[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:
442 -
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.
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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
352 -
such a bad idea
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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 -
Welcome back to "This was not on my Discord bingo card"
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+1, this change shall not be made
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Can't wait for people to start sniping and selling nicknames 🙄 Bad idea tbh
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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...
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+1
This will be terrible for impersonators and name sniping (definitely for content creators, known figures, large community admins,...)188 -
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
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.162 -
+1
145 -
+1
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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
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I really don't want this to go through
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+1
Genuinely going to be one of, if not the worst discord update of all time136 -
Worst decision discord has ever come up with
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+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 -
I second this. I would like to comment this on every single post saying DO NOT ADD THIS FEATURE because I genuinely DO NOT want this feautre.
The discrims are great, it allows me to change my nickname and change my username to what I WANT to be called. It's why I pay for Nitro in the first place, for people to find me under my nick and Discrim. This is such a stupid decision from Discord corporate offices.
Please DO NOT implement.
EDIT: I wrote a larger post here, and as updated my post here too as requested.
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To the intern/moderator reading this: I know I'm just one voice of several, but please escalate this matter to higher management and especially to the person recommending this change from discriminators to the pomelo system. I know how hard it is to get your voice through in corporate, so even escalating this to your manager who then escalates it further would be wonderful. This change is absoluely terrible and I genuinely would like to sit down over zoom and have a chat - where no corporate language is used - to understand whoever approved this terrible decision to impact the end-user experience.
Please do not implement this change or push this change into production enviroment.
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This is yet another post about the terrible change Discord just announced regarding removing discriminators to a pomelo system, and I want to give my take on this. It seems like huge tech companies don't care about the average end-user experience unless the sterile corporate bigwigs come in and want to change things up to make the green line go up, in which case the end-user experience gets messed.
So, I'm here to add my perspective to it: I'm a long term user, I've been on Discord since July 2015. I've paid for Nitro since it came out, and most importantly: I've been bringing in my irl friends to Discord. I will go point by point commenting on each claim on the blogpost and adding why this is a bad idea - my passion is cybersecurity so I will involve this aspect to the best of my ability into this.
- The whole point of these changes is that we want to make it a lot easier for you and all the new users coming to Discord to connect and hang out with friends.
No, sorry. I don't buy this. I've added plenty of my irl friends to Discord and most of them have understood how the discriminator system works right away. If that's an issue, why not add a tutorial for people like - clippy - on how to add people or join servers? Not only that, I've made plenty of friends on Discord and no-one has ever said "The Discriminators are hard" .
- We also recognize that our current username format has been one of the things that makes Discord unique, and that this change makes our usernames look a lot like those on other platforms. To be blunt, that’s kind of the point.
- When we were first building Discord, one of our top priorities was to let you give yourself just about any name you wanted [...] We didn’t want people to ever hit a screen that said “Your Desired Username is Taken.” [...] we didn’t even have a friend system, so no one had to type usernames manually.
Then... why change it if it makes Discord unique and if it makes Discord stand out? If the point was that no username you want should ever be taken? I mean, I've literally paid to have my name on Discord with a discriminator that I like for years at this point. I very well remember back in the day on Discord when I joined and there was only Light mode and I was so happy to see a lot of features being implemented we wanted.
I was so happy when I could actually pick a name I wanted when I joined and wasn't met with 1000 messages on how variations of my name are taken.
Edit here: I actually have given this a bit of though I've talked with people who are adamant this change will bring "more individuality", but I simply am not convinced.
I just want to stress this even further, even if I am not able to explain this more throughoutly I know will reduce individuality and bring a 1000-times WORSE sign-up expereince. I can from experience say, my name is a very general name and the amount of times I've attempted to sign up to a website, only to be told my name and all it's subsequent variations are taken, is too many to count and at some point I've just given up. I actually did exactly that yesterday - I absolutely loathe signing up for any website, as often times even my realname.lastname is taken.
So, think of it this way: My name on Discord is a very common word, "Rain". I signed up in July 2015, and I was already informed by people in the Discord Town Hall that my name is already taken. Great, so signing up early made no difference in getting the username and identity I like. Now comes the fun part: because, let's assume, there is 9998 other Rain accounts, how can we decide who is the "only" Rain? Sure, we can make our names as "Rain.." "_rain_" "rrraaaain" and so on, but at that point it's just so much more convoluted than anything else. It's why I loathe Instagram; My name (literal first-middle-last) name taken there, and I know plenty of people with he same issue so they end up with "looooong-words" to go around it. And that's still so not fun.
But even so - especially without username culling or deleting inactive usernames: do you realize half instagram handles are just people "squatting" on them, where they took the username and deactivated their account so they can say they have a rare name?
And now let's think of the other aspect. Maybe for some reason my usernames elsewhere are "RainTheDiscordUser" becasue just Rain was taken. I have no social media connected to my Discord, because I don't care. However, because I use this same username elsewhere due to the fact that the username I want has been taken everywhere else (which is, again, such a common thing), now the barely-above-TOS age person who find me can just google me and get the rest of my information because all the other usernames are taken. Yeah, sure, I can switch my name to "Rainthewqjasjas2190892311" but now it defeats the purpouse you wanted in the first place of people "finding you easier".
OR, better yet - let's say I have a rare name like only "Rain" under the pomelo sysem. Because of the username, people who break the TOS with self-bots (or other malicious bots) finds a way to keep a list of me, like a Twitter feed - in which servers I am in, in what servers I like to talk with. Maybe they realize I am friends with "Sunnydays" and hey are not so used to tech. So Sunnydays get's compromised - and suddenly my private server where hey are in gets compromised too with all the data raked and the person who managed to phish Sunnydays is threatening me to release all my information unless I give them my username. This has happened before for a friend of mine - not on Discord. A man died because his name was Tennessee on Twitter and someone Swatted him. Do we really need this issue? No.
Granted, digital fooprint is a thing, but it's absurd to think someone wouldn't talk about their peronal life with their friends on an instant messaging platform. And keep in mind, cybersecurity is a field that changes by month - maybe you and I are smart enough to roll our eyes at this, but why do you think scams work? Because that one person out of 1000 fell for it. Hence, always assume all threats are the worst kind of threat.
I can't stress it enough how this current username system is good, and this change is so ridiculous.
I can understand every code - if built flimsily or pushed to prod on a patch - comes with a detriment and potentially huge issues that may flare up later on, but considering several places, such as Microsoft or Activision Blizzard, has started implementing the discriminators or have them so I'm sure you could be able to cooperatet with them to figure out how to fix the discriminator system. Or better yet: add a new discriminator number, or two.
Edit: I somehow randomly realized that Discord already has ID's - your unique ID. When you do use support or right-click your name you are able to copy your ID, so again, using the argument that this makes the database easier - why on earth wasn't the database run on ID's instead of name#discrims then?
- As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular, more problems have emerged. The technical and product debt we incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people.
Okay, so. That sounds like it can be fixed with a dedicated, motivated and understanding team of programmers. Re-writing the code from scratch will suck, but discriminators - like Discord said themsevles - is a part of Discord so why remove it?
- The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.
- Your friend says they changed their name to “vernacular” but actually it’s “𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖆𝖈𝖚𝖑𝖆𝖗” and you have trouble finding them.
That sounds like a non-issue. I have a very generic name - Rain, as you can see - which I identify with and I know plenty of other people with their name as "Rain". The point is literally so you don't find me unless you know me. Yes, I pay for the discriminator, but even then if someone adds me it's because it's intentional.
People with Zalgo in their name has it because they have it in their name. I'm sure it's not because they pressed the wrong buttons but it's intentional. However, I get that this comes with technical difficulties and could open up Discord to vulnerabilities; so why not just forbid special characters in the Discriminator username? Not optimal, but then most people would not need to change their name.
- You try to share your username outside of Discord. Unfortunately, you either can’t remember the discriminator, have to explain which letters are uppercase and lowercase, or have to try to specify which special characters your name uses.
- You meet someone IRL that you want to talk to on Discord, and they say “I’m Phibi Eight Nine Three Six!” You go home and add “phibi#8936” only to find out you added the wrong “Phibi” because your new friend’s username is actually “PhIBI#8936”.
This is a non-issue? I'm pretty sure that having my name as Rain#0000 is easier to remember than Rain12451245 or R41N12412 since I'm quite sure that my name will be taken the moment this change rolls out. The same way goes for everyone who has a generic name: I know plenty of people named Mike, Jack, Jake, Kim, Tom... I guess we're not allowed to have the name we want anymore, eh?Not only that, but from a cybersecurity perspective this sucks as it increases phishing attempts: I knew someone who on Instagram got a 3-letter name, their real name, by some sheer luck. They keep getting random people adding them, DM:ing them, tagging them in pictures, the phishing attempts are constant. They are never having a calm moment. So now you're subjecting the select few people who are lucky enough to get the name to constant harassment and phishing attempts because you're opening a black market for "fancy usernames". So much for individuality!
- You want to use a common name like “Mike” or “Jane” but there are already 9,999 Mikes or Janes so you’re blocked from that name altogether.
This... is the point. Sometimes I don't want to add people and just tell them my first name on Discord. This is for my own safety as a woman on the internet.
And if I stream, I don't want people to find my account and add me. What is going to happen to streamer mode now, when streamers will have people adding them the moment their url leaks? Or if they take the username on Discord so people don't impersonate them and then get targeted? Or better yet - they don't get the username because someone else got it and now they are being impersonated? This by design is already a terrible choice.
- You like to change your username a lot and get rate limited.
A non-issue. I've not changed my name because I like my name but I used to change my name occasionally because I want to feel comfortable in my name. Make it so that you can change your username once a month then, like on Twitch.
- More than 40% of you either don’t remember your discriminator or don’t even know what a discriminator is. That’s a big problem when discriminators are required to add a new friend.
Funny you mention that - I only lurk Discordapp whenever there's a happening (like this). How was the data collected? What statistics are you used? How did you vet the data that it's 40%? Because I sure as day never got a questionaire on my Discord client, nor did any of my friends or anyone in several huge servers I am in (totaling almost 300k people). How do we know your one linked anecdotal post where the person asking what the code is called isn't asking what it's just named? For example, there are several thigns I don't know the name of but I understand what it does and understand how it works.
Not only that, but with a quick look at the user's profile, this user seems to be - this user is allegedly just around the age of 13.. so it's expected they don't know what a discrim is but understand what it does.
So if we're going to use reddit's Discordapp as a reference, why does it turn out everyone posting on the subreddit says they don't like this change, even your own staff? Or, I don't know, when a staff mentions Discrims as a better option?
- Across Discord, almost half of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with, mostly because users enter an incorrect or invalid username due to a combination of missing discriminator and incorrect casing.
That's happened to me too, but I don't exactly find this to be an issue - it doesn't bother me in the slightest because it's the point. If someone truly wants to reach out to me, like a friend, they will find me. Otherwise I do not find their friend request to be important.
But if this is such a crucial point: why not implement friend codes or friend invite codes like Steam or Hoyoverse then? Let people copy a link from the settings where, when pressed, they will send a friend invite to the person they want. And this would work like a server invite; but for yourself. Granted, there may be issues that friends lists needs to be limited and only X invites a day should be sent to avoid bots, but that's not a bad thing.
- We decided at one point that the most important issue to solve was case-sensitivity and special characters, so there could be only one phibi#8936, instead of allowing permutations like PhIBI#8936, and PHibi#8936.
- [...] Unfortunately, we found that nearly one-third of our active users would be forced to change their name just to accommodate this. Meanwhile, people from regions where non-alphanumeric characters are common in names, such as Asia, would have difficulty fully representing themselves.
- [...] We came to the conclusion that if we were going to ask a lot of our users to make a change, we needed a more comprehensive and robust long-term solution - one that gives people the power to have a Display Name they can change anytime with very relaxed rate limits. Think of them like a global nickname.
Okay. But having one third of people change their username because it's case-sensitive, in order to accomodate the systemt, is better than having 1000 people change their username to accomodate one. So you're basically going to alienate entire regions such as Asia with this new system because...?
Edit here: With a lil bit of research it turns out Discord has started flourishing in Japan due to the fact that they can use kanji, kana and hiragana in their names as most other apps do not allow this. This is a MASSIVELY Americacentric change limiting characters to only latin letters a-z . _ 0-9 and I can forsee huge negative market impact due to this change.
Yes, I understand lack of language skills and knowledge of potential vulnerabilities that can exist within other alphabets exist, however, this seems to alienate a huge part of your userbase. No keyboard is coming to come with 15k+ symbols installed but limiting it to the American English alphabet only is just... bad.
However, again, this could simply be solved with a friend invite code like Steam or Hoyoverse has. Or better yet: make a lil tutorial like Clippy when someone new joins Discord on how to use Discord and where you can invite people and so on. Not only that, I've used Blizzard's services for years as I'm an avid video gamer and I've never, ever had issues with the Discrim tag there. Yes, it has 6 numbers instead of 6 but I remember those numbers even if I've not played any games there for years: I highly doubt someone "forgets" their 4 numbers on Discord as your SIM PIN, Bank code etc. usually has 4 numbers. But again, if you truly want to "Patch" a consequence: make discrims longer to 6 digits. Going from 4 to 6 discrim numbers, with a quick google, gives this:
"A four digit PIN has 10,000 possible combinations. I know that sounds pretty impressive, but it's actually quite easy to break using various electronic methods. However, a six digit pin has a whopping 1 million possible combinations". That sounds like a huge upgrade to me which would patch the issue of only 9999 people being able to have the number!
You've truly not thought about the end-user perspective here; the average Joe and average Rain is not going to get the username they want. You, as a [inset high title] will probably always get any name you want with the contacts but we here on the bottom are just going to be left to fend for ourselves where our individuality is being stripped away.
And last but not least,
- We recognize that this is a big change. There may be hiccups with this process, and it may be tough to part ways with that “#0001” that’s meant a lot to you over the years. We’ll be doing everything we can to manage things as smoothly as possible.
- Jason and I truly believe this is the right thing to do to help more people hang out with their friends on Discord, which is what we’re all about
You started out by saying that you wanted Discord to be a place where you can express your individuality, and now you're removing it. How on earth can you sit and write this blog post expecting it to go well, when it's clear you don't even want this change to happen? Who greelit this?
There needs to be a change in Discord management where the people who suggested this change - all the way down to whoever greenlit this - needs to go.
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And last but not least, think of this from a security perspective:
- A huge black market has now been opened for rare usernames: People with rare, small or otherwise fancy usernames will be relentlessly targeted. Scams will go up. Impersonations will go up.
- Swatting and other targeted harassment: There are plenty of stories on Reddit about people getting swatted because someone else wanted their username.
- Stalking: as a woman on the internet, I've been subjected to people stalking me. Going through all my posts to find one username and then intimidate me. I've had to delete or deactivate so many of my accounts because I don't want to be found under one name. I don't want Discord - my safe space to talk for people - to be targeted by people because of my name.
- Government surveillance: People in hostile countries - for example, where LGBTQ+ people are oppressed - may use Discord under a name that's common and change their name often becasue of said oppression. Now they are only stuck with one username and it makes it unsafe for them to talk to their friends. This is not only limited to LGBTQ people: you are now putting people in authoritarian dictatorships under danger too. People who speak out about their government, people who share information against their government, people organizing protests; all a pilar of democracy taken away.
- Scams and impersonations: related to the black market, but also going to see a huge amount of "youtubers" on this platform that's actually just not them. Or it is them and they can't be left in peace. Either way, scams will go up because of the rare usernames.
- Removes individuality and in general sense of security. Just yeah.
And last but not least, this will be a larger one:
Children will be targeted and their safey put in danger. This is something that I realized as I was reviewing and finalizing this post, but a huge reason other social media platforms have obscured and removed a lof of public data is becasue of children. Discords TOS is 13, which is understandable - the name change is great as if you get targeted by creeps at that age you can block them and change your name quickly. Or make a new account with a new name so you can keep your individuality, but be out of reach from the creeps.
It's very well known there are bots and other kinds of creeps making lists and keeping tabs of people. Bots can scrape the internet for known minors and make a list of them - which makes it easier for creeps and predators to contact them. And now with the new pomelo system, minors will be disproportionately targeted and disadvantaged because they can't escape the grip of predators as easily as before.
I'm sure I don't need to write more elaborately on this, but how was this overlooked by any of your teams?
---
I'm ending my post by linking this post on reddit, that nailed it.
Please do no implement or push this change into production.
116 -
God damn it Discord can you do something right for once
You had a good system, don't freaking eradicate it109 -
1+ by fatrio
108 -
such a terrible idea
100 -
+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 -
like I (the original sender of this message) said on discord:
Respectfully, this is a terrible update. Please consider not doing this not just for the aesthetic reasons (because honestly, it's very ugly - discriminators look better) but LARGELY because now it's going to be a race to pick our preferred usernames. People are going to be hacked because others will want their usernames. Content creators are going to be affected in a big way too - a lot of them buy Nitro specifically so they can have contentcreator#0001. Now they'll be REALcontentcreator or something silly when someone inevitably takes their username first.
Monetarily, this is also a bad move for YOU. A very big chunk of people buy nitro specifically so they can have their own custom discriminators. Aesthetic means a lot to people. It also makes it so that more of us can share the same username, which is what we all love.
I don't really see how this makes it easier to add friends. If I want a friend to add me, it takes a whole 3 seconds longer to tell them my discriminator numbers. We don't want to look like other social media platforms. The discriminators are what we like and what makes our chosen nicknames unique & personal.
The update is ugly, inconvenient, and will make things a lot more difficult than they need to be for the actual users.
It would be great if you'd let us vote on this, as the people paying you tbh
Change is NOT always better. Don't fix what isn't broken.
ETA: I cancelled Nitro. I encourage others to do the same if you're considering it :)90 -
No one wants this update. No one asked for it. I partially got Nitro, especially in the beginning, just to mess around with those little numbers. My username is so basic but it’s special to me, I’ve had it for almost forever. Yk how many other “me” is out there? And seriously, using the excuse that we’re gonna forget the 4 numbers next to our username isn’t good enough. What other pros are there? What’s the real reasoning? This isn’t preventing or solving anything, this is making things worse. (Please refer to the thread as to WHY this is bad.) I had yet to see a bad update from Discord, but this takes the cake.
86
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