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> We want to be particularly considerate of longtime Discord users who have had their usernames for quite awhile, so we will be assigning priority to choose yo

> We want to be particularly considerate of longtime Discord users who have had their usernames for quite awhile, so we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord. So anyone who joined in the last ~3 years will have no chance of getting a short and memorable username? Yet the username is what's actually required for all the same functions, such as adding a friend, etc... I can't see the upside for newer users, especially if their native language doesn't use latin characters.

saurik 4y ago
Yeah: unique usernames chosen by the user is an inherently elitist mechanism that only works for a small number of early adopters to a platform; the vast, overwhelming, dominating majority of the billions of people on earth who might become a user of your platform end up with semi-random strings of numbers and even symbols to establish their unique name. The only fair and reasonable thing to do is to randomly assign enough of the username to put everyone on an equal playing field... which is how Discord used to work, but--as is all too typical--I guess some engineer or product manager failed to really think through how this actually feels for the hoi polloi in their zeal to slightly improve some metric.