Discord plans to make everyone change their username
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It feels like a huge regression in usability. Discriminators are one of the things that make Discord cool. And it seems like the only reasonable solution that scales for hundreds of millions of users.
Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"?
If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros.
I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.
I’m theshawwn on Twitter. shawwn on GitHub. sillysaurusx on HN. I was once on discord for years, till I left — and when I left, I felt no loss. There was nothing attaching me to discord. If I abandoned any of those others, it would feel awful; my entire ML history is codified in twitter, and anyone can go read it. Whereas I can’t even remember what my discord username was.
You might be thinking that you’d lose the servers. If you leave discord, you have to rejoin everywhere if you make a new account. But rejoining is easy; it’s the point of discord to join servers. So that’s not really “a thing” the way that my HN comments are a thing, or my GitHub repos, or tweets.
This change is the first step in letting users feel attached to discord. If they play their cards right, you’ll start to feel like “this is me” the way that those other services feel like a part of you. Being able to link someone to discord.gg/shawwn (or whatever) is no small thing — it’s a reason to care about staying on discord at all.
I don’t know if this change will matter at this point, but it’s nice to see them still pivoting and trying to fix their fundamentals. Making big changes to community software is such a tricky thing (how many times have we seen a mass exodus? I can think of at least 7, with digg being the limit case of what not to do) so I respect that they’re willing to take a risk at this point in their growth stage.
Not everyone wants this. I'm in Discords with friends, I'm in game hacking Discords, I'm in Overemployed Discords, etc. I don't want everyone knowing what Discords I'm active in.
If any person could see everything I’m doing in B, C, and D community automatically (or even what communities I’m apart of to then track down everything I’ve ever said), I would be way less inclined to be myself and participate at all.
Lack of chilling effects. It’s a feature, not a bug.
I'd like pseudotrue pseudonymity please.
Then comes account switching, which you manually have to do as it's not natively supported by any of the clients. This is especially a pain.
What I'm looking for as a user is a way to optionally obscure what my base profile name is, since the server name is what people interact with anyways, and to not list mutual servers by default in the profile (or at least, be able to turn it off).
It's not even really for a nefarious purpose, I just like having nice and clean compartments for different areas of interaction. It's predictable and keeps the world a lot smaller in a nice an structured kind of manner.
I feel you're overthinking the problem. Discord encourages multiple accounts, make them and separate your identities. Bonus: you don't have to fiddle around with keeping servers in certain folders to keep track of which identity you're using where.
I'm not sure how many people have multiple phone numbers...
I had to use some shady weird sms service to verify my other account, I tried legit voip services but those were all blocked.
I maintain a few distinct Discord accounts for this reason.
I think this is probably one of the worst features (alongside downvotes / upvotes) about HN, Reddit and similar sites. If you are anonymous your opinion can be taken for what it is without any bias and ad hominem due to your previous comments. We can argue in one thread about something, and agree in another without even recognizing each other. It makes one focus on the content of the post and not on the personality of the author.
Anonymity tends to lead to the most vile comments being made behind green alt accounts. This isn't 4chan, we don't want that here.
And publicity leads to bottling up comments that go against the grain or might provoke controversy leading to groupthink. We don't want that here either.
That's much easier to moderate than anonymous vile comments. It may not be exactly a civil discussion but you're still learning something about these people and their views.
I'm happy that there are websites with different cultures, so people can choose the best outlet to express their view instead of mudding the water here and turning it to flame wars or whatever.
I've seen plenty of well thought out, thought provoking comments that criticize or contradict someone's point of view. No one has any reason to bottle that up. However, if your comment history is packed with midwit rants about "the woke" or "cultural marxism" or flagged racist tirades then it's in everyone's interest to have some warning before interacting with you.
I've seen the opposite, where attaching your personal details to social media and creating a threat of real 'consequences' have lead to an extremely aggressive attitude of conformity that makes it impossible to actually discuss anything even slightly outside of group consensus. Which is something I have thankfully not encountered oh HN.
Healthy, well adjusted adults will care, because healthy well adjusted adults are possessed of empathy and the awareness of living within the norms and boundaries of social structures, and that the people they interact with online are actual people and not simply text in a box.
Having no internal filter and not caring about the effect you have on others is a sign of immaturity and sociopathy. It's the sort of internet fuckwad behavior most of us grow out of by the time we're no longer teenagers.
>Which is something I have thankfully not encountered oh HN.
And HN has exactly that kind of system, so you admit it works here. People are capable of discussing things outside of group consensus as well as respecting one another and being civil, and the fact that they do at all suggests the effect of downvoting, flagging and disengaging works to discourage bad behavior while not suppressing actual thought provoking or interesting discussion.
Please explain what civil disruption is being caused by my lack of social pressure and consequence.
Do you share all of your private conversations and thoughts under your real name?
I very much like that when I join a discord server. It’s pretty much a blank slate.
edit: here's the actual blog https://discord.com/blog/usernames
Why isn't it linked? No clue
Do they benefit by linking to twitter and not the discord website for some reason? Also, _who cares_ what some people I don’t know are saying about it on twitter?
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.
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.
This doesn't solve anything.
> I'd rather be "TheRealChomp" or "ChompChomp" or something, versus having to give out my name and number.
On discord? same name? never.
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.