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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 wa

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
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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?
- 0xC0ncord 3y ago
  The 4-digit number after your username is randomly assigned after you create an account or change your username. You can manually change this number to a custom one (if it's not already taken) if you pay for Discord Nitro.
saltminer 3y ago
I think it's a great solution to the problem of username theft (which, as shown by the OGUsers forum, can rise to the level of swatting and extortion). There's little incentive to try and hack Discord accounts for their usernames, which is extremely common on Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, etc. If you want to hinder the username black market, you can either: - Make globally unique names somewhat sharable (via the discriminator, which you can lengthen as needed) - Do away with global names entirely and just use a UID (which Discord already has but doesn't directly expose to users since it's a long number that is rather unwieldy to memorize and type out) Globally unique names with a single namespace are a terrible idea once you have more than a handful of users, and the discriminator effectively creates 10000 namespaces for each name. And because the pressure is so greatly reduced by having 10k namespaces, even if you can't be "JaneDoe", you can probably be "JaneD0e", "Jane Doe", etc. Even if you want a very basic/common name, you usually only have to make one or two variants before you find an available one on Discord, vs trying 20 times to come up with a fun Twitter handle before giving up and resorting to "janedoe9484389652857". It may be slightly more inconvenient to type "JaneDoe#8485" vs "JaneDoe", but realistically, you wouldn't get "JaneDoe", you'd get "JaneDoe9484389652857". Discord decided to make their username system objectively worse, and already it's causing the value for hacked Discord accounts that were registered early on to skyrocket since those will be able to pick their new usernames first. This change is also infuriating to my Jewish friends who loved that Discord was one of the few places that didn't force them to use Latin characters in usernames, only for that rug to have been pulled right out from under them. And I'm sure that the rest of the non-Latin world is feeling the same right about now.

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

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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?

0xC0ncord 3y ago
The 4-digit number after your username is randomly assigned after you create an account or change your username. You can manually change this number to a custom one (if it's not already taken) if you pay for Discord Nitro.

saltminer 3y ago

I think it's a great solution to the problem of username theft (which, as shown by the OGUsers forum, can rise to the level of swatting and extortion). There's little incentive to try and hack Discord accounts for their usernames, which is extremely common on Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, etc. If you want to hinder the username black market, you can either: - Make globally unique names somewhat sharable (via the discriminator, which you can lengthen as needed) - Do away with global names entirely and just use a UID (which Discord already has but doesn't directly expose to users since it's a long number that is rather unwieldy to memorize and type out) Globally unique names with a single namespace are a terrible idea once you have more than a handful of users, and the discriminator effectively creates 10000 namespaces for each name. And because the pressure is so greatly reduced by having 10k namespaces, even if you can't be "JaneDoe", you can probably be "JaneD0e", "Jane Doe", etc. Even if you want a very basic/common name, you usually only have to make one or two variants before you find an available one on Discord, vs trying 20 times to come up with a fun Twitter handle before giving up and resorting to "janedoe9484389652857". It may be slightly more inconvenient to type "JaneDoe#8485" vs "JaneDoe", but realistically, you wouldn't get "JaneDoe", you'd get "JaneDoe9484389652857". Discord decided to make their username system objectively worse, and already it's causing the value for hacked Discord accounts that were registered early on to skyrocket since those will be able to pick their new usernames first. This change is also infuriating to my Jewish friends who loved that Discord was one of the few places that didn't force them to use Latin characters in usernames, only for that rug to have been pulled right out from under them. And I'm sure that the rest of the non-Latin world is feeling the same right about now.