think so. A lot of people think the internet now is a somewhat negative construct and don’t feel so strongly about it somewhat dying away.

Beware the vocal minority. Internet comment sections only tell you the sentiments of people who make comments.

HN comments sentiment seems to shift over the age of the thread and time of day.

My suspicion is that the initial comments are from people in the immediate social circle of the poster. They share IRC or Slack or Discord or some other community which is likely to be engaged and have already formed strong opinions. Then if the story gains traction and reaches the front page a more diverse and thoughtful group weighs in. Finally the story moves to EU or US and gets a whole new fresh take.

I’m not surprised that people who support something are the ones most tuned in to the discussion because for anyone opposed they also have their own unrelated thing they care about. So the supporters will be first since they’re the originators.

The average tech “literate” person uses discord, social media, a GitHub with their real name, a verified LinkedIn, and Amazon Echo.

These are not the same people from 30 years ago. The new generation has come to love big brother. All it took to sell their soul was karma points.

I highly doubt the sentiment is from real humans. If anything, it proves that a web-of-trust-based-attestation-of-humanity is the real protection the internet needs.

Its weird how all these 1,000 IQ innovators suddenly can't figure it out.

I dont think they want to figure it out. They think the internet should be stagnant unchanging and eternal as it currently exists because it makes the most money. If you disagree you're either a normie, bot, or need to parent harder or something. There is nothing you can do don't dare try to change it.

The vibe has shifted quite a bit among the general populace, not just in tech.

The short version is that voters want government to bring tech to heel.

From what I see, people are tired of tech, social media, and enshittified apps. AI hype, talk of the singularity, and fears about job loss have pushed things well past grim.

Recent social media bans indicate how far voter tolerance for control and regulation has shifted.

This is problematic because government is also looking for reasons to do so. Partly because big tech is simply dominant, and partly because governments are trending toward authoritarianism.

The solution would have been research that helped create targeted and effective policy. Unfortunately, tech (especially social media) is naturally hostile to research that may paint its work as unhealthy or harmful.

Tech firms are burned by exposés, user apathy, and a desire to keep getting paid.

The lack of open research and access to data blocks the creation of knowledge and empirical evidence, which are the cornerstones of nuanced, narrowly tailored policy.

The only things left on the table are blunt instruments, such as age verification.

This is a VC site, when the revenue generating model of the Internet has strongly shifted into surveillance capitalism overdrive.

Cui bono?

> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

Yes.

Or more honestly, there was always an undercurrent of paternalistic thought and tech regulation from the Columbine Massacre days [0] to today.

Also for those of us who are younger (below 35) we grew up in an era where anonymized cyberbullying was normalized [1] and amongst whom support for regulating social media and the internet is stronger [2].

The reality is, younger Americans on both sides of the aisle now support a more expansive government, but for their party.

There is a second order impact of course, but most Americans (younger and older) don't realize that, and frankly, using the same kind of rhetoric from the Assange/Wikileaks, SOPA, and the GPG days just doesn't resonate and is out of touch.

Gen X Techno-libertarianism isn't counterculture anymore, it's the status quo. And the modern "tech-literate" uses GitHub, LinkedIn, Venmo, Discord, TikTok, Netflix, and other services that are already attached to their identity.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/suicide-of-girl-after-...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/09/why-young...

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Better to let a hundred people’s “privacy” be violated than to let another child be radicalized or abused or misled by online predation.

It’s bots pushing another false narrative. You’ll notice this in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years, with big booms around 2016 and 2024 “for some reason”

As a tech-literate person, I'm not 100% against the concept of ID if only because I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't anonymous.

This conflicts with my concerns about government crackdowns and the importance of anonymity when discussing topics that cover people who have a monopoly on violence and a tendency to use it.

So it's not entirely a black/white discussion to me.

I used to be so against this but after the never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son) I don't think the tech crowd really appreciates how frustrating it is and how many different screens there are.

Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates, depression rates, eating disorders etc. so it's not as if there is no good side to this.

When you’re young, the overwhelming and irrepressible desire to overcome society's proscriptions to satisfy your intellectual and sexual curiosity is natural and understandable. The open Internet made that easier than ever, and I enjoyed that freedom when I was younger—though I can’t say it was totally harmless.

When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials and people who want to exploit or harm them.

It’s a matter of perspective and experience. As adults age, their natural curiosity evolves into a desire to protect their children from harm.