Discord’s username change is causing discord | Hacker News Reader

Discord’s username change is causing discord

theverge.com

212 pointsthm208 comments

> 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.

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.

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.

Almost certainly a play on the Twitter space.

Driven by some exec or PM.

The numeric distinguisher was good, actually.

So how do you suggest they address the recurring issues they laid out?

How often does adding a friend cold even happen on discord? All interaction is based around shared servers. If user A wants to friend user B, they either are or will be a member of the same server. Globally unique usernames just aren't relevant.

Based on discord's post: https://discord.com/blog/usernames it seems it happens more than you'd expect; particularly as discord has been on the uptick to being ubiquitous among teens/young adults who may wish to add each other after meeting in person

I think what's confusing to me is why this has to be done in a breaking way. If the goal is to be able to have some sort of identifier people can remember and share to add each other, why not just make that a separate system where the "special" identifier maps to an "old-style" identity? They're already trying to change the symbolic notation for users (i.e. "@foo" instead of "foo#1234"), so it seems like they could just make that something unique enough to not be confused with an original name (e.g. "@@foo" to differentiate from how you tag people in chat today, or even something weirder like "@foo@").

I think that's essentially what they're doing. Currently "usernames" in the discord context are equivalent to display names. You can change your username at any time so long as 9999 other people don't already have the name your going for. With this change, you're getting a permanent identifier in the form of a username, while you retain your display name, which you can still change at any time, but now without having to worry about whether you're the 10000th person to get it.

> Currently "usernames" in the discord context are equivalent to display names.

This is not correct. There is a username associated with your account. It's used in friend requests.

Display names are an entirely separate concept; they exist on a per-server basis. The same discord account can have many different display names at once. When you join a server, your display name on that server defaults to the part of your username before the numeric tag. But you're free to set it to whatever you want.

> Display names are an entirely separate concept; they exist on a per-server basis. The same discord account can have many different display names at once. When you join a server, your display name on that server defaults to the part of your username before the numeric tag. But you're free to set it to whatever you want.

Yes, but you have to manually set those. You default to your proper username. My understanding from the blog post is that now it will default to your display name, and that the username will be for identification scenarios.

> now without having to worry about whether you're the 10000th person to get it

Which is trivial to fix with another digit, and not the reason they're doing this massive change.

Maybe I'm, getting confused by the messaging then; the article talks about "forcing people to make a change", which to me implies that this is some sort of transition where eventually the "old" names will no longer work, or at least that using a custom nickname per server won't work. If that's the case, then I don't consider this to be done in a "non-breaking way", although maybe I wasn't specific enough in my previous comment.

Yeah, if I'm understanding it correctly, the word choice and communication really muddy the waters. If they chose to call it "unique identifier", and treat is a brand new value, I think there would be much less confusion and frustration. "Username" is too overloaded in this context for it to have been communicated clearly.

Note: this page seems to have big localization issues, as the French version actually has few parts in English because they amended it at the beginning and at the end, and that makes this article feel quite messy.

Meeting in person seems like the issue. In the gaming space for people who have used the platform for a while, it isn't so weird. The games I play it's even fun to see people have ign be their discord tag. I can see this providing value to "the general public" but I don't see how it provides value to gamers... and that's the thing I guess Discord is trying hard to branch out of gaming.

For in person why don't they add a qrcode scanner or shareable URL just like they do for servers?

RN what I do is share a qrcode for a small server that I admin and then friend/add ppl as they join. Totally not needed tbh.

Generally discord does a great job with onboarding, hope they figure this one out.

Fine. Have a first-come-first serve lottery system. Person with the lowest discriminator wins that name. You have to open that up to everyone (not just those who pay), but that should be relatively easy to do.

IMO, I think it's also ok to give preference to people who 1) were there first 2) pay for the service

> Fine. Have a first-come-first serve lottery system

Isn't this exactly what Discord is doing?

Okay, discriminators are randomly assigned unless one pays for nitro, that said they have account creation date on record, so they can do it in order no problem.

The issues are the order they have chosen is not that simple. They are giving verified bots first choice (some of these are questionable), then owners of partnered servers, then discord for business, then it is going by account age.

They have added a clarification to their blog post: "Current Nitro subscribers paying for the ability to customize their discriminator that registered for Nitro on or before March 1, 2023 will also be given early access." Yeah, when early access is in the list I do not know.

Discriminators are random for non nitro-users. And if you stop paying you don't even get to keep one...

> Globally unique usernames just aren't relevant.

And if some users think they are relevant, let it be an optional additional name for premium users.

there are games where you can only trade, in game and there is no easy way to find groups (diablo 2 resurrection for example) and there are multiple discords servers to trade and most of the time you befriend/message somebody in discord first (outside of the server) and there are ways to get help with killing diablo clone where you also first get messaged globally.

If a person or a group needs a unique username, then give them the #'less version of it.

Outside of that, the issue isn't a problem.

For a community based platform like Discord it's valuable to let people have the name they want and if that means people make typos from time to time, then that's necessary.

The problem is that discord users think they know their username, but they don't. Most people know their phone number, those who don't, know that they don't.

I don't think this is a big enough problem, but I do see how this can be a problem.

It can’t be that hard to add a ‘find your user name here’ link to every place where one would potentially use it.

Do you really want people braindead enough to not figure that out on your platform? I don’t, and certainly not if their incompetence inconveniences the existing users that make the platform what it is.

Discord took VC money. Slow and steady growth is as unacceptable to their investors as going bankrupt. So they have to chase the lowest common denominator of user.

Automatically replace the discriminator by something like Word3Words to make them less confusable.

Add a globally unique generated name to add someone with?

If you have a username full of weird casing and unicode characters you kinda deserve people not being able to add you

Regarding discriminators: have 5-digit discriminators for usernames used by more than 10000 accounts

Right up there I'd put:

Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's a terrible idea for security and it's just straight-up dumb. Talk about amateur hour.

What's the alternative that doesn't require more effort for the user?

Just a number. Remember ICQ? They simple had a number increasing for each new registered account. I mean, if the users still get to set an arbitrary display name, then just give everyone a number as user„name“. Sorted by registration date, this would be the most fair process.

And then yes, there is no validation that someone named „@verge“ is really from TheVerge – simply because there is no such name, and users just need to tell people that 3728348 is their handle. Like a phone number. Unique, easy, fair.

Any string that isn't taken.

That sounds like more effort for the user: now they have to remember some random string in addition to their email address.

If every website did this, no one will ever sign up.

Why would it be "in addition to" their E-mail address? And do you have a problem remembering your E-mail address? I don't understand your objection here at all.

Not to mention, I said ANY string; that could be your E-mail address if you want it to be.

Finally, your assertion about "any Web site that did this" is absurd, since a huge number of (probably even most) forums are powered by software that requires you to specify a user ID that doesn't have to be an E-mail address.

Implying that one would remember their email address but would forget the 2nd item for identity. Combining email address with another string to create a unique ID isn't the answer either. Any combination of string+salt can be broken. What we are getting at is that it shouldn't be on the user to have to remember yet another identifier for XYZ website or service. We already have the concept of usernames, email address are somewhat unique, and you can suffix numbers like they do. If you really want unique ID's, decouple login from your identifier. On Steam, people login with their username or email address, not their Steam ID. For some, their Steam ID is 9999999999999999 long. For others it's 99999999 long. It all depends on when you joined Steam.

I've never seen a site that used legitimate IDs but offered no way to recover them. If you forget your ID, you can have it sent to your E-mail address.

I also said that users COULD use their E-mail addresses if they wanted to. An E-mail address is a string, and I said "any string." I mean you yourself pointed out, "On Steam, people login with their username or email address"

So what's the problem?

> Why would it be "in addition to" their E-mail address?

Because they already have to remember their email address for other things, like to give it to people, to log into LinkedIn, etc.

Now you want to give them another piece of information that they must remember in order to log in?

I already said that they COULD use their E-mail address if they wanted to. I said ANY STRING. What is the problem?

You do realize that millions of Web sites, including every financial institution's (that I've ever seen, anyway) let (or require) users set up legitimate IDs that are separate from their E-mail addresses, right? Or is this news to you?

Millions of forums based on PHPBB alone use proper user IDs instead of forcing users to use an E-mail address. That's just one open-source forum system: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=546501

If you want more info on why E-mail addresses are a stupid user ID: https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-us...

I do want to add: you can still add people by their old name#9999 username

This is up to the user to change. Your old username becomes a display name and then you get to pick what your unique username will be.

Discord doesn't have unique usernames right now.

and what recourse do I have if my unique name is taken? This is the crux of the problem. You can't create a limited supply market when there wasn't one, after the fact.

>and what recourse do I have if my unique name is taken?

Add a number. Before your unique username was your name + a 4 digit number. You could do the same thing here with your name plus a number.

The difference in affordances between "everyone has a number attached" and "somebody who isn't you doesn't" should be obvious.

My username on Discord is "Ed#1234". My username will not be "@Ed". That sucks, the change isn't my choice, and I've canceled my subscription because they're removing the one feature, as much of a vanity thing as it is, that I liked enough to give them money.

(This isn't an invitation to well-actually-that's-illogical about it. I could not care in the slightest if you think it is sufficiently lesswrongish to be valid. They're changing my username out from under me. That sucks. They have lost me as a customer.)

if I have a unique username in the form of a name + a 4 digit number, why do I need to create a unique username? The logic behind this doesn't make any sense other than the fact that they want to charge for a blue checkmark and/or they aren't satisfied with their current username setup. Both of which are not my concern as a user of their product. I shouldn't have to win the lottery to get my username back. I shouldn't be outbid by some kid with a python script who wants my name. Your name is your only true property on 3rd party sites/services. My username, is me. I am my username. To change it would be to change me. I kinda like me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  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

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.

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.

You have no privacy from Discord Inc. They can read everything if they want to:

>investigation is centered around the reported messages, but can expand if the evidence shows that there’s a bigger violation.

>we may investigate whether the entire server is dedicated to bad behavior, or if the behavior appears to be part of a wider pattern.

>we know there is also violating content on Discord that might go unreported. This is where we get proactive.

>When we have data suggesting that a user is engaging in illegal activity or violating our policies, we investigate their networks, activity on Discord, and their messages to proactively detect accomplices and determine whether violations have occurred.

https://discord.com/safety/360043712132-how-we-investigate

It's because the whole Discord experience is modeled after IRC, which has (literal) servers. In order to get gamers to switch from IRC to Discord, they wanted to change as little as possible, including the verbiage.

It's funny because "server" is obviously revisionist history. Their API calls them "guilds". I have no idea why they changed the name to the less-accurate "server".

They use the word "server" very intentionally to convey a sense of sovereignty, seclusion, and privacy while downplaying the fact it's just a multi-tenant SaaS messaging platform.

They do this probably because the SaaS reality seems repressive (i.e. they don't want to be seen as another Facebook), uncool with a younger audience, antithetical to 'gamer culture' which evolved out of self-hosted servers, and maybe gives a specific hint around pricing (just guessing, not a marketing expert).

What? Outside of like minecraft on espernet and a few obscure old games which have communities on quakenet nobody was really using IRC for gaming communities. Those existed largely on various forums, Skype, reddit, teamspeak and steam.

IRC was used by many gamers and devs, including the discord founders.

In the past, not really at the time when discord first became popular. This makes it questionable why they named their user silos "servers".

>Those existed largely on various forums, Skype, reddit, teamspeak and steam.

IRC was a hub for gamers (among others) since well before Skype, Steam, and Reddit were conceived. Teamspeak itself never really had "communities", it was really just "the thing you log into to voice chat during the match" and was almost always a strict subset of the community that paid for the server.

Yes, in the past, so what? It doesn't explain why the "server" terminology was used long past IRC's prime.

Regarding teamspeak, you're wrong. That may have been your limited experience but I saw many actual communities which existed on teamspeak. People used it in many different ways (and still do).

SwiftIRC (as it existed a decade ago) would like to have a word.

A word about what? When discord became popular, IRC as a gaming community platform was all but dead.

That's completely untrue, though, because I was part of communities that migrated from SwiftIRC to Discord upon launch. Basically everyone who played the first few years of OSRS at a serious level used Swift heavily.

https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=SwiftIRC 1/2 to 1/3rd of its prime is diminished, sure, but far from dead. Today is what dead looks like.

A few thousand users might not seem like much compared to Discord's current userbase, but mass migrations like that were a pretty good shot in the arm for it right out of the gate.

QuakeNet would like a bigger, boomier, word.

So what you're saying is that they embraced IRC, extended IRC, and extinguished IRC? Surprised they haven't been bought by 1990s Microsoft yet!

And before Discord existed, we had IRC.

At the time discord became popular almost nobody was using IRC for games communities anymore.

That is objectively not true.

They’re (were) called guilds, not servers, in the API fwiw

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

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.

The implication is that Discord can surveil you (or help a government surveil you), not that your chats will be leaked to the world directly.

Discord "servers" are just instances of Discord on Discord Inc's cloud. Discord never claims that they are private in the sense of 'sovereign', only that you can moderate them yourself.

Discord openly states in the TOS that their "Trust and Safety" team can see literally everything you do (channel messages, DMs, attachments, etc) at any time.

There is no Discord Inc. cloud. Discord is hosted on the Google cloud.

No need to be pedantic. Discord Inc has their own cloud ecosystem built on top of Google. Discord "servers" aren't unique instances deployed on bare metal. It's multi-tenant SaaS just like Slack.

The thing that always gets in the way of that idea is when they get big and the (often technologically illiterate or agenda driven) media puts out hit pieces about them encouraging hate/csem to spread by not actively moderating private conversations.

That's why the only solution is fully E2EE platforms for anything you have an expectation of privacy towards.

It's like a server in that the members have to pay $1000 a month in order to upload a file that's more than 3 millibytes in size.

But all that money goes to pay off their VC debt, not to the person that created the community. So that's fun.

> 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.

> 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/An00nymushun/End-to-end-Discord-Encryptio...

But you might be misgendering people or saying offensive things about protected minorities in there! And that's bad and needs to be stopped.

(I'm somewhat upset the UK has done this, with actual charges for hate speech communication on private whatsapp groups)

Discord has worse privacy then Facebook. Use something better, like matrix.

In what way is it worse than FB?

Everything is recorded and stored forever. One is beholden to the French authorities, the other serves the US.

I say, build your own chat system. It's not that hard.

French? Discord is an american company

Also matrix is e2e encrypted.

Look at data collected section, they basically collect everything, nothing is deleted.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/discord...

Don't know why I thought it was French. Can't find anything about where they are on Wikipedia.

As for the link, are you talking about the "app" or the web version? Of course the "app" is collecting anything that it can. Don't install it.

This is for discord in general

Maybe I am reading it wrong but as far as I can see, the creepy stuff is confined to the app. Feel free to correct me again, though

Has crappy or non-existant voice support.

Use Mumble for that.

Actually it does have one in one-to-one calls, and in groups they have been saying jitsi will be replaced "soon", but this "soon" appears to be more than half a year. You can join the beta if you want.

Then better don't use it because that is exactly what is happening.

> The discriminator allows people to have their own name of choice.

Indeed I always considered this a major bonus point for discord. Sigh.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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".

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

On a site aimed at people who pay a lot of money to solve puzzles and learn skills with persistence.

Installing mastodon is rocket science. I can see why people call it difficult.

Typing the correct name into a field is not. I have a hard time understanding who’d fail at that.

Yes exactly. It is almost a feature. If you can't type their handle properly, are they really a friend?

> 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 not a bug, it's a feature. Considering how often users prefer anonymity, global search for users is a bad idea.

users can still be anonymous while search able?

This was my thought as well, is discord VC funded? This smells of 'hyper-scale or die'.

They are. They have raised about a billion dollar so far.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, the barcode only makes sense if you value secrecy over your brand. But streaming and content creation is way more lucrative than tournaments, so branding is more valuable. Even in major sports like golf or baseball, your brand is way more valuable. Pro athletes like Tiger Woods make way more money from their brand than their tournament winnings.

In the games I'm familiar with, pro players can still practice together secretly when prepping for a major tournament. But everyday play is just under one's own username.

I think SC2 is a little unique. Over half of the top 10 players do not speak English fluently enough for the amount of content creation expected. The majority of the viewers do expect content in English. This means many of the best players do have trouble converting their brand into cash and have been primarily funding themselves through tournament winnings. This dynamic has created the perception of match fixing [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-XbHBQAco8 (Around 4:20, Terran player didn't see obvious thing and it cost him the game)

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.

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.

> 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.

It's not that either system is a problem, the problem is changing randomly after hundreds of millions of users have signed up, and probably gotten used to their username.

On my friends server everyone changes their server name a few times per week (for whatever quote or joke is topical), and it's the discord handle we use to @ each other, and the discriminator isn't important. But now I'm sure many of us will need to change our discord username.

> How is that any different than a unique username

The difference is that I’m almost never in a game with another Aeolun, so now everyone can see that nice looking name instead of Aeolun442, even if I still need Aeolun#442 to have people add me to their friends list..

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

>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.c...

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.

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.

What did nitro do for your discriminator?

Nitro allows you to choose your own discriminator.

There is clearly a benefit for paying its just a very expensive one.

Anecdotally the big draw is custom emoji you can use everywhere

Oh great, I’ve been using discord since it was in beta, but sadly my nitro got interrupted thanks to a lost card. Guess I won’t be seeing it soon.

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

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.

4 digit discriminants aren't unique to Discord. Battle.net also uses them.

I have a 5 digit battle.net discriminator number.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Ah right, I probably forgot to pay off the folks keeping my social credit score up to date and got caught out.

At one stage they were developing an account switcher feature, so it is at least semi-supported

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.

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.

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.

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

Do you have a phone number? Do you find that confusing? Imagine if you had to claim a globally unique username to use a phone. Is that better?

Discriminators are, in my mind, are a clever hybrid. You have a unique name plus a short randomized "telephone number". This is easier to remember than a 10 digit phone number, or a username with lots of random junk (xxxxMyNameIsBlahx1203923) added it to it to make it unique.

Yeah it’s a clever hybrid but that doesn’t mean that it’s without its drawbacks. I’m not really trying to argue one way or the other, but I do think that there are tradeoffs between using a universally understood system for something this core to the product vs. a custom, albeit clever, solution.

> a custom, albeit clever, solution.

It was "custom" in 2010. When StarCraft 2 did it. Discord launched in 2015.

"I cannot parse the idea of a username without an @ in front of it" does not suggest that such a person will be more receptive to Discord when @'s are added. On the other hand, I've already canceled my Nitro subscription because I had it for the novelty name and a 200-server limit that I'm no longer using.

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.

I don’t know or really understand the full process for any of that haha. I’m a super casual user. When I open the app, my only goal is to figure out how to find my username to send to my friend, accept their friend invite, and then bumble my way around the app until I’m in a voice or text chat.

I’m not their core user base. But I’m guessing that I’m the type of person they want to engage next, kind of like a warm lead

> confusing process of finding my full name that they assigned to me

Isn't it always shown at the lower left corner of the window? Or the profile tab on mobile.

Also, the only part assigned to you should have been the #NNNN suffix, the rest can be your same handle as everywhere else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rent a VPS. They are a few bucks a month.

https://element.io/

There is a free open source self-hostable reimplementation of Discord, called Spacebar: https://spacebar.chat

https://revolt.chat

https://app.revolt.chat

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.

Citizenship numbers already exist. Are you suggesting that we should log in to private online services using our citizenship numbers?

>Call us after you're born again.

In other news, churches see surging attendance!

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

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!

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

You can use Susie74514 as your username and Susie as your display name

Exactly correct. I don't think that Dylan16807 read the blog post that explained how the system works, because Discord made it very clear that the display name was meant to be used in most cases for most things.

Except you’d be shown as Susie.

And for interactions you’d be susie#whatever

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.

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

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.

Your expectations of Discord match with mine. None of my friends or guildies use it as anything else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stereotypical response to penalize the entire user base in order to combat spam. As if detecting spam bots by username will fix spam.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

Makes sense.

This is going to be a total mess.

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

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'.

No this definitely feels real bad.

Actually why not just go with emails. They are somewhat durable enough, globally unique. And easy to remember and find.