The Username Change No One Asked For
Yes, this is umpteenth post made about this and I'm just beating a dead horse, but the point still stands. Absolutely nobody asked for this change and we don't want it either.
Personal and account security are going to be severely compromised by this change. What, people are hard to find right now? That's the point. Discriminators serve the purpose of keeping people and their accounts safe from malicious parties looking to cause harm while also allowing more freedom for what their usernames can be. Removing discriminators will put them all in danger. What kind of danger, you ask? Scammers, name snipers, hackers, impersonators, you name it. Microsoft added discriminators partly because of this very issue -- and Discord wants to remove them? Are you daft?
There's already a huge thread full of people that are very much against this change -- I've honestly never seen a single post have over a thousand upvotes. I think that should say something about how much people do not want this. Even outside of that particular thread, there are several other threads, this one included, urging Discord to not go through with this. Everywhere I look, every person I talk to, not a single person wants this. How many times do we have to say it before it finally gets through your thick skulls?
Furthermore, as it has been a few days since this was announced, it suddenly occurred to me: Discord stated about 40% of the userbase don't know what discriminators are and/or their purpose, and the link they provided as proof... was a Reddit thread?
Excuse me? No.
As of posting, that thread has a total of 284 comments. 40% of 284 is 113.6. Discord has over 350 million registered accounts with roughly over half of them being active monthly, estimated around 196.2 million. 40% of 350 million is 140 million, and 40% of 196.2 million is 78.48 million. 114 people not knowing and/or misunderstanding the purpose of discriminators is not even close to representative of 79 million people, never mind 140 million.
All that thread proves is that 40% of active Discord users who also actively use Reddit and follow that particular subreddit did not know and/or misunderstood the purpose of discriminators. That is an incredibly small minority, not to mention 40% is being incredibly generous as I'm certain the actual percentage is a lot smaller than that. As such, that Reddit thread -- really any Reddit thread at all -- is insufficient proof of anything and thus invalid as evidence.
What you should've done was conduct an in-app survey to gauge what the active userbase actually knows and what they don't know and move on from there. I can almost guarantee you there are nowhere near 79 million people that don't get what discriminators are or what they're for.
Contrary to what you've stated, you did not think this through at all, you did not get sufficient feedback from the userbase, and this is not, and I quote, "the right thing to do to help more people hang out with their friends on Discord".
I'll close with how I ended my ticket about this, which Support is being dismissive of:
And just on a personal note, don't make Discord more like Twitter with this change. Discord is the cooler and better version of Skype. Twitter is an on-fire garbage can. Don't sink to Twitter's level.
-
absolutely. Their 'statistics' are COMPLETELY BOGUS. They didn't do a poll, they didn't do a survey. their data is biased and bad and they should feel bad for using it. This is a DISGRACEFUL attempt at statistical analysis and they failed completely.
They just want to appeal to twitter users. But here's the thing: I DON'T USE TWITTER. i don't WANT to use twitter. I don't like twitter. If discord tries to be twitter, I'll stop using discord too, and from the sheer number of posts and comments, everyone agrees.
+1
9 -
They just want to appeal to twitter users. But here's the thing: I DON'T USE TWITTER. i don't WANT to use twitter. I don't like twitter.
I refuse to touch Twitter with a fifty foot pole. You couldn't pay me to sign up there. If I want social media with unbridled chaos and 100% unique usernames/URLs, I'll open my Tumblr dash
Trying to appeal to a specific social media's userbase just in general is a stupid idea, but trying to do it by forcing out an update like this is beyond asinine. Discord is not social media nor will it ever be; it is an instant messaging application, and the people who run it would do well to remember that
3 -
the link to the megathread is https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/14337329256983--Do-NOT-add-The-new-discord-usernames-system !!!!!
2
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
3 comments