At some point they'll just resort to calling the metric "person type" and the gender and age will be baked into it. They'll then use that "person type" metric to determine what you want to see, hear and consume.
People already do this on their own and advertisers already use it.
The Venn diagram of people who subscribe to 'The Economist' minimally overlaps with subscribers to the 'Razorcake' zine and very few companies would want to have an ad in both.
Yes but demographic has the unfortunate problem of needing to be connected to real world observable traits. Clustering people into as many groups as naturally fall out can capture way more.
The downside is that you don't know what the clusters actually mean precisely but you figure that out broadly by running tests.
That's existed forever, it's customer segmentation. It's the underlying reason people want this info, age etc is just a proxy. From an advertising perspective nobody cares how old you actually are, they want to know if you're likely to respond to an ad.
>nobody cares how old you actually are, they want to know if you're likely to respond to an ad.
sadly, people will pay a lot to know the age of someone precisely because they just wanna sell you stuff. Which is the problem in and of itself. I'm glad governments are slowly starting to stamp down on this
An unsupervised approach makes way more sense in some ways but advertisers often like to pick demographics manually so the categories need to be understandable by a human.
Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners -- being able to say they have approximately x 18-24s is valuable to pitching partnerships, etc.
> Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners
I'm thinking about the workflow here.
First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male.
Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male.
Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior.
We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?
A non-marketing answer is determining whether users are under age for regulatory purposes. Discord was and still is a gaming chat platform so the draw of young children can be dangerous.
Could be used to trigger a verification workflow in the event certain municipalities start requiring it.
How does that explain the focus on gender? Admittedly there are countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia where there might be laws about what you're allowed to show women.
I recall hearing that they added some sort of advertising into the streaming built into discord. Maybe they're intending to gradually expand that and make them more targeted.
Maybe finding out if you've got under aged users in order to prevent them from using the service or accessing resources they should not?
The obvious answer is marketing but I think there "could" be a real use case for:
"We want to know if we've got under aged users accessing what they shouldn't and they're not honest about their age so we have to figure it out somehow."
I think the "big deal" about it comes from the fact that users did not give that information willingly to Discord. If I did not provide you that information, why would I expect you to know it? And in a state that California (where Discord is based), I have the right to know how my data is used/shared, and request it be deleted. But I can't request information to be deleted if I don't know you have it. I can't know how you're using/sharing my data if I don't know you have it.
>Your (inexact) age and your gender aren't private.
"On the internet, no one knows you're a cat". Most people probably don't care enough to conceal such factors, but maybe we should be more careful divulging that information on a semi-anonymous platform.
Age is an especially dangerous thing to share if you're young.
Not tracking, but EU and their countries have strong laws to protect children. And the Digital Service Act did raise the bar in all of EU. So figuring out users they are supposed to protect, might be beneficial to prevent high penalties. And DSA was finalized in October 2022, so the date matches.
as long as they are accurate I do not mind. I was annoyed that as women who is also an engineer google's ad profile always insisted I was a single man. Despite my many skincare/make up/ and women's clothing/shoe purchases. I guess they weighted reference schematics and data sheet searches more heavily than other things. If you are going to show me targeted ads please make them ads I want to see.
If that's true, it's pretty ridiculous. I wish legislation would get at the core issue, which is not processing, but that collection happens at all. Normalizing surveillance, but asking companies to please not do anything with that data for minors, is such a far cry from what we deserve.
But Discord must store the messages, to make searching possible. And I assume the model works based on the writing style, topics discussed, etc. What would you propose, automatically remove all messages after a few weeks? Even then Discord technically can process the messages and build the same model. So yeah, in this case the processing is the problem since I don't want Discord to know my gender and age (unless I explicitly tell it).
> If you suspected you had underage users using your service illicitly. Could you not use such methods to find them?
You could use something like that and it would be counted as “legitimate interest” under GDPR, but:
- you wouldn't need (and then would be forbidden) to do segmentation between more categories than “too young”/“old enough”. This is not what they are doing here.
- you'd still need to tell the users that you're doing it, and provide a way for the users to modify that data upon request
> Under age users aren't going to just tell you their age honestly, so you'd have to use some method to derive their age.
You don't have a legitimate interest of knowing their age, only for knowing if they are underage or not.
I wonder if Discord may end up using this in some capacity to determine whether someone may be under the age of 13, which is the minimum age you need to be in order to have an account according to their terms of service.
The beginning of enshitification of discord (while 100% expected) for some reason hits harder then any other service I've used throughout all these years. It has entirely replaced social media for me. It just felt more organic to me then anything else.
So... since I've heard about the ads coming to discord, I have looked into alternatives.
They do exist, in varying quality, and there are programs for some of them that make a "bridge" from a discord server to your new platform. It's possible to have your cake and eat it to.
Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love. I have high hopes for matrix because of the idea of it. Perhaps my lackluster experience was because I didn't choose the best client available. I'm still trying new things here.
I just wanted to see if anyone else had other recommendations for me to try. I really would appreciate help here. Hopefully something open source and self hosted so I can stop migrating and sink some roots in somewhere.
I'm just happy they resisted the buyout by Microsoft.
> Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love.
Matrix is just a protocol. Clients competing with Discord would be things like Element. https://element.io/
It's no Discord (which itself is no WLM, by the way -- rip to oldschool fat clients which had even less of a business model and whose features you can't have at all or have to pay for now), but I sorely hope it or something open source gets there one day.
I'm a big fan of Matrix, and run a small homeserver for my family in friends. But if you really want to explore the frontiers peer to peer seems really intriguing because you don't need any server. https://tox.chat/ just to name one.
Revolt's UI looks super nice, I just wish it was connected to Matrix on the backend so I could use it with all the communities I participate in on matrix.
I understand and sympathise, but Discord is one service I just stayed away from because I could see the enshittification coming a mile off. And I'm disappointed every time I see an open source project house its community on Discord. I hoped that people would learn from the painful experience with Reddit's enshittification but apparently not.
I've been hosting a Mattermost server as an invite-only chat board for about six years. Slack is the direct comp. Mattermost is not immune to being enshittified either, but at least I get some warning: I can read the patch notes before updating the server, and when I see they've turned fully evil, I just won't upgrade the server, and we can start looking for an escape route before the clients break.
Since I own the server, I have some confidence I'm the only person who can possibly read the user data too. That is to say, I know that I won't do it, whereas I believe Discord and Slack would.
Readit News
The Venn diagram of people who subscribe to 'The Economist' minimally overlaps with subscribers to the 'Razorcake' zine and very few companies would want to have an ad in both.
"demographic"
The downside is that you don't know what the clusters actually mean precisely but you figure that out broadly by running tests.
This is using typed communications by anonymous users to make a guess about those attributes.
sadly, people will pay a lot to know the age of someone precisely because they just wanna sell you stuff. Which is the problem in and of itself. I'm glad governments are slowly starting to stamp down on this
If the advertisers use multi-armed bandits you wouldn't care less about the segments themselves.
Like from Discord's perspective, what would this actually accomplish business wise?
I'm kinda drawing a blank here.
Selling ads for paroxetine to women aged 40-50.
Ex, maybe don't show the "ad" during the day because they're likely at work if they're >24, or show a "quest" that's targeted towards nostalgia.
I'm thinking about the workflow here.
First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male.
Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male.
Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior.
We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?
Could be used to trigger a verification workflow in the event certain municipalities start requiring it.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/discord-is-adding-ads-but-with-a-g...
The obvious answer is marketing but I think there "could" be a real use case for:
"We want to know if we've got under aged users accessing what they shouldn't and they're not honest about their age so we have to figure it out somehow."
"On the internet, no one knows you're a cat". Most people probably don't care enough to conceal such factors, but maybe we should be more careful divulging that information on a semi-anonymous platform.
Age is an especially dangerous thing to share if you're young.
Deleted Comment
This is almost certainly a starting part of implementing that, designed to reduce the amount of users they have to ask for harder age checks for.
Ummm... like, business?
I wonder at what point analytics, queries, or ML to determine age gets in the way of actually keeping them from getting into things they shouldn't...
Under age users aren't going to just tell you their age honestly, so you'd have to use some method to derive their age.
You could use something like that and it would be counted as “legitimate interest” under GDPR, but:
- you wouldn't need (and then would be forbidden) to do segmentation between more categories than “too young”/“old enough”. This is not what they are doing here.
- you'd still need to tell the users that you're doing it, and provide a way for the users to modify that data upon request
> Under age users aren't going to just tell you their age honestly, so you'd have to use some method to derive their age.
You don't have a legitimate interest of knowing their age, only for knowing if they are underage or not.
In the UK it already is under the Online Safety Bill.
So... since I've heard about the ads coming to discord, I have looked into alternatives.
They do exist, in varying quality, and there are programs for some of them that make a "bridge" from a discord server to your new platform. It's possible to have your cake and eat it to.
Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love. I have high hopes for matrix because of the idea of it. Perhaps my lackluster experience was because I didn't choose the best client available. I'm still trying new things here.
https://matrix.org/
Revolt is the more complete product as of today.
https://revolt.chat/
Spacebar I have yet to try but it's on my radar.
https://github.com/spacebarchat
I just wanted to see if anyone else had other recommendations for me to try. I really would appreciate help here. Hopefully something open source and self hosted so I can stop migrating and sink some roots in somewhere.
Oh crap, is it IRC?
> Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love.
Matrix is just a protocol. Clients competing with Discord would be things like Element. https://element.io/
It's no Discord (which itself is no WLM, by the way -- rip to oldschool fat clients which had even less of a business model and whose features you can't have at all or have to pay for now), but I sorely hope it or something open source gets there one day.
Since I own the server, I have some confidence I'm the only person who can possibly read the user data too. That is to say, I know that I won't do it, whereas I believe Discord and Slack would.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903541
This would make sense with regards to this. It's essential data to be able to sell ads to companies.
If you are an open source or community project on the platform you should probably set up a Libre alternative...