18 ms·

Discord’s username change is causing discord

212 points by thm 3y ago

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Why don't they just implement a display name system first and grandfather in existing IDs? If you're going to hide the ID most of the time anyway the legacy format doesn't have to be eliminated.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Because handles aren't unique right now and people might reasonably be more mad to have their official handle be automatically made to be myname#2394. Handles are the display name right now. You have a unique global user id across discord that's static and the 4 digit code to make your display name unique that can change when you change your handle.
moomoo11 3y ago
Three months from now: Discord raises 500 million dollars to make the next generation social media company. Also this is a terrible decision IMO. The discriminator allows people to have their own name of choice. If people aren’t accepting friend requests have they ever thought that maybe.. nor everyone responds to friend requests? I just checked my discord and I’ve got 82 friend requests. I don’t add anyone except people I actually want to.
- tomatotomato37 3y ago
  Three months from now: Discord raises 500 million dollars to make the next generation social media company. Wonder if that would be before or after a misguided attempt to purge NSFW content
  - prepend 3y ago
    Which is especially funny for discord as they are private servers. I don’t want discord checking what I’m saying in my own server with my own friends.
    - Fnoord 3y ago
      > Which is especially funny for discord as they are private servers. Not my definition of private. > I don’t want discord checking what I’m saying in my own server with my own friends. Then use E2E encryption.
      - Technetium 3y ago
        > Then use E2E encryption Great idea, except for the part that modifying the client is a bannable offense itself, and you can get banned as a spammer for using it too often. Nevertheless, it's possible: https://github.com/leogx9r/DiscordCrypt https://github.com/leogx9r/DiscordCrypt // https://github.com/An00nymushun/End-to-end-Discord-Encryption https://github.com/An00nymushun/End-to-end-Discord-Encryptio...
    - dceddia 3y ago
      It always seemed a little weird to me that Discord decided to call them “servers” and let people believe things like this (that it’s yours, that it’s truly private even from the company’s eyes) when it’s really more akin to an invite-only Facebook group. It’s hosted by them, so they can shut them down if they wanted, and I’d have very little trust that they can’t see the messages inside.
      - pram 3y ago
        They’re (were) called guilds, not servers, in the API fwiw
        Macha 3y ago
        I believe this is an artifact of the discord founders previous project, guildworks, which let ffxiv guilds text chat with players out of game as one feature later on its life
      - prepend 3y ago
        I understand about it’s their resources. What I mean is that it’s a private, closed group that’s invite only. They have no need to moderate content as if someone doesn’t like it, they leave. This is different from public networks where content spreads broadly and is seen broadly. I wouldn’t expect, nor want discord to know if my material is nsfw or not. If they imposed any restriction it would make me less likely to use them. I noticed through using bark, an app used to monitor and protect kids device usage, that discord doesn’t provide any api user access to content and the only way to see material is through their app.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I actually wondered at one point if Discord would adapt some kind of Twitter-like status updates after the whole Musk shitshow. It felt like they were in the best position to launch a new microblogging solution.
  - Macha 3y ago
    There was a few years ago where everyone was adding "stories" when unwanted, like Whatsapp etc. I'd hope not, but I wouldn't put it past them (after all they did "stages" to copy clubhouse and made it very prominent for a few months until it turned out clubhouse was all noise and no staying power)
- recursivecaveat 3y ago
  The whole friend request thing baffles me. The old system was quite good in this respect: if someone has display name bob, full username bob#1234, when you mistakenly enter bob in the friend request field you'll get an error. Now bob is a totally valid username, and you can't disambiguate. The new system seems much more prone to more serious mistakes and impersonation. I would rather 100X go "whoops, need to add the discriminator" than once accidentally send something to a stranger meant for a friend.
  - Operyl 3y ago
    The big problem was case sensitivity in my opinion. It should have been case insensitive with discriminators. The current system means bob#1234 is a different user from Bob#1234.
    - fafzv 3y ago
      It's even worse that if you try to add bob#1234 and he doesn't exist because it's Bob the error message you get doesn't remind you usernames are case sensitive.
  - cdash 3y ago
    None of this should be an issue anyway, no one has any trouble linking discord server invites. Add the ability to easily link your user profile. Or even better, friend invites. Discord already has single use invites for servers. I doubt this change has anything to do with friend invites, they want to start adding features of other social media networks instead of just being a chat platform.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  > The discriminator allows people to have their own name of choice. Indeed I always considered this a major bonus point for discord. Sigh.
- Macha 3y ago
  Discord's already VC funded, which has always made me a bit leery, but they seemed to have a profitable business model with nitro subs.
pierat 3y ago
Seems like a way to normalize social profiles to have a loose federation across multiple services. This could lead to pierat@coolsite.com@discord.com and use discord as a federated source of truth. Yeah it's painful, but it doesn't 'feel bad'.
- Entinel 3y ago
  No this definitely feels real bad.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Actually why not just go with emails. They are somewhat durable enough, globally unique. And easy to remember and find.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Yeah, just change everybody's visible username to their email overnight. It's also called mass doxxing.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      So force them to register one that is public. Infinitely better than the evil crap they are now doing.
david422 3y ago
Battle.net used to have unique usernames. People would just add numbers to their name to make them unique. Then for starcraft2 they added a 3 digit number - basically same system Discord uses - to differentiate usernames. But why? How is that any different than a unique username except it's now more restricting and confusing to boot. Just have unique usernames and/or a display name.
- Entinel 3y ago
  You can argue it is more confusing but it is by definition not more restricting. It gives everyone the chance to just use whatever name they want which is the opposite of how restricting unique usernames are. Also, you can already change your display name by server.
  - david422 3y ago
    > It gives everyone the chance to just use whatever name they want But it's not actually the user name they want since it is required to have a special number attached to it. Which is the part that makes it confusing, and also a restriction.
- heyheyhey 3y ago
  Funny thing with Starcraft 2 is since you can have duplicate user names, all the top players would ladder with a ||||||| user name to prevent the other player from knowing who they are and what they would do.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Even in SC1 you would have this, just with different combinations of 1, l, |, ¦ and I, which were not nearly as distinct in the font the game used.
  - htag 3y ago
    Some background info on this. * This type of account is called a "barcode" * SC2 is now free to play, so anyone can create a barcode account. The biggest barrier for top level players is needing to play ~10 hours to have a high enough rank to get interesting games. * For top 1000 players this allows them to play games without the opponent knowing their style before hand. * For top 100 players this allows them to experiment with different styles in public games without their tournament opponents knowing how they have been playing recently. * Professional SC2 is changing from having a couple of big tournaments every year to having frequent smaller tournaments. Previously the top 10 players might publicly play only a handful of events throughout the year so their opponents would have less information about their strategies and play styles. Now, the best players are being forced to play publicly multiple times a month or not be able to generate enough winnings to support themselves. This is making barcode play less attractive for top 100 players, as being secretive is less important than being consistent. * Along with this change, many professional players are shifting into content creation/streaming. Players like Hero Marine(Germany) and Harstem(Netherlands) are leading the way on being a professional level player and a content creator. Players like PiG(Australia) are leading the way on being pivoting a former professional career into a content creating business. * There's a surprising number of players with lifetime winnings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Serrel(Finland) and Maru(S. Korea) have crossed over one million. Dark(S. Korea) is going military service soon with over $990,000 in total winnings.
elliotpage 3y ago
I hope the headline writer got the rest of the day off after writing that banger
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> Users will need to wait for an in-app prompt for when it’s their turn to select a new username, which will eventually roll out to all users over the course of “several months.” The company will assign priority to users based on their Discord registration dates, so people who have had their name “for quite a while” will have a better chance to get a desired name. I have several friends who use Discord as their primary social outlet. The vague way this change is being rolled out is causing a lot of heartburn for them. It's strange to have a social platform force everyone to change their screen names. The vague way that they're rolling out the change over "several months" without any indication of timelines is making it worse. From a product point of view, it would ease the pain if they would have communicated each person's username selection date in the app. Instead, they gave vague advice to watch for some unspecified in-app notification to pop up at some time in the next few months. For people who are anxious about keeping their screen names, this is a recipe for anxiety.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Rule number one is you don’t change usernames, like you don’t change peoples email address. Username, email, address, phone, any PII is up to the user to change. Don’t f#ck with it.
  - prox 3y ago
    Absolutely. If there is even just one Discord employee reading this : dont ffing do this. This is some hallucination that things will be more in line with other social outlets. Ask yourself: does this add value to my service? I think the answer is a 100% no. Ask yourself: does this move hurt my brand? Guess what is happening right now. This is idiocy in action.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      So how do you suggest they address the recurring issues they laid out?
      - 3y ago
egypturnash 3y ago
I will be glad to see the random numbers go, they make me feel like I am a kid who has not yet learnt that "Susie" is already taken and is settling for "Susie74514" like 74513 Susies before her.
- moomoo11 3y ago
  Except you’d be shown as Susie. And for interactions you’d be susie#whatever
  - crb3 3y ago
    And (guessing here) you'd be SOL if there were already 9999 Susies registered when you tried to sign up. Me, I'm gonna treat it like a firstnick.lastnick format when it arrives at my account. I figure "crb3.cdp1802" is very unlikely to be taken before I get there, but, if I'm wrong, there're lots of other already-memorized device-numbers I can append.
- Macha 3y ago
  The numbers were nice for that because they'd get out of the way when not needed, unlike if they were embedded in your username. Sometimes you want to just be Susie around your friends, rather than having to think of a clever/unique variant. And I'm saying that as someone with a very early account who actually stands a very good chance under this system of just grabbing my moderately common first name as the screen name.
  - fouric 3y ago
    > Sometimes you want to just be Susie around your friend You can do that with the proposed system, because your display name can be anything you want and doesn't have to be unique.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      You still have a pick a unique username and they'll all see it. You can't just pick Susie and let the discriminator happen.
prepend 3y ago
I don’t trust that discord will prompt for handle changes fairly. They say that preference will be given based on registration date but don’t say that’s the only preference. It’s rolling out over months so it will be impossible to audit or test. My fear is that preference will be given and even though I’ve used discord for many years my handle will be taken by someone else. The lameness is that they are doing an unfair landgrab where people won’t know if their handle is safe or not for some unpredictable amount of time. My feeling though is that most people don’t care about their handle based on all the “blarghy1988111” handles that I see.
- 0x_rs 3y ago
  >They say that preference will be given based on registration date but don’t say that’s the only preference. From a later modification to the announcement not present originally[0], early access will be given to users that were uninterrupted Nitro subscribers before March 1st, too, which of course nobody could've predicted would result in this benefit, already an indication the migration was poorly thought out. 0. https://web.archive.org/web/20230504043331/https://discord.com/blog/usernames https://web.archive.org/web/20230504043331/https://discord.c...
  - prepend 3y ago
    Wow, that’s even worse as it means people paid to skip the line. It’s weird that they are only rewarding historical nitro users rather than letting people pay now. Nitro is a weird product offering as it really seems like no benefit to paying. But people do.
    - eximius 3y ago
      Disclaimer: I think this change is extremely dumb and alienating to their core users in a feeble attempt to fix a problem that doesn't exist. That said, you kind of identified why they're only rewarding historical nitro users. Because it is historical, the nitro users aren't paying to skip the line - they couldn't have, it was in the past before this was announced. Instead, they are saying "you were already paying for a feature involving the discriminator, which we're removing, so you are getting priority". Frankly, that is one of the very few things about this they are doing right.
cpeterso 3y ago
If the current usernames with four digit discriminator are unique, why do they need the new style usernames? Or at least grandfather existing usernames so those users don’t have to change?
0x_rs 3y ago
I think it's a really bad decision. I always thought very poorly of the platform, but the username system seemed effective enough at making many people share the same name without ugly xXx_user_xXx abominations, and it was also very distinctive compared to other similar websites, very hard to mistake it for a twitter handle for example. Asking hundreds of millions of users to change their username (which only one in ten thousand at worst will keep, ignoring the inevitable massive abuse incoming) is exceptionally lame. They acknowledge in the blog post users will just add numbers or find combinations with symbols that work, too. The only benefit seems being able to arbitrarily set your display name as anything you want, which makes up for ugly usernames, but that's all there is to it?
- epse 3y ago
  Am I missing something with regard to the abuse here? I don't see how this is worse for impersonation than the current famousPerson#8392 and famousPerson#8292 where nobody ever remembers those four digits?
  - saurik 3y ago
    That everyone knows it is easy and accepted to reuse names fixed the problem where people just assume that if you have the right name you are the right person.
Ekaros 3y ago
So if you register new account during this period, you might not end up with name you registered with? And if your name is stolen, you might be able to steal someone else's username. Which reminds me, anyone got list of Discord employees names? Surely those can be fair targets as well?
- tenryuu 3y ago
  a number of staff already have taken their applicable usernames. the api for username migrations already return correct errors for names being taken even if a user is unauthorised to change theirs yet
andromeda-brain 3y ago
As someone who very, very casually uses Discord, I’ve always found the naming system confusing. I don’t use it enough to care to memorize my code, and I’m dissuaded from using it because I know I’ll have to face the confusing process of finding my full name that they assigned to me (rather than the handle I use on every other network and is basically my second name). I groan when someone wants me to use Discord, and the naming system is definitely part of that. That said, I was still really surprised to get the pop-up that they’re moving to this new system, mostly because of the obvious friction they’re creating for all of their existing users. My intuition is that this is a move to attract users like me, at the risk of alienating some power users or the users who won’t be bothered to figure out the name change system. Can’t tell you whether it’ll work for them, but I can say that I’ll personally be slightly more likely to use the product.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I personally don't see the issue with current model. Then again I don't use Discord to directly chat with people. And if I wanted to do that, why wouldn't I just make a new server or invite them to one I have. And do that simply by sending a link. Actually, if adding other users is the issue, why not allow them to make custom links for that purpose. Something easy enough to remember if they do it all the time.
  - andromeda-brain 3y ago
    That’s fair, there were probably other workarounds for my use case. But there may also be other problems, different from mine, caused by the naming system (?). Playing whack-a-mole with all those problems, assuming there are more, may not have been worth it vs this major one-time friction. Just kinda theorizing at this point; I have no stake in this fight but find the decision really interesting
- jsnell 3y ago
  Why do you need to know the full id to use the app? It is not required for signing in, for joining a server, or for creating a server + creating an invite link.
unionpivo 3y ago
Problem with this is that for a lot of games and integrations, having the same name on server as you have in game is expected. This will screw that up, for a lot of people. Same is true for various YouTube/twitch channel communities. And then of course, some smaller companies use discords as a better TeamSpeak alternative. Right now you could just have one identity and change nick for each server. Now I'll probably end up having half a dozen different accounts, each with some servers. This is kind of stupid, and will kill some neat things. Oh well we knew it couldn't last and VC's will want their money back.
- eep_social 3y ago
  Discord currently makes it difficult to have multiple accounts by requiring a phone number and limiting to one account per phone. Doubt they’ll change that policy any time soon. Will be interesting to see if they pause or change course on this now that the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative (at least in my bubble).
  - imtringued 3y ago
    I have four discord accounts. There is a way to bypass the phone verification. You need a trustworthy/legitimate email address. Also, if you mess up they might start tracking you and flag you as suspicious which means they will start asking for phone numbers on any account you create.
    - eep_social 3y ago
      Ah right, I probably forgot to pay off the folks keeping my social credit score up to date and got caught out.
  - Macha 3y ago
    At one stage they were developing an account switcher feature, so it is at least semi-supported
- hamishwhc 3y ago
  This completely misses the part where Discord is keeping the server nicknames system and adding a display name (that will be your existing username), like Twitter’s username + display name system. You can absolutely keep having different names for different servers. I still think this change is dumb, but you concerns you’ve expressed aren’t going to be a problem.
zarriak 3y ago
The way I would solve all of this is make disappearing servers so you can just share a server link and add people in the interface that way. I have almost never added people externally most of it comes from in server interactions.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  And that already have a solution. Just allow user to generate invite link. Send it via email or SMS or whatever. Clearly someone at some point knew how to do that...
ryan29 3y ago
I just want the option of using my domain name as a verified handle everywhere. I’m so tired of having to participate in the gold rush to grab my handle for brand protection, especially on platforms I barely use.
shahidkarimi 3y ago
[flagged]
janitor61 3y ago
There's one thing about this I don't see brought up - if someone says "add me, I'm janitor#0832" people usually know they're talking about Discord since that format is ubiquitous, and that's a very valuable thing. They're destroying that and moving for something like "add me, @janitor0832" - which then needs to be qualified (Twitter? Instagram?). Bing tried so hard to become a verb and Discord is discarding something they already have that's similar
- ziml77 3y ago
  4 digit discriminants aren't unique to Discord. Battle.net also uses them.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I have a 5 digit battle.net discriminator number.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  What a great point! I've even seen people simply post 4 numbers before, and people get what they mean. This is truly an awful decision.
k12sosse 3y ago
We should all be assigned a GUID at birth and use that through all services, ever as the unique identifier, duh. Get banned? Banned for life. Call us after you're born again.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  >Call us after you're born again. In other news, churches see surging attendance!
- anticensor 3y ago
  Citizenship numbers already exist. Are you suggesting that we should log in to private online services using our citizenship numbers?
leach 3y ago
Is there any viable self hosted discord alternatives? Discord is setting itself up to basically have all user data on everyone and be able to track it. The 38% stake Tencent owns eventually has to reap benefits for the CCP. Looking to distance myself from the application in general.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat https://app.revolt.chat https://app.revolt.chat
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I and some discord friends use a matrix server as a backup + place for convos involving PII but we only really do text and images. Depending on your needs it might fit for you too.
  - bentcorner 3y ago
    I set up a matrix server with voice chat for myself and a friend but hosting the TURN server through NAT is tricky and (perhaps it was my stack) it didn't always connect (one of us would click the call button and the other person may or may not get a call notification, and clicking answer may or may not actually connect the call). I'm no expert so maybe there's something I did wrong. Text chat + images work quite well though.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Rent a VPS. They are a few bucks a month.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      TURN + NAT is always going to be a pain. If IPv6 isn't available to you or all of your friends, going for a VPS seems like the best choice to me. Just don't go for the extremely expensive server providers (i.e. Amazon) if you care about affordability. This will cost a few dollars per month but it makes hosting UDP services becomes a lot easier.
personjerry 3y ago
Here's the real issue as I see it, based on the CEO's statements. His reasoning that '“almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person' clearly alludes to some friending metric they want to improve. It's an easy "fix" and they're probably right, this change is highly likely to "move the needle" on this metric and other related metrics such as # of friends, first month retention, etc. as a result of better early user friending experience. But modern tech product development and its obsession with "moving the needle" avoids this question: What about the long term effects? I would ask, does making Discord more like traditional social media eat away at its "core culture", that essence that makes people loyal and likely to stay with it over months and years of time? While you can have a holdout group to "measure against",because of the network effect it doesn't always work out the way you intend it to - if your friends stop using Discord as much, you're likely to use it less as well. To me, it sounds like they have a) immense outside pressure and b) decreasing conviction in their original vision, which feels like the beginning of the end.
- Thorrez 3y ago
  Sure there might be long term effects of making Discord more like traditional social media. But there could also be long term effects of people saying "huh my friend didn't get my friend request, well forget this buggy site".
  - personjerry 3y ago
    Sure, that's exactly the retention metric I mentioned (or we can call it activation), but another way to look at it could be that the people who said "forget this site" may not have stuck around or converted, so in fact you could be retaining the users with high LTV and gatekeeping against low/negative LTV users
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      On a site aimed at people who pay a lot of money to solve puzzles and learn skills with persistence.
DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
This just seems so infuriatingly stupid. I don’t know what else to say. I hate what the Internet has become.
nikolay 3y ago
What an idiotic move! First, they went against widespread practice and made people feel comfortable about it, now they want to ruin it worse! Having unique usernames was the standard, they went against it so that people don't hate when their username gets stolen, now, they are going back to old standards pissing tons of people off who now complain they won't be able to get their usernames!
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Best they could do now is have every single username end in 4 digits. Simple to memorize still and entirely fair to make them all equally ugly.
mkl95 3y ago
They want to make it behave like Twitter, while what users expect is more like Facebook groups for gamers
- nvy 3y ago
  As an early-adopter of Discord, I think what users expect(ed?) is basically a modernized version of IRC+Teamspeak. The rest of the social media shlock was never part of their value add, at least from the POV of the circles I'm in.
  - ziml77 3y ago
    Your expectations of Discord match with mine. None of my friends or guildies use it as anything else.
jtlicardo 3y ago
This may be a silly question, but I'm not quite getting what all the fuss is about. Let's say your current username is abc#1234. When you get prompted to change your username, you will be able to change it to @abc#1234. You can still configure your server usernames to display only "abc". So what is the exact problem here?
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Everyone is not forced to do that. So if someone is faster they get @abc. The current system is one of the better ones in existence because it is equally unfair to everyone.
  - jtlicardo 3y ago
    Makes sense.
WA 3y ago
> He noted that over 40 percent of users don’t know their discriminator number, which leads to “almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person, largely due to mistyped numbers. These seem like two different problems. First, who knows their number in Fortnite, LoL, Battle.net or any other gaming service which use the same kind of naming scheme? Probably most don’t. And I don’t see why anyone needs to know this. Just copy paste the thing. Which brings me to second: maybe the UI around inviting friends and/or copy-pasting a username#number is not clear enough and this metric could be improved with better UI?
- Doddler 3y ago
  It does seem like they're mistaking two issues as one. Because you can't submit a friend request without knowing the descriminator I don't see how it would be involved in failed friend requests, I would put the blame for that squarely on case sensitivity. And not knowing your descriminator isn't really a problem, it's shown prominently on your UI if you need it, it's not as though the unique user names people come up with will not be similarly prone to forgetting when it has no use outside of friend requests.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I don't know a single one of my friend's phone numbers. I give my phone to them and they type it in. It has never been a problem. It's not just me, literally no human being has ever had a problem figuring out how to send their friend a SMS message. I have no idea what Discord is up to. They made a big decision in a weird meeting.
  - concerned_user 3y ago
    My guess is that they look at application analytics what features are used and how often and see that in 40% of cases the send friend request form is not being submitted and just closed.
- antifa 3y ago
  > maybe the UI around inviting friends and/or copy-pasting a username#number is not clear enough and this metric could be improved with better UI? Discord's server invite is already the superior UI around inviting friends. Just send server link. It's easy to add friends there. Friending people you weren't already planning on being in a server with is an anti-pattern.
Destiner 3y ago
I'm glad they are making the change. The current "discriminator" system is ugly and confusing. I always felt weird sharing my name along with some cryptic numbers. @username is much more straightforward and familiar.
jrockway 3y ago
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at this meeting. It feels like a bunch of people who don't use the product agreed on some on-paper-the-best choice, but one that will ultimately kill the company. To me, one of the most fun features of Discord is that I can have my username of choice, and pay extra to be #0001. That's so cool! If I'm just going to be some globally unique set of numbers or whatever, well that's just Signal, and they can't sell my conversation history to some future repressive government. There just isn't any advantage. To me, this is the "jumped the shark" moment. Discord has disappointed me for nearly a decade. I was one of the first users, and most of my social network I met through random Discord servers. I should be the biggest evangelist there is. But as part of their growth, they have fucked me over again and again and again. One time, I wanted to enable 2FA. They told my my phone number was ineligible for 2FA, because it was VoIP. It is not. But even if it was, I can't use Google Authenticator to have an extra login factor because of this? That's the dumbest product decision I've ever heard. I moderate several large servers; your reputation is destroyed if my account gets hacked. But because literally TWENTY YEARS ago my phone number was a Google Voice number, I can only use a password to log in? What the fuck does my Yubikey have to do with the Public Switched Telephone Network anyway? Crazy. It was at that moment that I began praying for the death of Discord every single day. (I also think they are greedy motherfuckers. I started paying for Discord as soon as you could do such a thing. They decided one day, that isn't enough money. I pay more for a fucking chat app than my IDE that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income, and it's not enough? HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The greed is unbelievable. Luckily, I can still pay $50 a year to keep my username, but apparently that is going away? What are these people on? How did the people that funded this company sign off on this shit? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard! But I say that, and it's not. Wait until you hear the shit that they send to their biggest partners. It blows my mind. Weird fucking company.) If I don't get my username when they do the great switch, I am gone. I hate this company, and most of my mental energy is dedicated to fantasizing about their untimely death. I gave this startup $50 every single year, because I believe in them, but they fuck me over again and again and again. "That's not enough jrockway, we've only gotten ONE BILLION dollar in funding, and we need your $30 real bad. Also, our phone number database is TWENTY YEARS out of date, so you can't use your Yubikey to sign in." Good riddance. I dream of the day the CEO is living out of a cardboard box and some 19-something tells them they didn't write good enough Ruby on the whiteboard to get a job as a junior engineer. Does that make me a piece of shit human being? Yes. That's how I really feel about your company. Sorry. I'll try to be a better person in the future. For the Discord employees that are reading this and feel bad, go look up my account. Have I ever joined a server that needs "hey he's not a spammer" verification? Nope. Have I ever abused the system in even the slightest way? Nope. Have I received thousands of spam messages that the simplest AI ever could detect? Yup. And have I paid my bill every single year since your company was founded? Yes I have. And this is how you treat me? Crazy. Good fucking luck, guys. Good luck.
rojcyk 3y ago
Reading the threads seems like I am the only one welcoming this change. The amount of scammers taking advantage of the way usernames worked before was getting out of hand. Especially since when you could paid to have a custom number. Lot of people could not differentiate between RandomJoe#4587 and RandomJoe#4597.
- jamesu 3y ago
  I don't think making the usernames randomjoe4587 and randomjoe4597 is going to be much of an improvement in this case. If anything, its harder to read.
- 12345hn6789 3y ago
  Stereotypical response to penalize the entire user base in order to combat spam. As if detecting spam bots by username will fix spam.
negative_zero 3y ago
And here I was just a few days ago thinking of finally paying for Discord. I'll be shelving that idea now.
footlose_3815 3y ago
Discord's UX team is nonexistent. Everything is features. I used to like the platform, but it's gotten too greedy with Nitro popups, and not letting you remove your payment options based on certain conditions. I had to get in contact with support who made me write a message for a bot to cancel my subscription. It was arduous, and the support team gave me false information about my eligibility to cancel before I was able to cancel. (They said I was not eligible and gave no details, I wrote back and was suddenly able to get my refund)
brianjking 3y ago
This is going to be a total mess.
Aeolun 3y ago
Wow, while I’m not worried about my handle, that is so dumb.
deeviant 3y ago
This is a Stupid Idea. Obvious things that will happen due to this: 1. High profile nicks get sniped and offered for ransom to the original owners. 2. Discord steps in on some high profile cases from #1 3. Everybody who lost a nick they cared about appeals to discord to intercede in in this behalf, citing #2. 4. Nearly ends up with a bitter taste in their mouth and no value at all will ever be generated from this change.
Technetium 3y ago
They're taking something that works, and screwing EVERYONE late to signup. The fact that I've had the same contact information for years, and it's about to be taken away, is infuriating beyond belief. I have 492 friends on Discord right now. I'm not going to know who ANYONE is as this changes. There's no 'note' of an old name, or transitional period. It's on ME to make a note for everyone and then individually go through my list to find who I want to message. There's not even a vague consideration for transition AT ALL here. This is a hasty bad decision made by old men, not by engineers, or even people that actually use the platform on a daily basis. How would you feel if you paid for Gmail for years, then suddenly they say you're going to be forced to change your email address. Or your phone number, the phone number that you've had for years. The way that everyone reaches you. Now you have to pick a new number at a random time based on when you signed up for the service. MAYBE you'll get lucky with a similar number, and you can get it to ALL the people that need to be able to contact you, but don't forget, they're forced to change their identity too! You get no choice in the matter. To hell with your social links, business cards, code with contact info, videos with contact info, and anyone who knows you by your username. Now I have to play the world's worst lottery to hopefully get a similar name, before someone else takes it. I'm beyond upset. I'm enraged and fully disgusted. This is the worst decision that's come from them since I started using the service in early 2016.
protocolture 3y ago
Mechwarrior Online went through a similar process, however they elected to do it all at once as part of a database migration. Was somewhat interesting to wake up one day and have my username I had used since beta replaced with a random one, with the offer to raise a support ticket to change it.
precompute 3y ago
Discord discovers legal liability with the amount of illegal sh*t going on on their platform and quickly decides to curb privacy and enforce strict metadata checking so they can pin the tail on the correct donkey. More news at 9.
dancemethis 3y ago
Hopefully it helps burn this thing down. Discord tries really hard to be the most anti-privacy of those proprietary platforms and gee, they are ranking high on that.
evanmoran 3y ago
Another issue with Discord naming is I picked my name for gaming voice chat many years ago and now it doesn’t make any sense for people at work or in developer groups. They clearly copied BattleNet at the time, and it was cool to be known by the name we wanted. So which name will people pick: a public real name like in Twitter or their gaming pseudonym? As for why, my guess is Discord just wants to add feeds/advertising ala FB/Instagram and the names are completely broken for that.

212 points by thm 3y ago

Why don't they just implement a display name system first and grandfather in existing IDs? If you're going to hide the ID most of the time anyway the legacy format doesn't have to be eliminated.

Spivak 3y ago
Because handles aren't unique right now and people might reasonably be more mad to have their official handle be automatically made to be myname#2394. Handles are the display name right now. You have a unique global user id across discord that's static and the 4 digit code to make your display name unique that can change when you change your handle.

moomoo11 3y ago

Three months from now: Discord raises 500 million dollars to make the next generation social media company. Also this is a terrible decision IMO. The discriminator allows people to have their own name of choice. If people aren’t accepting friend requests have they ever thought that maybe.. nor everyone responds to friend requests? I just checked my discord and I’ve got 82 friend requests. I don’t add anyone except people I actually want to.

tomatotomato37 3y ago
Three months from now: Discord raises 500 million dollars to make the next generation social media company. Wonder if that would be before or after a misguided attempt to purge NSFW content
- prepend 3y ago
  Which is especially funny for discord as they are private servers. I don’t want discord checking what I’m saying in my own server with my own friends.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    > Which is especially funny for discord as they are private servers. Not my definition of private. > I don’t want discord checking what I’m saying in my own server with my own friends. Then use E2E encryption.
    - Technetium 3y ago
      > Then use E2E encryption Great idea, except for the part that modifying the client is a bannable offense itself, and you can get banned as a spammer for using it too often. Nevertheless, it's possible: https://github.com/leogx9r/DiscordCrypt https://github.com/leogx9r/DiscordCrypt // https://github.com/An00nymushun/End-to-end-Discord-Encryption https://github.com/An00nymushun/End-to-end-Discord-Encryptio...
  - dceddia 3y ago
    It always seemed a little weird to me that Discord decided to call them “servers” and let people believe things like this (that it’s yours, that it’s truly private even from the company’s eyes) when it’s really more akin to an invite-only Facebook group. It’s hosted by them, so they can shut them down if they wanted, and I’d have very little trust that they can’t see the messages inside.
    - pram 3y ago
      They’re (were) called guilds, not servers, in the API fwiw
      - Macha 3y ago
        I believe this is an artifact of the discord founders previous project, guildworks, which let ffxiv guilds text chat with players out of game as one feature later on its life
    - prepend 3y ago
      I understand about it’s their resources. What I mean is that it’s a private, closed group that’s invite only. They have no need to moderate content as if someone doesn’t like it, they leave. This is different from public networks where content spreads broadly and is seen broadly. I wouldn’t expect, nor want discord to know if my material is nsfw or not. If they imposed any restriction it would make me less likely to use them. I noticed through using bark, an app used to monitor and protect kids device usage, that discord doesn’t provide any api user access to content and the only way to see material is through their app.
Hamuko 3y ago
I actually wondered at one point if Discord would adapt some kind of Twitter-like status updates after the whole Musk shitshow. It felt like they were in the best position to launch a new microblogging solution.
- Macha 3y ago
  There was a few years ago where everyone was adding "stories" when unwanted, like Whatsapp etc. I'd hope not, but I wouldn't put it past them (after all they did "stages" to copy clubhouse and made it very prominent for a few months until it turned out clubhouse was all noise and no staying power)
recursivecaveat 3y ago
The whole friend request thing baffles me. The old system was quite good in this respect: if someone has display name bob, full username bob#1234, when you mistakenly enter bob in the friend request field you'll get an error. Now bob is a totally valid username, and you can't disambiguate. The new system seems much more prone to more serious mistakes and impersonation. I would rather 100X go "whoops, need to add the discriminator" than once accidentally send something to a stranger meant for a friend.
- Operyl 3y ago
  The big problem was case sensitivity in my opinion. It should have been case insensitive with discriminators. The current system means bob#1234 is a different user from Bob#1234.
  - fafzv 3y ago
    It's even worse that if you try to add bob#1234 and he doesn't exist because it's Bob the error message you get doesn't remind you usernames are case sensitive.
- cdash 3y ago
  None of this should be an issue anyway, no one has any trouble linking discord server invites. Add the ability to easily link your user profile. Or even better, friend invites. Discord already has single use invites for servers. I doubt this change has anything to do with friend invites, they want to start adding features of other social media networks instead of just being a chat platform.
eqvinox 3y ago
> The discriminator allows people to have their own name of choice. Indeed I always considered this a major bonus point for discord. Sigh.
Macha 3y ago
Discord's already VC funded, which has always made me a bit leery, but they seemed to have a profitable business model with nitro subs.

pierat 3y ago

Seems like a way to normalize social profiles to have a loose federation across multiple services. This could lead to pierat@coolsite.com@discord.com and use discord as a federated source of truth. Yeah it's painful, but it doesn't 'feel bad'.

Entinel 3y ago
No this definitely feels real bad.
Ekaros 3y ago
Actually why not just go with emails. They are somewhat durable enough, globally unique. And easy to remember and find.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Yeah, just change everybody's visible username to their email overnight. It's also called mass doxxing.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    So force them to register one that is public. Infinitely better than the evil crap they are now doing.

david422 3y ago

Battle.net used to have unique usernames. People would just add numbers to their name to make them unique. Then for starcraft2 they added a 3 digit number - basically same system Discord uses - to differentiate usernames. But why? How is that any different than a unique username except it's now more restricting and confusing to boot. Just have unique usernames and/or a display name.

Entinel 3y ago
You can argue it is more confusing but it is by definition not more restricting. It gives everyone the chance to just use whatever name they want which is the opposite of how restricting unique usernames are. Also, you can already change your display name by server.
- david422 3y ago
  > It gives everyone the chance to just use whatever name they want But it's not actually the user name they want since it is required to have a special number attached to it. Which is the part that makes it confusing, and also a restriction.
heyheyhey 3y ago
Funny thing with Starcraft 2 is since you can have duplicate user names, all the top players would ladder with a ||||||| user name to prevent the other player from knowing who they are and what they would do.
- Macha 3y ago
  Even in SC1 you would have this, just with different combinations of 1, l, |, ¦ and I, which were not nearly as distinct in the font the game used.
- htag 3y ago
  Some background info on this. * This type of account is called a "barcode" * SC2 is now free to play, so anyone can create a barcode account. The biggest barrier for top level players is needing to play ~10 hours to have a high enough rank to get interesting games. * For top 1000 players this allows them to play games without the opponent knowing their style before hand. * For top 100 players this allows them to experiment with different styles in public games without their tournament opponents knowing how they have been playing recently. * Professional SC2 is changing from having a couple of big tournaments every year to having frequent smaller tournaments. Previously the top 10 players might publicly play only a handful of events throughout the year so their opponents would have less information about their strategies and play styles. Now, the best players are being forced to play publicly multiple times a month or not be able to generate enough winnings to support themselves. This is making barcode play less attractive for top 100 players, as being secretive is less important than being consistent. * Along with this change, many professional players are shifting into content creation/streaming. Players like Hero Marine(Germany) and Harstem(Netherlands) are leading the way on being a professional level player and a content creator. Players like PiG(Australia) are leading the way on being pivoting a former professional career into a content creating business. * There's a surprising number of players with lifetime winnings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Serrel(Finland) and Maru(S. Korea) have crossed over one million. Dark(S. Korea) is going military service soon with over $990,000 in total winnings.

elliotpage 3y ago

I hope the headline writer got the rest of the day off after writing that banger

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> Users will need to wait for an in-app prompt for when it’s their turn to select a new username, which will eventually roll out to all users over the course of “several months.” The company will assign priority to users based on their Discord registration dates, so people who have had their name “for quite a while” will have a better chance to get a desired name. I have several friends who use Discord as their primary social outlet. The vague way this change is being rolled out is causing a lot of heartburn for them. It's strange to have a social platform force everyone to change their screen names. The vague way that they're rolling out the change over "several months" without any indication of timelines is making it worse. From a product point of view, it would ease the pain if they would have communicated each person's username selection date in the app. Instead, they gave vague advice to watch for some unspecified in-app notification to pop up at some time in the next few months. For people who are anxious about keeping their screen names, this is a recipe for anxiety.

gabereiser 3y ago
Rule number one is you don’t change usernames, like you don’t change peoples email address. Username, email, address, phone, any PII is up to the user to change. Don’t f#ck with it.
- prox 3y ago
  Absolutely. If there is even just one Discord employee reading this : dont ffing do this. This is some hallucination that things will be more in line with other social outlets. Ask yourself: does this add value to my service? I think the answer is a 100% no. Ask yourself: does this move hurt my brand? Guess what is happening right now. This is idiocy in action.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    So how do you suggest they address the recurring issues they laid out?
    - 3y ago

egypturnash 3y ago

I will be glad to see the random numbers go, they make me feel like I am a kid who has not yet learnt that "Susie" is already taken and is settling for "Susie74514" like 74513 Susies before her.

moomoo11 3y ago
Except you’d be shown as Susie. And for interactions you’d be susie#whatever
- crb3 3y ago
  And (guessing here) you'd be SOL if there were already 9999 Susies registered when you tried to sign up. Me, I'm gonna treat it like a firstnick.lastnick format when it arrives at my account. I figure "crb3.cdp1802" is very unlikely to be taken before I get there, but, if I'm wrong, there're lots of other already-memorized device-numbers I can append.
Macha 3y ago
The numbers were nice for that because they'd get out of the way when not needed, unlike if they were embedded in your username. Sometimes you want to just be Susie around your friends, rather than having to think of a clever/unique variant. And I'm saying that as someone with a very early account who actually stands a very good chance under this system of just grabbing my moderately common first name as the screen name.
- fouric 3y ago
  > Sometimes you want to just be Susie around your friend You can do that with the proposed system, because your display name can be anything you want and doesn't have to be unique.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    You still have a pick a unique username and they'll all see it. You can't just pick Susie and let the discriminator happen.

prepend 3y ago

I don’t trust that discord will prompt for handle changes fairly. They say that preference will be given based on registration date but don’t say that’s the only preference. It’s rolling out over months so it will be impossible to audit or test. My fear is that preference will be given and even though I’ve used discord for many years my handle will be taken by someone else. The lameness is that they are doing an unfair landgrab where people won’t know if their handle is safe or not for some unpredictable amount of time. My feeling though is that most people don’t care about their handle based on all the “blarghy1988111” handles that I see.

0x_rs 3y ago
>They say that preference will be given based on registration date but don’t say that’s the only preference. From a later modification to the announcement not present originally[0], early access will be given to users that were uninterrupted Nitro subscribers before March 1st, too, which of course nobody could've predicted would result in this benefit, already an indication the migration was poorly thought out. 0. https://web.archive.org/web/20230504043331/https://discord.com/blog/usernames https://web.archive.org/web/20230504043331/https://discord.c...
- prepend 3y ago
  Wow, that’s even worse as it means people paid to skip the line. It’s weird that they are only rewarding historical nitro users rather than letting people pay now. Nitro is a weird product offering as it really seems like no benefit to paying. But people do.
  - eximius 3y ago
    Disclaimer: I think this change is extremely dumb and alienating to their core users in a feeble attempt to fix a problem that doesn't exist. That said, you kind of identified why they're only rewarding historical nitro users. Because it is historical, the nitro users aren't paying to skip the line - they couldn't have, it was in the past before this was announced. Instead, they are saying "you were already paying for a feature involving the discriminator, which we're removing, so you are getting priority". Frankly, that is one of the very few things about this they are doing right.

cpeterso 3y ago

If the current usernames with four digit discriminator are unique, why do they need the new style usernames? Or at least grandfather existing usernames so those users don’t have to change?

0x_rs 3y ago

I think it's a really bad decision. I always thought very poorly of the platform, but the username system seemed effective enough at making many people share the same name without ugly xXx_user_xXx abominations, and it was also very distinctive compared to other similar websites, very hard to mistake it for a twitter handle for example. Asking hundreds of millions of users to change their username (which only one in ten thousand at worst will keep, ignoring the inevitable massive abuse incoming) is exceptionally lame. They acknowledge in the blog post users will just add numbers or find combinations with symbols that work, too. The only benefit seems being able to arbitrarily set your display name as anything you want, which makes up for ugly usernames, but that's all there is to it?

epse 3y ago
Am I missing something with regard to the abuse here? I don't see how this is worse for impersonation than the current famousPerson#8392 and famousPerson#8292 where nobody ever remembers those four digits?
- saurik 3y ago
  That everyone knows it is easy and accepted to reuse names fixed the problem where people just assume that if you have the right name you are the right person.

Ekaros 3y ago

So if you register new account during this period, you might not end up with name you registered with? And if your name is stolen, you might be able to steal someone else's username. Which reminds me, anyone got list of Discord employees names? Surely those can be fair targets as well?

tenryuu 3y ago
a number of staff already have taken their applicable usernames. the api for username migrations already return correct errors for names being taken even if a user is unauthorised to change theirs yet

andromeda-brain 3y ago

As someone who very, very casually uses Discord, I’ve always found the naming system confusing. I don’t use it enough to care to memorize my code, and I’m dissuaded from using it because I know I’ll have to face the confusing process of finding my full name that they assigned to me (rather than the handle I use on every other network and is basically my second name). I groan when someone wants me to use Discord, and the naming system is definitely part of that. That said, I was still really surprised to get the pop-up that they’re moving to this new system, mostly because of the obvious friction they’re creating for all of their existing users. My intuition is that this is a move to attract users like me, at the risk of alienating some power users or the users who won’t be bothered to figure out the name change system. Can’t tell you whether it’ll work for them, but I can say that I’ll personally be slightly more likely to use the product.

Ekaros 3y ago
I personally don't see the issue with current model. Then again I don't use Discord to directly chat with people. And if I wanted to do that, why wouldn't I just make a new server or invite them to one I have. And do that simply by sending a link. Actually, if adding other users is the issue, why not allow them to make custom links for that purpose. Something easy enough to remember if they do it all the time.
- andromeda-brain 3y ago
  That’s fair, there were probably other workarounds for my use case. But there may also be other problems, different from mine, caused by the naming system (?). Playing whack-a-mole with all those problems, assuming there are more, may not have been worth it vs this major one-time friction. Just kinda theorizing at this point; I have no stake in this fight but find the decision really interesting
jsnell 3y ago
Why do you need to know the full id to use the app? It is not required for signing in, for joining a server, or for creating a server + creating an invite link.

unionpivo 3y ago

Problem with this is that for a lot of games and integrations, having the same name on server as you have in game is expected. This will screw that up, for a lot of people. Same is true for various YouTube/twitch channel communities. And then of course, some smaller companies use discords as a better TeamSpeak alternative. Right now you could just have one identity and change nick for each server. Now I'll probably end up having half a dozen different accounts, each with some servers. This is kind of stupid, and will kill some neat things. Oh well we knew it couldn't last and VC's will want their money back.

eep_social 3y ago
Discord currently makes it difficult to have multiple accounts by requiring a phone number and limiting to one account per phone. Doubt they’ll change that policy any time soon. Will be interesting to see if they pause or change course on this now that the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative (at least in my bubble).
- imtringued 3y ago
  I have four discord accounts. There is a way to bypass the phone verification. You need a trustworthy/legitimate email address. Also, if you mess up they might start tracking you and flag you as suspicious which means they will start asking for phone numbers on any account you create.
  - eep_social 3y ago
    Ah right, I probably forgot to pay off the folks keeping my social credit score up to date and got caught out.
- Macha 3y ago
  At one stage they were developing an account switcher feature, so it is at least semi-supported
hamishwhc 3y ago
This completely misses the part where Discord is keeping the server nicknames system and adding a display name (that will be your existing username), like Twitter’s username + display name system. You can absolutely keep having different names for different servers. I still think this change is dumb, but you concerns you’ve expressed aren’t going to be a problem.

zarriak 3y ago

The way I would solve all of this is make disappearing servers so you can just share a server link and add people in the interface that way. I have almost never added people externally most of it comes from in server interactions.

Ekaros 3y ago
And that already have a solution. Just allow user to generate invite link. Send it via email or SMS or whatever. Clearly someone at some point knew how to do that...

ryan29 3y ago

I just want the option of using my domain name as a verified handle everywhere. I’m so tired of having to participate in the gold rush to grab my handle for brand protection, especially on platforms I barely use.

shahidkarimi 3y ago

[flagged]

janitor61 3y ago

There's one thing about this I don't see brought up - if someone says "add me, I'm janitor#0832" people usually know they're talking about Discord since that format is ubiquitous, and that's a very valuable thing. They're destroying that and moving for something like "add me, @janitor0832" - which then needs to be qualified (Twitter? Instagram?). Bing tried so hard to become a verb and Discord is discarding something they already have that's similar

ziml77 3y ago
4 digit discriminants aren't unique to Discord. Battle.net also uses them.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I have a 5 digit battle.net discriminator number.
xcdzvyn 3y ago
What a great point! I've even seen people simply post 4 numbers before, and people get what they mean. This is truly an awful decision.

k12sosse 3y ago

We should all be assigned a GUID at birth and use that through all services, ever as the unique identifier, duh. Get banned? Banned for life. Call us after you're born again.

rjbwork 3y ago
>Call us after you're born again. In other news, churches see surging attendance!
anticensor 3y ago
Citizenship numbers already exist. Are you suggesting that we should log in to private online services using our citizenship numbers?

leach 3y ago

Is there any viable self hosted discord alternatives? Discord is setting itself up to basically have all user data on everyone and be able to track it. The 38% stake Tencent owns eventually has to reap benefits for the CCP. Looking to distance myself from the application in general.

bongobingo1 3y ago
https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat https://app.revolt.chat https://app.revolt.chat
dotnet00 3y ago
I and some discord friends use a matrix server as a backup + place for convos involving PII but we only really do text and images. Depending on your needs it might fit for you too.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  I set up a matrix server with voice chat for myself and a friend but hosting the TURN server through NAT is tricky and (perhaps it was my stack) it didn't always connect (one of us would click the call button and the other person may or may not get a call notification, and clicking answer may or may not actually connect the call). I'm no expert so maybe there's something I did wrong. Text chat + images work quite well though.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Rent a VPS. They are a few bucks a month.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    TURN + NAT is always going to be a pain. If IPv6 isn't available to you or all of your friends, going for a VPS seems like the best choice to me. Just don't go for the extremely expensive server providers (i.e. Amazon) if you care about affordability. This will cost a few dollars per month but it makes hosting UDP services becomes a lot easier.

personjerry 3y ago

Here's the real issue as I see it, based on the CEO's statements. His reasoning that '“almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person' clearly alludes to some friending metric they want to improve. It's an easy "fix" and they're probably right, this change is highly likely to "move the needle" on this metric and other related metrics such as # of friends, first month retention, etc. as a result of better early user friending experience. But modern tech product development and its obsession with "moving the needle" avoids this question: What about the long term effects? I would ask, does making Discord more like traditional social media eat away at its "core culture", that essence that makes people loyal and likely to stay with it over months and years of time? While you can have a holdout group to "measure against",because of the network effect it doesn't always work out the way you intend it to - if your friends stop using Discord as much, you're likely to use it less as well. To me, it sounds like they have a) immense outside pressure and b) decreasing conviction in their original vision, which feels like the beginning of the end.

Thorrez 3y ago
Sure there might be long term effects of making Discord more like traditional social media. But there could also be long term effects of people saying "huh my friend didn't get my friend request, well forget this buggy site".
- personjerry 3y ago
  Sure, that's exactly the retention metric I mentioned (or we can call it activation), but another way to look at it could be that the people who said "forget this site" may not have stuck around or converted, so in fact you could be retaining the users with high LTV and gatekeeping against low/negative LTV users
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    On a site aimed at people who pay a lot of money to solve puzzles and learn skills with persistence.

DoneWithAllThat 3y ago

This just seems so infuriatingly stupid. I don’t know what else to say. I hate what the Internet has become.

nikolay 3y ago

What an idiotic move! First, they went against widespread practice and made people feel comfortable about it, now they want to ruin it worse! Having unique usernames was the standard, they went against it so that people don't hate when their username gets stolen, now, they are going back to old standards pissing tons of people off who now complain they won't be able to get their usernames!

Ekaros 3y ago
Best they could do now is have every single username end in 4 digits. Simple to memorize still and entirely fair to make them all equally ugly.

mkl95 3y ago

They want to make it behave like Twitter, while what users expect is more like Facebook groups for gamers

nvy 3y ago
As an early-adopter of Discord, I think what users expect(ed?) is basically a modernized version of IRC+Teamspeak. The rest of the social media shlock was never part of their value add, at least from the POV of the circles I'm in.
- ziml77 3y ago
  Your expectations of Discord match with mine. None of my friends or guildies use it as anything else.

jtlicardo 3y ago

This may be a silly question, but I'm not quite getting what all the fuss is about. Let's say your current username is abc#1234. When you get prompted to change your username, you will be able to change it to @abc#1234. You can still configure your server usernames to display only "abc". So what is the exact problem here?

Ekaros 3y ago
Everyone is not forced to do that. So if someone is faster they get @abc. The current system is one of the better ones in existence because it is equally unfair to everyone.
- jtlicardo 3y ago
  Makes sense.

WA 3y ago

> He noted that over 40 percent of users don’t know their discriminator number, which leads to “almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person, largely due to mistyped numbers. These seem like two different problems. First, who knows their number in Fortnite, LoL, Battle.net or any other gaming service which use the same kind of naming scheme? Probably most don’t. And I don’t see why anyone needs to know this. Just copy paste the thing. Which brings me to second: maybe the UI around inviting friends and/or copy-pasting a username#number is not clear enough and this metric could be improved with better UI?

Doddler 3y ago
It does seem like they're mistaking two issues as one. Because you can't submit a friend request without knowing the descriminator I don't see how it would be involved in failed friend requests, I would put the blame for that squarely on case sensitivity. And not knowing your descriminator isn't really a problem, it's shown prominently on your UI if you need it, it's not as though the unique user names people come up with will not be similarly prone to forgetting when it has no use outside of friend requests.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I don't know a single one of my friend's phone numbers. I give my phone to them and they type it in. It has never been a problem. It's not just me, literally no human being has ever had a problem figuring out how to send their friend a SMS message. I have no idea what Discord is up to. They made a big decision in a weird meeting.
- concerned_user 3y ago
  My guess is that they look at application analytics what features are used and how often and see that in 40% of cases the send friend request form is not being submitted and just closed.
antifa 3y ago
> maybe the UI around inviting friends and/or copy-pasting a username#number is not clear enough and this metric could be improved with better UI? Discord's server invite is already the superior UI around inviting friends. Just send server link. It's easy to add friends there. Friending people you weren't already planning on being in a server with is an anti-pattern.

Destiner 3y ago

I'm glad they are making the change. The current "discriminator" system is ugly and confusing. I always felt weird sharing my name along with some cryptic numbers. @username is much more straightforward and familiar.

jrockway 3y ago

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at this meeting. It feels like a bunch of people who don't use the product agreed on some on-paper-the-best choice, but one that will ultimately kill the company. To me, one of the most fun features of Discord is that I can have my username of choice, and pay extra to be #0001. That's so cool! If I'm just going to be some globally unique set of numbers or whatever, well that's just Signal, and they can't sell my conversation history to some future repressive government. There just isn't any advantage. To me, this is the "jumped the shark" moment. Discord has disappointed me for nearly a decade. I was one of the first users, and most of my social network I met through random Discord servers. I should be the biggest evangelist there is. But as part of their growth, they have fucked me over again and again and again. One time, I wanted to enable 2FA. They told my my phone number was ineligible for 2FA, because it was VoIP. It is not. But even if it was, I can't use Google Authenticator to have an extra login factor because of this? That's the dumbest product decision I've ever heard. I moderate several large servers; your reputation is destroyed if my account gets hacked. But because literally TWENTY YEARS ago my phone number was a Google Voice number, I can only use a password to log in? What the fuck does my Yubikey have to do with the Public Switched Telephone Network anyway? Crazy. It was at that moment that I began praying for the death of Discord every single day. (I also think they are greedy motherfuckers. I started paying for Discord as soon as you could do such a thing. They decided one day, that isn't enough money. I pay more for a fucking chat app than my IDE that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income, and it's not enough? HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The greed is unbelievable. Luckily, I can still pay $50 a year to keep my username, but apparently that is going away? What are these people on? How did the people that funded this company sign off on this shit? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard! But I say that, and it's not. Wait until you hear the shit that they send to their biggest partners. It blows my mind. Weird fucking company.) If I don't get my username when they do the great switch, I am gone. I hate this company, and most of my mental energy is dedicated to fantasizing about their untimely death. I gave this startup $50 every single year, because I believe in them, but they fuck me over again and again and again. "That's not enough jrockway, we've only gotten ONE BILLION dollar in funding, and we need your $30 real bad. Also, our phone number database is TWENTY YEARS out of date, so you can't use your Yubikey to sign in." Good riddance. I dream of the day the CEO is living out of a cardboard box and some 19-something tells them they didn't write good enough Ruby on the whiteboard to get a job as a junior engineer. Does that make me a piece of shit human being? Yes. That's how I really feel about your company. Sorry. I'll try to be a better person in the future. For the Discord employees that are reading this and feel bad, go look up my account. Have I ever joined a server that needs "hey he's not a spammer" verification? Nope. Have I ever abused the system in even the slightest way? Nope. Have I received thousands of spam messages that the simplest AI ever could detect? Yup. And have I paid my bill every single year since your company was founded? Yes I have. And this is how you treat me? Crazy. Good fucking luck, guys. Good luck.

rojcyk 3y ago

Reading the threads seems like I am the only one welcoming this change. The amount of scammers taking advantage of the way usernames worked before was getting out of hand. Especially since when you could paid to have a custom number. Lot of people could not differentiate between RandomJoe#4587 and RandomJoe#4597.

jamesu 3y ago
I don't think making the usernames randomjoe4587 and randomjoe4597 is going to be much of an improvement in this case. If anything, its harder to read.
12345hn6789 3y ago
Stereotypical response to penalize the entire user base in order to combat spam. As if detecting spam bots by username will fix spam.

negative_zero 3y ago

And here I was just a few days ago thinking of finally paying for Discord. I'll be shelving that idea now.

footlose_3815 3y ago

Discord's UX team is nonexistent. Everything is features. I used to like the platform, but it's gotten too greedy with Nitro popups, and not letting you remove your payment options based on certain conditions. I had to get in contact with support who made me write a message for a bot to cancel my subscription. It was arduous, and the support team gave me false information about my eligibility to cancel before I was able to cancel. (They said I was not eligible and gave no details, I wrote back and was suddenly able to get my refund)

brianjking 3y ago

This is going to be a total mess.

Aeolun 3y ago

Wow, while I’m not worried about my handle, that is so dumb.

deeviant 3y ago

This is a Stupid Idea. Obvious things that will happen due to this: 1. High profile nicks get sniped and offered for ransom to the original owners. 2. Discord steps in on some high profile cases from #1 3. Everybody who lost a nick they cared about appeals to discord to intercede in in this behalf, citing #2. 4. Nearly ends up with a bitter taste in their mouth and no value at all will ever be generated from this change.

Technetium 3y ago

They're taking something that works, and screwing EVERYONE late to signup. The fact that I've had the same contact information for years, and it's about to be taken away, is infuriating beyond belief. I have 492 friends on Discord right now. I'm not going to know who ANYONE is as this changes. There's no 'note' of an old name, or transitional period. It's on ME to make a note for everyone and then individually go through my list to find who I want to message. There's not even a vague consideration for transition AT ALL here. This is a hasty bad decision made by old men, not by engineers, or even people that actually use the platform on a daily basis. How would you feel if you paid for Gmail for years, then suddenly they say you're going to be forced to change your email address. Or your phone number, the phone number that you've had for years. The way that everyone reaches you. Now you have to pick a new number at a random time based on when you signed up for the service. MAYBE you'll get lucky with a similar number, and you can get it to ALL the people that need to be able to contact you, but don't forget, they're forced to change their identity too! You get no choice in the matter. To hell with your social links, business cards, code with contact info, videos with contact info, and anyone who knows you by your username. Now I have to play the world's worst lottery to hopefully get a similar name, before someone else takes it. I'm beyond upset. I'm enraged and fully disgusted. This is the worst decision that's come from them since I started using the service in early 2016.

protocolture 3y ago

Mechwarrior Online went through a similar process, however they elected to do it all at once as part of a database migration. Was somewhat interesting to wake up one day and have my username I had used since beta replaced with a random one, with the offer to raise a support ticket to change it.

precompute 3y ago

Discord discovers legal liability with the amount of illegal sh*t going on on their platform and quickly decides to curb privacy and enforce strict metadata checking so they can pin the tail on the correct donkey. More news at 9.

dancemethis 3y ago

Hopefully it helps burn this thing down. Discord tries really hard to be the most anti-privacy of those proprietary platforms and gee, they are ranking high on that.

evanmoran 3y ago

Another issue with Discord naming is I picked my name for gaming voice chat many years ago and now it doesn’t make any sense for people at work or in developer groups. They clearly copied BattleNet at the time, and it was cool to be known by the name we wanted. So which name will people pick: a public real name like in Twitter or their gaming pseudonym? As for why, my guess is Discord just wants to add feeds/advertising ala FB/Instagram and the names are completely broken for that.