I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord's new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.
They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.
They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn't start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.
The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.
How how is Discord's policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.
So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That's one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn't want any kind of protections at all.
That's because public discourse is saturated by the extreme at both ends of the spectrum. The part of society that feels there could be some solution in the center of the argument is drowned out by Stallman zealots that feel that diddling kids is bad but you shouldn't be kept from doing it if it requires any information on you while the corporate sycophants are crying that they can't protect THE KIDS if they don't have every piece of information on you from birth onwards.
I view it the same as politics. I'll let the others behave as if they have a say in it and argue for or against. I'll just quit using discord when they require verification, as I will/have for any other corporation that does the same. Not because I don't think verification of some kind would help protect everyone from additional risk but because providing my very sensitive information to corporations that both exploit my data and pass it on to hackers and third-parties is not something I am willing to do.