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.