On that front, we’re a little fortunate. One of the whitepapers I saw on the legislation essentially spruiked a whole industry poised to offer sites ‘age verification services’. By getting in ahead of all that and verifying our users using methods our own users themselves define, we’re avoiding that noise.

And the users have been wonderful. I’ve always loved the support of this crowd and they haven’t let us down on this matter, either. By simply leaving it with you all to go ahead and define your own verification means, you’ve come up with loads of unique stuff that I would never have thought of. And by keeping it all funnelled to DMs the way we have, no AI is going to learn anything from you.

If we are singled out to demonstrate that we took reasonable steps, I’d love to present the evidence that we have complied with the legislation. They can’t complain that our methods fail to meet some standard, as they haven’t provided a standard. I honestly believe I could go all the way to court with the messages that you’ve sent in as “any reasonable person would believe this was sent by someone over sixteen”. If that turns into some sort of thing that goes ‘ok, you need to do x to verify ages in future’, we’ve beaten all such changes by being grandfathered in on our own system.