What actually happened here is that the parent commenter, instead of clicking "login", entered their username into a "enter a display name" prompt on the home p

What actually happened here is that the parent commenter, instead of clicking "login", entered their username into a "enter a display name" prompt on the home page, which registers a new account using the string you entered as a _display name_, and generates a random username. The parent poster then did not realize they had created a new account and, even when it told them their email address was registered to a different account, somehow didn't realize they should go click login instead. I think the easiest way for discord to make this a not-confusing experience for people who aren't tech savvy enough to click "login" to login, is to make it so the signup flow is a normal explicit "Enter email, enter display name, enter username" prompt, not a flow where they silently create a username if you _just_ enter a displayname. The reason this would help is because forcing the user to enter a username early on lets you display a "Would you like to login instead?" message if the username conflicts. Having the user enter a non-unique displayname, and silently creating a random unique username, means the signup flow no longer has the ability to say "Are you sure you don't want to login?" Of course, discord mostly targets relatively tech-savvy users, not the average hacker-news-user, so it probably isn't that big a deal for their main demographic.