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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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