Discriminators are important for Discord

I may be among the countless people already echoing this, but this is simply a horrible decision. Do not go through with this. Do not remove discriminators. It may be easier to remember names without them, but you keep your users safe by using discriminators. I can't tell you how many people I know who sing their praises of Discord using discriminators. It protects them from harassment, stalking, spam, and abuse, among others. You should already know that privacy is a huge concern to the general population, and now it's being compromised because people with malicious intentions are able to find their targets easily thanks to having unique user handles. Believe me when I say uniqueness is not a boon in this setting.

Not to mention, people will hoard names in order to financially exploit them, essentially making a profit that will be taken away from you. This is already a problem on platforms with unique handles such as Twitter and Twitch, and this decision you're making will exacerbate the problem even further, creating one less haven for people to safely express themselves, which means you'll have a shrinking userbase, which means less money for you.

All in all, you're digging yourselves a grave. People will leave. You will lose subscribers. I'm not even memeing about this, I will literally cancel my Nitro subscription and possibly deactivate my account if you continue down this path, and I know I'm not the only one who will do this either. Simplicity is not a counterbalance to user safety, and you'll be creating more work for your support team than they can probably handle.

Discriminators are important.

Edit 5/6/23: Since you're taking your sweet time in making this public (this was sent 5/4), I'm going to add another point that I forgot to mention.

Your decision to convert to a handles system? Racist. Why? Because handles systems are only able to support Latin alphanumerical scripts. Take a moment to consider your users from all parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans; every culture and language that doesn't use Latin scripts. They make up quite a large chunk of your user base, don't they? What will happen once they're forced to name themselves with a script that many cannot even read?

They'll leave, and take their subscriptions with them. I can only imagine the number of complaints you'll be getting from your non-English customers after you're done anglicizing and alienating them.

So you can tell whichever shareholder(s) that's behind this decision to get stuffed.