[Enshittification][DO NOT ADD] Discord Username System
Did you know? Discord is reworking/removing their partnership program (as it currently stands)
Hey there @everyone! Been about 2 months since I changed this post. And it's been a hot minute, but the username update has now been worked into Discord. No matter if we liked it or not. And people will now (forcefully) get used to it.
As a suprise, this idea has the MOST ever comments and votes recieved on a single post on the feedback platform EVER. The story around this event is the most interesting I have ever seen. And the gerne around it still hasn't ended either. We'll see where all of this goes.
On that note, I have been working on a little project regarding that, since Twitter, Discord, Reddit and Tiktok are heading all into the same route. Our own little enshittification.social! A mastodon instance for the enshittification of companies and they services they used to offfer. (Twitter, Unity, Discord, and so on)
Would you like to participate in an UNOFFCIAL poll? Click here!
(NOT affiliated with Discord in any way, shape or form)
We thank everyone for their votes, comments and joining our DIscord server and enshittification instance. The story of enshittification will never end and we can see that with the recent Unity Pricing changes.
I've recieved a press request through Discord, however I'm moving that to email, if any press wants to reach out about the update from someone willing to represent the entire discord community against this change, send an email here:
- press@stefanocoding.me
Need more information? Check NTTS's Video:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3LUtBVe3Jk
Want to talk with people about the update? Check this server:
- https://discord.gg/jpFhkeqGHS
An anonymous Discord Partner has spoken out about the reservations, check it out.
- Original post was deleted by reddit admins, link is now for archive.org
Hey, even game devs are struggeling getting their official name as verified servers:
- https://www.gamesradar.com/indie-studio-has-their-discord-username-stolen-out-from-under-them/
- https://twitter.com/rustylakecom/status/1659556388526338048
So what is it with this update?
So generally, this update has recieved a TON of backlash. And this feedback post has already recieved just about 13k upvotes at the time of writing AND a change.org petition with 13k people having signed it,
Fundementally this change to discord is going to cause more issue's for it's users then it could be worth. Among the comments, there are a few I'll display/mention.
One of the major issues that can be confirmed is the resale of Discord accounts. That is something that is unable to be denied and is going to be a major issue. Example here:
What discord has done absolutly wrong during this update:
Discord staff has been claiming double the names, one for their private account. Another for their staff account. Some of these usernames that are being claimed are so rare that people are speculating they are planning to sell it one day or another. The communication is absolute crap, they have not communicated how they where planning to do the roll-out and the way people are now claiming names left and right, from piewdiepie, markiplier and other names that should have been reserved. Then the way access get's rolled out? Verified bots where supposed to get access first, then supposedly brands, moving on to the staff and then the partnered and verified servers. Then the general population. But this has so far changed even more, starting with people from the moderator program, and suddenly the Hypesquad event team. And we still do not have enough information to know what the next bracket will be. There is no proper communication apart from Discord telling us to append our tag/discriminator to our usernames if we can't use it. Or you know just don't make usernames unique. The reddit has been stormed with people hating this update. And when people go to the support page, they're told to respond to feedback, or create it. We've all done this, but Discord still hasn't made an official statement. The entire update wasn't even properly announced like they do with everything else. Hidden behind their Birthday suprises. With the nitro trails providing people with 2 weeks of nitro to forget they signed up and pay an additional month. Normally, this would be tweeted and announced everywhere properly. People are moving away from Discord in an attempt to revolt, they're disbanding Nitro to put a dent somewhere in Discord's earnings. But that'll probably be recouped by investors. Discord claims to listen to feedback. But we've seen nothing of this yet. As a ton of people are saying, Discord is turning into Twitter, we don't want to see it happen. But with the 300 million active users on Discord, we're barely making a dent with this feedback post.
What are some good ways to fix this update?
The previous system worked perfectly, nothing to change about it. However using the display name system is a good idea. Maybe even supporting for official known people to get a username, or a checkmark to define "hey they are official" without the Twitter "pay for a blue tick" bs.
> BELOW ARE COMMENTS MADE BY THE COMMUNITY, NOT BY ME DIRECTLY <
Mikey's, Gen, Rain
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Another one:
441 -
such a bad idea
302 -
Welcome back to "This was not on my Discord bingo card"
243 -
+1, this change shall not be made
233 -
This feature sucks so much, like literally someone who has the rollout earlier can steal your nickname and I don't give a damn about display name I want to keep my unique nickname. also nickname sniping is going to be insane, literally useless feature that destroys the uniqueness of discord nicknames having tags not like on other platforms
351 -
+1
144 -
+1
141 -
+1
This will be terrible for impersonators and name sniping (definitely for content creators, known figures, large community admins,...)187 -
Can't wait for people to start sniping and selling nicknames 🙄 Bad idea tbh
203 -
I can already tell namesniping is going to be a huge issue. No clue what Discord was thinking with this change, just because other platforms do it doesn't mean it's a good idea!
224 -
I really don't want this to go through
135 -
1+ by fatrio
107 -
Namesniping... I'm going to be immediately impersonated which is a huge deal, not sure who didn't think of that smart move. People who are "substantial individuals" where you can't snipe it... Right... So that's streamers and YouTubers? What about actual people who's living is based on Discord that doesn't officially own a business as they are a sole trader and their username gets sniped? Real smart...
191 -
+1
Namesniping, selling of accounts (creating a discord account black market), impersonators, and complaining about people not getting their names. The list goes on about the issues this will cause not to mention that the amount of benefits this has do not outweigh the issues.161 -
Discord is a platform that has been different than all other social platforms since its inception in 2015, including the use of discriminators and not usernames. Account selling + vanity URL selling has already been a problem for awhile, I personally have had many accounts try to buy my #0001 discriminator for hundreds of dollars, switching to usernames will NOT fix any problems with the current system in place. You're spitting in the face of your Nitro consumers that have paid for years for their handles (myself included, I have paid for various forms of Nitro since 2018 to keep my handle intact and prevent impersonation of my own account). There must be another solution somewhere out there, even adding an extra number to the discriminator would add hundreds of thousands of new account flexibility for various usernames that are used commonly. We've been here for so long because you've been the one difference amongst the pack, please do not conform to other social medias and make this decision.
207 -
+1
Genuinely going to be one of, if not the worst discord update of all time136 -
such a terrible idea
100 -
Too bad thing
I am an adminstrator and discord server owner/admin of many games, and youtubers, now random people might get the username of our developers, content creator friends, trademark, game name, etc... and scam using them
137 -
Financial Effects
Like literally there are no benefits for Discord to doing this. Not even their shareholders since their income will drop from this change.Since most of the "market research" they did in that article, they probably should've done one on how many people buy nitro just for changing their discriminator. Discriminators and tags are not only signature to Discord but crucial to the platform and it's mostly how people communicate with each other. People buy Nitro just to have a simple discriminator.
Scams and Frauds
It will be so easy to impersonate someone, for example if I wanted to impersonate @Juju#0001, all I would have to do is just make a fake letter (such as like... J), use the same profile and become @JujuJ. Boom! I have now successfully impersonated someone. Tags make it a lot easier to identify fake identities, such as "the only real moderators are Juju#0001".Not only that, but this feature benefits account stealing, hacking, and selling to a new level. People with short usernames such as @Rek would become targets for scammers to sell their accounts for a profit. I'm sure this doesn't give Discord the PR it wants.
Community Appeal
99% of the community on Discord have taken well to discriminators and don't want to change to a Pomelo system. It does not benefit the community in any way, shape, or form. Pomelo tags (@username), are absolutely not what the community wants, and that is shown by the immediate community outroar in pretty much every official Discord-owned community server, such as Townhall and Discord Developers.Impersonations
As talked about earlier in the Scams and Frauds section, people without a significant following or new to the platform (within 4 years) are going to be impersonated! Even YouTubers or internet personalities with hundreds of thousands of followers could be impersonated by a simple internet scammer with an older Discord account.The system is flawed
The current implementation of Pomelo tags is absolutely terrible for the end-user, as well as pretty much any member of the Discord platform. Sure it makes identifying people a lot easier in the eyes of Discord, but this just makes the lives of Discord users infinite amount times harder and for no significant benefit.There are so many ways to ruin this system, and it can be abused in so many ways. This isn't good for Discord, at all.
364 -
This will do the exact opposite of what the blog post suggests and make usernames hard to remember and *more* unique, because people will have reserved your chosen name that you can remember.
This is an absolutely atrocious change, with clearly very little planning and foresight onto how this will actually impact people. The claim that a lot of friend requests fail is also failing to consider the fact that many friend requests which are sent are *spam* requests that are denied or intentionally ignored.
+1 to the post, revert the change.
215 -
Worst decision discord has ever come up with
125 -
+1
81 -
God damn it Discord can you do something right for once
You had a good system, don't freaking eradicate it109 -
☠️
72 -
+1
Why is this needed? It'll upset a lot of people and will result in many issues, most of which are stated above already.96 -
For the change.org fans:
https://www.change.org/p/discord-add-back-discriminators94 -
The people at Discord have continuously updated the app and improved upon it with each iteration. The majority of the changes were well thought out and well implemented. However, after reading the new username blog post and thinking about it for a while, I have a lot of concerns I need to discuss.
This change should not be implemented in Discord. In general, it doesn't provide any tangible benefit to the users and only serves to make things more convoluted and inconvenient for the people who use it, contradicting its intended purpose. I will run through a few of the reasons why:
My greatest concern is with the reason for the change: that it will help people add each other on Discord by removing discriminators from the add tag. This is just not true. For example, in order to add me, people previously would have to just type "Name#8000" into the text box. With this change, they will have to type a longer name like "Name_something01" because it is certain that there is absolutely no way I will be able to change my username to "Gen" or any other shorter derivative quickly enough. In general, this change will provide no change to the ease of access for adding others on the platform, as the increased complexity of a unique username will offset the lack of a discriminator.
This leads me to another concern, new and returning users will have a much worse experience when creating their accounts or switching to the new username system. When I first joined Discord, what most impressed me is that unlike other platforms, I could set my username to whatever I wanted it to be, without having to go through the annoying hoops of "This username is already taken" for several iterations before finally settling on a username that I am not fully content with. This has always been something that I praised, and believe sets apart your platform from the others. This change takes away from that first time user experience, which will make people have a worse first impression or maybe even give up on creating an account altogether.
A counterpoint one might make is that the display name system makes up for the lack of flexibility in one's username, but this only serves to make things more convoluted and confusing, especially for those who are not familiar with the platform. With this change, we will now have four different things that one person could be referred to as: their username, their display name, their nickname, and their friend nickname. This is not intuitive in any sense and is extremely bloated, confusing, and inconvenient, taking away from the experience. In addition, a display name system already exists, also known as a "nickname". Because of this, many long-time users like myself are attached not to their display name, but rather their actual username, and essentially forcing them to change it because it is too common is not a solution to any problem, but rather upsets people.
Furthermore, this change not only doesn't provide a tangible benefit to the user, it also makes things worse for the company in terms of its revenue. A system like this simply removes one of the nitro incentives - the custom discriminator. Many people pay for nitro specifically for this thing, and removing it as an incentive is a bad decision which will drive away business from many of the dedicated users.
The confusion of the transition period is another element. Many things will go wrong as people are steadily pinged to adopt the new username system. One major example is that scammers with older accounts might claim the handles of popular influencers before they can change it, essentially impersonating them and committing fraudulent acts on the platform for a short time before they are reported. In general, the transition will also lead to a much greater workload for the discord support team.
To wrap things up, the new system brings up many many complications which create an overall worse experience for the user, remove the uniqueness from Discord as a platform which draws many people in, and creates more problems for the company itself. These changes are claimed to be done to improve a system that is already fine, and generally has no feedback against. There are very few feedback reports on Discord that claim that the method of adding friends is unsatisfactory, and not only is the new system dubious in improving that facet, but it also makes a number of different things much worse. For these reasons, it is best if the new system is scrapped and not implemented. If something isn't broken, don't "fix" it.266 -
yes because having to tell someone my username is @h.o.p.sc.o_t_ch. because of name sniping is so much easier than saying hopscotch#numbers
i wonder who had to justify their job and decided to push this dogwater change184 -
+1
not a good update at all
account selling will skyrocket
this is a very bad update
people with rare usernames will get targetted by hackers
not a good idea118 -
+1
77
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