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.
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.
IMO, I think it's also ok to give preference to people who 1) were there first 2) pay for the service
Isn't this exactly what Discord is doing?
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.
Which is trivial to fix with another digit, and not the reason they're doing this massive change.
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.
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.
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.
And if some users think they are relevant, let it be an optional additional name for premium users.
Regarding discriminators: have 5-digit discriminators for usernames used by more than 10000 accounts
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.
I don't think this is a big enough problem, but I do see how this can be a problem.
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.
Driven by some exec or PM.
The numeric distinguisher was good, actually.
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.
If every website did this, no one will ever sign up.
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.
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?
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?
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...
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.
Discord doesn't have unique usernames right now.
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.
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.)