Discord is changing their username system and ditching discriminators | Hacker News Reader

Discord is changing their username system and ditching discriminators

discord.com

48 pointsKomoD26 comments

It's a shame.

There are a lot of popular requests from users in the suggestion platform (bulk data management! Erase the data of users who leave servers ! Proper 2FA !!!!)

And Discord keeps implementing what no one asked for (they just designed a proprietary font that looks like any other font. And now they do that ???)

Also, I liked the current name. It allowed you to have the most generic name so that you're not tracked on the web (which is nice as a large part of the community is young LGBT adults) Now you will stand out if you do that.

Discord is among the leading companies when it comes to ignoring users, and feeling empowered because you own the platform. That's not really DevOps.

I began to move to Matrix because you had a bit more freedom on that, and a fsf-loving community. I guess I'll just be there even more often from now

I think the Discord team is underestimating how much people crave having the exact username they want. This change wants to emphasize "display names", but I don't think that will really matter to people (including myself). Discord's discriminator was clever, and I would rather see them expand it to six digits or hexadecimal to give more people access to the same names, rather than remove it altogether. The only real argument is that people don't know how to share them, but I don't think the confusion of copy and pasting a four digit number is worth removing the benefits. I hope they rethink this.

> The only real argument is that people don't know how to share them

Aside from copy-pasting, I was thinking QR codes would be good too. Although, Discord already uses QR codes to log users in on other devices. Maybe they were afraid it would confuse users and create new scams.

I still think between copy-pasting and QR codes, sharing complex strings (like emails, urls, usernames) is a solved problem.

This seems like a bad idea - These types of unique usernames attract the wrong kind of crowd[0] (some have used harrasment up to physical violence to get vanity usernames). I would prepare to see a lot more account hijacking and sketchy behaviour over Discord.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGUsers

Completely agree. I loved Discord's unique and wonderful discriminator system for usernames. I imagine their current system would have worked if they had:

1) Only allowed ASCII characters without any case sensitivity

2) Required users to pick their own discriminator when they create an account, rather than having a default one automatically assigned to you (that you can change later)

But I'm sure they looked at the difficulty of changing that and what it would mean to blow away everyone's current username and replace it with a mostly-identical looking system and decided that would be awful.

> 2) Required users to pick their own discriminator when they create an account, rather than having a default one automatically assigned to you (that you can change later)

Well... you can if you pay them money

I feel like you're ignoring all of the downsides and problems with the username#discriminator system that are clearly laid out in the article.

* Your solution doesn't solve the problem that nearly half of users don't know their discriminator or even know what that is

* Busy usernames like Mike and Jane are still unavailable

* They're still difficult and cumbersome to share offline (although slightly improved)

It solves the awareness problem by making them choose it when they create their account. If you need more, you can have a fun little animation that presents the finalized username + discriminator after it's created. Or show them how to add Tom from Myspace.

I figured the "busy usernames" issue was a truly trivial problem solved by making the discriminator a 0 to 5-digit alphanumeric.

Because the discriminator would be chosen by the user, it would only be as cumbersome as sharing a normal username or email.

What I felt discord really needed was a way to send an invite link to be friends.

Unfortunately the existing discriminator system makes account impersonation incredibly easy on discord. You see a person on your server that looks like "Sean Hunter", they have the same profile pic etc but it's easy not to notice they are sean#3117 vs sean#3118 being the "real" Sean. There is a whole industry of people making bots etc to automatically detect and kick attempted impersonators precisely because this is such a problem.

True, but the new system will only improve it a tiny bit. According to this post In most of the UI it will use your display name (or presumably your server nickname) which will be allowed to match other users. You can still have matching profile pics. To tell people apparat in the new system you need to click their profile and look at the username field, which only helps if the real user has a simpler username than the impersonator.

Otherwise, like much like on Twitter, there is no good way for others to know which of @SeanHunter, @SeanHunterOfficial, @RealSeanHunter, is the real Sean Hunter and which ones are impersonators. The may all have identical display names, identical profile pictures, etc.

So those anti impersonation systems will still be just as needed.

The transition is exactly the time for impersonation

I hope they will protect some usernames that are shared by no other users (eg the name of artists)

Malicious users could register the Twitter handle of popular artists, to impersonate them or to request a fee to have it back :/

I hope they thought that out.

> We want to be particularly considerate of longtime Discord users who have had their usernames for quite awhile, so we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord.

So anyone who joined in the last ~3 years will have no chance of getting a short and memorable username?

Yet the username is what's actually required for all the same functions, such as adding a friend, etc...

I can't see the upside for newer users, especially if their native language doesn't use latin characters.

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

I definitely figured the punchline here would be completely killing the username. There's simply no need: drop searching for friends by username completely, make user identification on the backend just a UUID of some kind, and handle everything through opaque links, QR codes, and server DMs.

This new system is... questionable.

I suppose the best username system is the one that works for your use case, but I can't help but feel like the alphanumeric system isn't ideal for users of countries that don't primarily use the latin alphabet. I realize that the world has adapted to the demands imposed by the internet (for example Chinese users often employing strings of numbers as their username) but I wonder if something like NFKC unicode normalization would be a better solution for a global audience.

lowercase alphanumeric only is going to make a lot of users with things like é, あ, or д in their name sad.

timing is good for me, my nitro is running out in a few days so I can just go ahead and cancel over this while the frustration over the change is fresh in my mind.

TL;DR: Discord usernames are changing to become unique handles and remove four-digit discriminators.

Apparently unverified bots (including existing ones) will be only be allowed to have random usernames [1].

[1]: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1366775582...

They should be able to set their display name, right?

Yes they will still be able to do that

Why not use ICQ numbers instead?

I wonder why no social media platform uses seed phrases as usernames. It would be much easier to remember and communicate off-line.

What do you mean by "seed phrases"? Do you just mean "plain English words"? Lots of people do.

Fixed my sentence. I meant it as in, the internal username ID being derived the same way public keys are derived from seed phrases. Internally it would be a simple number, but it would correspond to a seed phrase composed of "plain English words" from a small dictionary selected such that words that are easy to mistake for others words are not included.

That sounds like a great way to get people to keep generating tons of unused accounts until they get the specific combination they want.