The Username Changes Are Horrible

I'm gonna try to be polite.

This is a terrible idea. And because I'm going to do my best to be polite and constructive I'm going to go through each point in this mess of a blog post and address them.

Your first two points are literally the same one, difficulty conveying your discord name in real life. Okay, so where's the difficulty? In verbal communication? You need to explain what's upper and lowercase? How about SPELLING?

There's always going to be this issue because of how language works and homophones. I'm sorry, Phibi#8936, how is that spelled? Is that phoebe like the actual name? Phibi? Fibi? Feebee? Fibby? So you're going to have to go in depth telling them how to spell it anyway. And as for remembering your discriminator, if you're the type to forget, we're in the modern era, you can just look at your dang phone and double check what your discriminator is.

Third point, there only being able to be 9999 Daves. Okay. How does switching to twitter @s fix this? It makes it WORSE, because now instead of having 9999 Daves separated by their unique number, you're going to have a bunch of daves with random numbers or variations that people have to come up with themselves and clutter up their username with like it's an MMO. Entirely counterproductive to your supposed goals. You could add another digit and have ten times the space if it's that big a deal. Also remember how some people paid for nitro to change that number? Mm.

Fourth point, you change your username a lot and get rate limited. That's... on them? That's literally a person's own fault if they change usernames so much it comes back to bite them, they can use nicknames like everyone else.

Fifth point, people using janked up fonts for their username causing problems adding them. I mean... you can just limit what characters people can use in their username. It's not hard. You're even planning to do this with your future @ scheme. Come on. And also, if someone uses a username that makes it hard to add them, that's again, their own fault.

Sixth point, a lot of people don't remember their number or 'Even what a discriminator is'. Okay. So they can check. They can look it up. It's not difficult. If they have access to their own discord it's right there. As for 'not even knowing what a discriminator is', I'm going to very pointedly remain polite here and note that EVEN YOUR OWN LINK THERE is a person asking 'what this number is called'. Not that they don't know what it DOES, or what it's FOR, they're asking what it's CALLED. Not knowing the technical terminology for a thing does not mean that they don't appreciate its function. Until today I just called it my discord number. Because that's what it was. That's what everyone called it.

Seventh point, a lot of friend requests fail the first time because of borked input. Okay, and? Then you double check and resolve the issue within like a minute or two. And if you're trying to convey your name and number to someone on your computer you can click to copy it so there's no ambiguity. But then again, that's a thing you need to mouse over your name in your profile to even know exists, so maybe make that not a mouseover. I wonder how many don't know the function exists

So these raised points don't really come to anything.

On top of that, the unique discriminators served a more strong purpose in anti-impersonation. The longer a name is, the easier it is for something to get lost in it, for someone to miss a small difference. When you make a free discord account your number is ASSIGNED TO YOU. If you want to change it, you need to pay. Under the new system you'd be VASTLY more able to make a name that looks very close to another person's because there's no part of it out of your control. And you'd be able to change it whenever. @phibiiiscool is coming to scam you, better watch out.

And this is just comparing the two systems ground up. Like if discord was built from day one using @ tags instead of discriminators. Never mind how a lot of people got attached to their numbers, or paid for nitro to change it. Never mind how discriminators were part of what identified a discord tag as a discord tag. Never mind how atrocious the transitional process will be with name sniping and impersonation and the tens of thousands of people you're going to uproot from their names. Never mind how you're aping twitter, which is like aping a boot left on the side of the road. Speaking of twitter, you're gonna see a lot of "The person with this @ on discord is not me" in people's bios. Because it got sniped.

This is a terrible, terrible idea that will solve none of your problems and only create more, even after the nightmarish transitional process that you seem to have just thrown up your arms and gone 'Lol nothin' for it' about.

Gonna post this in that big thread ( https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/14337329256983 ) as well as on its own for visibility.