Nexus Mods announce age verification for UK users

Honestly: Good.

We tried the laissez-faire way, and we know how that ended. However this eventually turns out, I cannot imagine it being worse.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 22 Aug 2025 at 11:08 am UTC

I have nothing against protecting children, speaking as a parent myself. I agree with the thought behind it, but nothing about the implementation of it.

The Online Safety Act is a serious overreach on what it does. We even now have some in the UK [External Link] suggesting age checks should be required on VPNs because people are using it as a workaround.

The problem is as usual: parenting. People need to actually check what their kids are doing. Basically all devices have parental controls, use them. A lot of parents really do just give their kids unrestricted internet access and that's the biggest part of the problem.

The other side is - if the UK gov really wanted to protect people, they would have rolled out a proper country-wide privacy-focused way to do the checks, not just hand it off to whoever. We have no real idea what these private companies are doing with our ID, our faces or whatever you choose to hand over.

Time to go underground I guess...

The problem is as usual: parenting.

While I agree with you, the UK government like many other governments favor short term solutions to fix the symptom rather than doing the hard work of fixing the underlying causes.

Many parents don't have the skills, understanding or (most importantly) time to effectively keep their children safe online. Governments could help to fix the skills and understanding problem by providing free classes for parents, but they also need to have the time to be able to monitor what their children are doing online. I know parents who have to work more than one job to make ends meet, resulting in their children being left unsupervised at home. This could be fixed by governments and have wider societal benefits.

Anyway, I'll get off my soap box now! ;)

At least Nexus Mods seems to have implemented the law in a sensible way compared to other sites.

At least Nexus Mods seems to have implemented the law in a sensible way compared to other sites.

What do non-sensible ways look like?
Genuine question.

What do non-sensible ways look like?

For example, Nexus Mods won't make you verify your age if your account is older than 10 years which is better than making all UK users do it to access adult content like other sites have done.


Last edited by CountVlad on 22 Aug 2025 at 1:04 pm UTC

Offloading individual responsibility on the society/government.

The lazy way to solve one problem and create one hundred.

Well done! You'll find me and my popcorn bag waiting for your tears when you'll realize what was the hidden cost of outsourcing your critical thinking to others.

Honestly: Good.

We tried the laissez-faire way, and we know how that ended. However this eventually turns out, I cannot imagine it being worse.

It's bad. Stupid etc. yes, I can imagine worse. It will get worse.

I'm not all that ticked at Nexusmods, they don't have much choice.
It's either that, or, block everyone from the UK.

(btw, that's what I'd do. Just like the porn companies are doing to individual states)

Some thoughts:

1. The proper way to do age verification is for the government of a nation to provide a service which other parties can use to verify that a person is old enough to access said content (so not 'is this person at least 18', but 'is this person old enough that they are allowed to access this type of content').

2. If they do Age Verification for sexuality-related content then it should also be done for violence-related content (I wouldn't consider teen pregnancies to be worse than school shootings, for example).

3. Protecting children is the job of the child's guardian(s), the government should only step in when the guardian(s) can't/won't do a decent job of it and in that case the solution is not to put some massive overreach in place but to transfer guardianship to someone who is actually capable of raising the child properly.

4. Trying to do AV only in specific regions is stupid because people can always bypass it using a VPN.

The UK Online Safety Act isn't really aimed at 'saving the children'. It is more a case of the UK government colluding with Big Tech corporations to strip away people's online anonymity.

On the Big Tech side, corporations like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter collect as much telemetry as they can about individuals. They want this web usage data to be connected to a real identity, telephone number, government id, home address, email address. This data is then sold (to whoever wants it) and generally it is used to manipulate people into parting with their cash.

On the government side, it is all about state surveillance of the general population, and they just lean over and ask their Big Tech friends to divulge all they know. They don't want you to have any privacy whatsoever, they literally want 1984 microphones in every home watching everything you do.

This leads to a loss of freedom of speech in the general population (because everyone is aware they are being watched and tone down their political views). Before long the state becomes more and more autocratic with a social credit system, like instigated by the Chinese government (where you can't even buy train tickets if your social score isn't high enough).

I suggest fighting against this, else your freedom will be lost and never come back. Consider the film Gattaca as a forewarning of the future.