6 ms·

Discord plans to make everyone change their username

53 points by jfk13 3y ago

sosodev 3y ago
Has the announcement not been posted anywhere? I find it strange the author links Twitter commentary but not the actual announcement edit: here's the actual blog https://discord.com/blog/usernames https://discord.com/blog/usernames Why isn't it linked? No clue
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- colpabar 3y ago
  For some reason that’s par for the course for a lot of mainstream news articles. The headline refers to a claim that was made by some org or group and there is an authoritative source of that claim and yet the article doesn’t link to it. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Do they benefit by linking to twitter and not the discord website for some reason? Also, _who cares_ what some people I don’t know are saying about it on twitter?
- pacifika 3y ago
  Journalists protect their sources!
bombcar 3y ago
TLDR, no more bombcar#2699 now you will be "bombcar" @bombcar239429 where the display name will be prominent. So basically exactly like twitter.
- surge 3y ago
  I paid Discord money to get a custom user #. How's that supposed to work?
  - chomp 3y ago
    I presume you're talking about Nitro. That's not a permanent custom discriminator. As soon as you stop paying for Nitro, it randomizes again.
egypturnash 3y ago
Good, I hate those four random digits on the end of the globally unique username I've been using for something like the past twenty years. Every time someone wants to connect to me on Discord I have to fire the damn thing up and see what those stupid numbers are. It's a decent solution to the problem of people who want to be FirstnameL or FirstnameLCity on the Internet, but if you've taken the time to choose a sufficiently unique handle, it's just annoying.
- chomp 3y ago
  I hate the discriminator system, one of the main reasons I pay for Nitro is so i can set it to 0001. I'd rather be "TheRealChomp" or "ChompChomp" or something, versus having to give out my name and number. We have almost 7000 people on our discord server, and we have a few people with colliding usernames, and also bot who shares a name with another user. The only way to tell these people apart is their profile pic (which people change somewhat regularly), or discriminator. Rather frustrating UX.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    IMHO "picking a globally-unique username that will never be taken anywhere unless someone is explicitly trying to steal your identity" is an important little rite of adulthood in the modern world.
  - gyaru 3y ago
    That's still going to be an issue though because you can set the same display name? This doesn't solve anything. > I'd rather be "TheRealChomp" or "ChompChomp" or something, versus having to give out my name and number. I dunno, I have a very common English word username on Telegram and Twitter and I can't even count on both of my hands and feet on how much I've been harassed to hand those names over. On discord? same name? never.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tzs 3y ago
  I've never used Discord so am a bit confused. Do the random numbers added to your name change, or do they assign 4 random numbers permanently when the name is creaated?
niij 3y ago
dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808318
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Discord missed a chance to build a community. That might sound absurd, but what separates Discord from HN (among many other things) is that we have consistent identities here. You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Ditto for me being curious about you. That curiosity is an important factor, and Discord’s naming system didn’t foster it at all. I’m theshawwn on Twitter. shawwn on GitHub. sillysaurusx on HN. I was once on discord for years, till I left — and when I left, I felt no loss. There was nothing attaching me to discord. If I abandoned any of those others, it would feel awful; my entire ML history is codified in twitter, and anyone can go read it. Whereas I can’t even remember what my discord username was. You might be thinking that you’d lose the servers. If you leave discord, you have to rejoin everywhere if you make a new account. But rejoining is easy; it’s the point of discord to join servers. So that’s not really “a thing” the way that my HN comments are a thing, or my GitHub repos, or tweets. This change is the first step in letting users feel attached to discord. If they play their cards right, you’ll start to feel like “this is me” the way that those other services feel like a part of you. Being able to link someone to discord.gg/shawwn (or whatever) is no small thing — it’s a reason to care about staying on discord at all. I don’t know if this change will matter at this point, but it’s nice to see them still pivoting and trying to fix their fundamentals. Making big changes to community software is such a tricky thing (how many times have we seen a mass exodus? I can think of at least 7, with digg being the limit case of what not to do) so I respect that they’re willing to take a risk at this point in their growth stage.
- datpuz 3y ago
  > You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Not everyone wants this. I'm in Discords with friends, I'm in game hacking Discords, I'm in Overemployed Discords, etc. I don't want everyone knowing what Discords I'm active in.
  - samtheprogram 3y ago
    In my opinion this is one reason why Discord is so successful and the place I feel most free to communicate. Everything you do on the platform doesn’t follow you everywhere. If any person could see everything I’m doing in B, C, and D community automatically (or even what communities I’m apart of to then track down everything I’ve ever said), I would be way less inclined to be myself and participate at all. Lack of chilling effects. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Entinel 3y ago
I prefer having the numbers as opposed to globally unique usernames. It destroys the incentive to steal high value usernames through scams and social engineering attacks. I don't get random friend request from people who aren't even in servers I am because they don't know the numbers to send a request. It also gave Discord a reason to sell Nitro because for a fee you could just change the numbers to 1234 or whatever. You will see an increase in scams as people aim to steal high value usernames to resell them as well as an increase in spam. We've seen this behavior on Twitter for years.
- RadiozRadioz 3y ago
  I disagree that discriminators fix the rare username problem. The way I see it, they just move the problem. Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"? If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros. I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.
- nvarsj 3y ago
  Yeah, this happens on literally every other popular platform without discriminators. It feels like a huge regression in usability. Discriminators are one of the things that make Discord cool. And it seems like the only reasonable solution that scales for hundreds of millions of users.
aftbit 3y ago
What a dumb idea. They should have picked one of the "half solutions" that the blog post lays out. Making everyone change their username is goofy.
Ekaros 3y ago
I don't like the idea of unique usernames. Too many issues with clashing ones. The Discord system allowed multiple users to get same one which was actually decent. Trade off really was finding each other in a server, but I don't think creating one is too high barrier.
mrguyorama 3y ago
They are prioritizing people who joined earlier, so you may have a chance to squat on a popular person's username!
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Calling Midjourney Bot!
- wink 3y ago
  I understood it more like "if wink#1234 from 2019 and wink#9876 from 2022 both want to change their name, the 2019 account can get it earlier" but maybe you are tight :(
rogerclark 3y ago
They're only doing this so they can launch a public platform like Twitter or Substack. Nobody actually wants this except the executive team at Discord.
revlolz 3y ago
I'm sick and tired of services degrading quality and "fixing" things that aren't broken.

53 points by jfk13 3y ago

Has the announcement not been posted anywhere? I find it strange the author links Twitter commentary but not the actual announcement edit: here's the actual blog https://discord.com/blog/usernames https://discord.com/blog/usernames Why isn't it linked? No clue

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
colpabar 3y ago
For some reason that’s par for the course for a lot of mainstream news articles. The headline refers to a claim that was made by some org or group and there is an authoritative source of that claim and yet the article doesn’t link to it. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Do they benefit by linking to twitter and not the discord website for some reason? Also, _who cares_ what some people I don’t know are saying about it on twitter?
pacifika 3y ago
Journalists protect their sources!

bombcar 3y ago

TLDR, no more bombcar#2699 now you will be "bombcar" @bombcar239429 where the display name will be prominent. So basically exactly like twitter.

surge 3y ago
I paid Discord money to get a custom user #. How's that supposed to work?
- chomp 3y ago
  I presume you're talking about Nitro. That's not a permanent custom discriminator. As soon as you stop paying for Nitro, it randomizes again.

egypturnash 3y ago

Good, I hate those four random digits on the end of the globally unique username I've been using for something like the past twenty years. Every time someone wants to connect to me on Discord I have to fire the damn thing up and see what those stupid numbers are. It's a decent solution to the problem of people who want to be FirstnameL or FirstnameLCity on the Internet, but if you've taken the time to choose a sufficiently unique handle, it's just annoying.

chomp 3y ago
I hate the discriminator system, one of the main reasons I pay for Nitro is so i can set it to 0001. I'd rather be "TheRealChomp" or "ChompChomp" or something, versus having to give out my name and number. We have almost 7000 people on our discord server, and we have a few people with colliding usernames, and also bot who shares a name with another user. The only way to tell these people apart is their profile pic (which people change somewhat regularly), or discriminator. Rather frustrating UX.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  IMHO "picking a globally-unique username that will never be taken anywhere unless someone is explicitly trying to steal your identity" is an important little rite of adulthood in the modern world.
- gyaru 3y ago
  That's still going to be an issue though because you can set the same display name? This doesn't solve anything. > I'd rather be "TheRealChomp" or "ChompChomp" or something, versus having to give out my name and number. I dunno, I have a very common English word username on Telegram and Twitter and I can't even count on both of my hands and feet on how much I've been harassed to hand those names over. On discord? same name? never.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tzs 3y ago
I've never used Discord so am a bit confused. Do the random numbers added to your name change, or do they assign 4 random numbers permanently when the name is creaated?

niij 3y ago

dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35808318

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Discord missed a chance to build a community. That might sound absurd, but what separates Discord from HN (among many other things) is that we have consistent identities here. You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Ditto for me being curious about you. That curiosity is an important factor, and Discord’s naming system didn’t foster it at all. I’m theshawwn on Twitter. shawwn on GitHub. sillysaurusx on HN. I was once on discord for years, till I left — and when I left, I felt no loss. There was nothing attaching me to discord. If I abandoned any of those others, it would feel awful; my entire ML history is codified in twitter, and anyone can go read it. Whereas I can’t even remember what my discord username was. You might be thinking that you’d lose the servers. If you leave discord, you have to rejoin everywhere if you make a new account. But rejoining is easy; it’s the point of discord to join servers. So that’s not really “a thing” the way that my HN comments are a thing, or my GitHub repos, or tweets. This change is the first step in letting users feel attached to discord. If they play their cards right, you’ll start to feel like “this is me” the way that those other services feel like a part of you. Being able to link someone to discord.gg/shawwn (or whatever) is no small thing — it’s a reason to care about staying on discord at all. I don’t know if this change will matter at this point, but it’s nice to see them still pivoting and trying to fix their fundamentals. Making big changes to community software is such a tricky thing (how many times have we seen a mass exodus? I can think of at least 7, with digg being the limit case of what not to do) so I respect that they’re willing to take a risk at this point in their growth stage.

datpuz 3y ago
> You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Not everyone wants this. I'm in Discords with friends, I'm in game hacking Discords, I'm in Overemployed Discords, etc. I don't want everyone knowing what Discords I'm active in.
- samtheprogram 3y ago
  In my opinion this is one reason why Discord is so successful and the place I feel most free to communicate. Everything you do on the platform doesn’t follow you everywhere. If any person could see everything I’m doing in B, C, and D community automatically (or even what communities I’m apart of to then track down everything I’ve ever said), I would be way less inclined to be myself and participate at all. Lack of chilling effects. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Entinel 3y ago

I prefer having the numbers as opposed to globally unique usernames. It destroys the incentive to steal high value usernames through scams and social engineering attacks. I don't get random friend request from people who aren't even in servers I am because they don't know the numbers to send a request. It also gave Discord a reason to sell Nitro because for a fee you could just change the numbers to 1234 or whatever. You will see an increase in scams as people aim to steal high value usernames to resell them as well as an increase in spam. We've seen this behavior on Twitter for years.

RadiozRadioz 3y ago
I disagree that discriminators fix the rare username problem. The way I see it, they just move the problem. Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"? If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros. I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.
nvarsj 3y ago
Yeah, this happens on literally every other popular platform without discriminators. It feels like a huge regression in usability. Discriminators are one of the things that make Discord cool. And it seems like the only reasonable solution that scales for hundreds of millions of users.

aftbit 3y ago

What a dumb idea. They should have picked one of the "half solutions" that the blog post lays out. Making everyone change their username is goofy.

Ekaros 3y ago

I don't like the idea of unique usernames. Too many issues with clashing ones. The Discord system allowed multiple users to get same one which was actually decent. Trade off really was finding each other in a server, but I don't think creating one is too high barrier.

mrguyorama 3y ago

They are prioritizing people who joined earlier, so you may have a chance to squat on a popular person's username!

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Calling Midjourney Bot!
wink 3y ago
I understood it more like "if wink#1234 from 2019 and wink#9876 from 2022 both want to change their name, the 2019 account can get it earlier" but maybe you are tight :(

rogerclark 3y ago

They're only doing this so they can launch a public platform like Twitter or Substack. Nobody actually wants this except the executive team at Discord.

revlolz 3y ago

I'm sick and tired of services degrading quality and "fixing" things that aren't broken.