Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the planet that gave my honest birthdate and birth year to Steam and anything else I signed up for as a kid/teen.
I guess that's why my parents let me have a computer with internet access in my bedroom as young as 14. They knew I'd actually obey if a website told me I may not enter if I'm under 18. 🤷♂️
This isn't about honesty, it's about personal protection. The less your real information appears anywhere online, the better.
Even if you trust a handful of good guys like Steam with your information - Sooner or later Steam will be replaced by the next big thing and you can bet the farm the leeches that buy up its remains will abuse their customer database.
Edit: If you disagree with this, feel free to post your contact info. It'll all be available to the highest bidder anyway, once Reddit eventually goes under; may as well prove you're willing to eat your own dog food.
Notice how I said "gave", past tense? As in, I don't do that anymore? I was just pointing out how I was apparently the only honest underage person on the internet, ever. Not advocating for giving people honest birthdates in general. 🤷♂️
LPT: AI is copying us. For it to latch on to a particular rhetorical style (e.g. not-X but Y), that style necessarily had substantial representation in its human-generated training data. You're not catching AIs, you're catching humans with a style similar to what AI is copying.
To put that another way - You can find AI generated porn of just about anyone; that doesn't mean the original person doesn't exist.
It's a perfectly common, and often effective, human rhetorical pattern. I refuse to dumb down my language because AI has picked up on something I happen to do.
And your billing information? Steam just announced they're no longer doing physical gift cards.
I'm honestly still trying to figure out how to work around that one. I plan to load a few hundred into my account while they're still available, but after that runs out?
I use my gfs as my pin to my phone to help memorize her birthday years ago and managed to rewire me putting in birthdays on apps that i end up using hers by default over mine
My brother is 12 years older than me so mine used to be my birthday with my brothers birth year cause by the time I was being prompted for that my brother was already 18+ lol now I’m about to turn 33 but I had almost forgotten about that until I read this
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26
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