I was about 50% sure this whole piece is parody when I read through the LLM part, and after I read the whole thing now I'm 99% sure.

> I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity.

I vehemently disagree, because this is not what is happening.

The Age verification domino toppled first in Australia, and then other governments found the example was good enough and followed suit.

The issue that HN conversations miss, is that the dominoes were set up over years. People have constantly been trying to deal with the many, many issues thrown up by social media. Issues ranging from the Myanmar genocide, content moderation, fraud, child safety, sextortion, to name just a random grab bag of issues.

Voters, governments, NGOs, victims and even tech firms, have been trying to figure out what to do for a decade+.

Voters, and non-tech-literate society used to complain about the status quo. The political will to change it reached critical mass, and is now in progress.