Do Not Change the Username System

This topic may have fallen from the top of the feedback forum here over the past month that you've been ignoring us, but to many of us it is still very important that you reverse this decision and we're (or at least I am) going to continue to be very annoying about it. As you know, there is another thread that has reached the maximum number of comments on the subject ( https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/14337329256983--Do-NOT-add-The-new-discord-usernames-system - although you can't comment anymore, you can still vote), which you really ought to review for a reminder how many of us hate this change and for our MANY reasons why we feel that way. Not that you care, evidently. Personally, my biggest issue is the lack of privacy this will bring. Discord is primarily a messaging client. As such, I (and I'd dare to say most users) use it to keep in touch with people I know. The key bit there being, "people I KNOW". Luckily, the discriminator allows for this distinction! There could be thousands of people using my online nickname. 9999, to be exact. So even someone who knows what I go by on the Internet could have to guess up to 9999 times in order to find me, and still might not pick the right one if they guess my icon wrong. This is how I prefer it! I don't want random people finding me from social media or from matching in a game—I only want people I choose to connect with to be able to find me. Of all the people I engage with in real life and on social media, the subset I want to talk to outside of those contexts is very, very small. It's currently very easy to get someone to add me—they could hand me their phone so I can put in my Discord tag myself, I could write down my tag so I know it's spelled right, if I currently have it as something funky a normal keyboard can't replicate I can change it briefly—meaning the privacy this allows me doesn't come at the cost of being able to add new friends. (Hell, my sister managed to add someone on Discord during a concert, which I think is a pretty good sign the system is working.) I could have another identity for this purpose, sure, but frankly I don't want to have to have a separate alias to talk to my friends. I don't want to have to be two separate people in order to maintain my small circle of interaction. Discord is a private space for me and has been for seven years now. This change takes it from being so to being more of a social media platform, which will leave that vital niche empty. TL,DR; this change forces users to choose between privacy and identity, and that kind of sucks. Naturally, I've already cancelled my Nitro subscription. (I miss the perks, though. I hope this decision will be walked back soon so I can resubscribe.)

NikkoJT

5. Juni 2023 23:32

Yep. This absolutely should not go through. The reasons why not have been well-stated many times.

Now it's rolling out to more users and those problems are becoming even more obvious in practice. People are unable to get names anything like their preferred names. This was the whole point of the discriminator system in the first place - ditching it is a massive step backwards. On top of that, accounts with popular usernames are being squatted on and sold on the black market, and those that are legit are being deluged with spam friend requests.

There's still time to go back. You could save some goodwill by stopping at the last minute. I mean, you're a tech corp, so I know you won't, because the last few years have proven that tech companies have literally no interest in doing right by their users. But you could. I kinda hope it sits with you at night, the knowledge that you could do what's right, but chose to make things worse for everyone instead.

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