[DO NOT ADD] Discord Username System
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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this proposed change is abysmally bad. it gets rid of basically the one thing that made discord stand out as a platform, that being the ability to have the same username as someone else. i can't imagine what benefit they see in taking that away.
22 -
Along with all the great points people have made about the problems this will pose, I'd like to add that there's also the issue of what a stunning lack of understanding this exhibits in regards to a huge portion of Discord's userbase. This isn't Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, or any other platform where a huge part of the appeal is creating content and users are there to be seen and discovered. There are plenty of those like that here, yes, but many of us are here for a much smaller community experience. We aren't trying to be found. We enjoy the privacy.
Aside from really enjoying the interface and many of the features, one of the things I like most about Discord is the fact that followers from my social media can't just... look me up and message me or try to add me. I have to actually give them my info because they can't guess my numeric discriminator. I can have a name that friends will recognize when I go to add them, but no one can find me out of the blue. It's great that way. No competition for names, no randos bothering me. That's the way I want my Discord experience. To me, my handle+discriminator is more like a phone number than a social media presence, and that's how I'd like it to stay.
25 -
Bad idea. I'm sick of having to add five random numbers or some symbols to get my desired name. Discrims are perfect for making the set of digits at the end of someone's preferred name orderly. Like instead of @John4428 being available while those who just want to try out this new platform already ending up settling for @John1234894, instead there's an orderly max of 9,999, removing inefficiencies in allocating a name to as many people as possible.
By the way, to get this request up to page 1 of the "Account & Server Management" subcategory when sorted by votes, we need to get around 1,050 upvotes. Let's go admins community!
20 -
Accounts will be stolen/phished more frequently. Considering that there is still no properly secure token storage on PC/Mac, tokens are extremely easy to steal by any app that is given access to any level of storage. Two factor auth won't help you when your token is stolen.
You will be putting an insane amount of pressure on your support team because of people trying to get back stolen accounts. The fact that there are no longer discriminators will cause a boom in the economy of people cracking accounts to sell them for profit. This economy already exists but in a much smaller capacity. Microsoft themselves made the change to add discriminators to already existing usernames to keep people happy and attempt to quell the stolen account economy.
All of this is probably known though, the support article on the change is lazy and self-contradicting. Linking to a 5 day old reddit post of someone who knew the concept of an discriminators, just not what it was called. Half of the article is spent complaining about how discriminators are confusing because they are case sensitive and allow unrestricted unicode, which were just awful intentional choices from the start.
Keep discriminators, limit the characters used in the current usernames, and then allow people to have global display names, it's really not that hard!
21 -
The discriminator is also a great anti-harassment tool as it reduces the ability to just guess a username as you'd also need to hit the 1 in 10k chance of getting the discriminator correct.
The fact that Discord is handing a giant win to harassers is awful.
21 -
Ridiculously bad decision. Cancelled my nitro subscription in protest.
19 -
+1
18 -
Fantastic change
-35 -
Very upsetting. Discord can put all the positive words they want around it, but this will give people LESS control over their username. Numerical discriminators were BRILLIANT. Anybody could use whatever name they preferred thanks to that system, even if over nine thousand other people liked the name too. I'm frankly sickened by the condescension in the announcement, of "numbers were probably hard for your friends and family to remember!", which couldn't be more insulting.
I WILL be canceling my Nitro and server boost subscriptions if Discord really does roll out the username system change. I can live without dancing emojis, but I will not pay to support a platform that thinks it can remove a brilliant unique feature that provided ACTUAL freedom of expression while simultaneously talking down to those users with nonsense like "just add periods and underscores if your preferred name is already taken." What on God's polluted Earth makes you think you can seriously suggest that remembering nonsense like "_._kek._ek_._." is EASIER for "friends and family to remember" than just four unique numbers after our names?
This marks a significant downward turn and I'm not going to keep throwing money at a sinking foundation.
27 -
what an absolutely asinine decision +1
22 -
+1
18 -
This is a horrible idea all around.
23 -
I can’t believe they would even consider this, i’m hoping they’ll go back on it because i do not want this to be social media. Please let me exist in peace and privacy. Please let me use my name without outing myself to everyone. Please let me use my name even if other people would like the same one. None of us want this.
26 -
Why are they just blatantly lying about the reason behind this? If the idea is to make it easier to connect and add people how is adding discord#1234 somehow harder than when someone with a common user name gets theirs taken and you now have to add xxxx_discord_xxxx_xxx!!!1 instead? Just such a blatant lie to justify a terrible change that doesn't need to happen.
27 -
+ 1
it's the fact that the super spooky discriminator numbers will probably still exist, just self-imposed, for me. if you have a simple username (ie, noodle#2929) if you want to keep that username, it's not unlikely that you'll just tack some numbers to the end of it anyway. The "It's simpler, guys! Trust" factor doesn't work, either. Saying "My username is Scottie four nine six three with a capital s" is a lot easier than having to explain that my username is scottielol but the first o is a zero and the Ls are actually just capital Is because of having to have a unique username.
23 -
+1. Hate this!
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I've already added to this thread, but I think I can give a more comprehensive list of just.. why this change is actually nearly as bad as everyone here makes it out to be, especially given Discord's publicly-announced reasons. Allow me to preface this by saying I understand what they were going for, and I do think it's a good idea, but it's the implementation of this that no one likes.
Sharing Information
Pertaining to sharing your profile in spoken communication, Discord says, "unfortunately, you either can’t remember the discriminator, have to explain which letters are uppercase and lowercase" and that the use of non-standard characters can cause errors in locating people.
The idea is fine, make it easier to share information with people you've met in person. But, it's 2023, we can take 3 seconds to pull up this information in a neat format and show it to our friend, or acquaintance. If users cannot remember 4 numbers, how can we expect them to remember their username? And at that, even, I don't think it's reasonable to say that supposedly half of your userbase is entirely unable to use the essential mental ability of recall, literally the first and most basic form of intelligence.Non-Standard Characters
Still about sharing contact information vocally, Discord suggests that it may be difficult if users "have to try to specify which special characters your name uses," since situations where "[Someone says their name is] vernacular but actually it’s 𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖆𝖈𝖚𝖑𝖆𝖗 and you have trouble finding them."
Now, again, this makes sense, most keyboards don't come with all 150K unicode characters (via wikipedia.org), I get it. However, let me pose this; the user could have chosen not to make their username in non-standard characters. The tools to fix this problem are entirely present, and if that party does not feel like resolving this issue, then mark it closed, and move on. This isn't Discord's fault, nor is it their problem to deal with.Common Names
Yes, let's talk about common names. Discord's concern is, "You want to use a common name (...) but there are already 9,999 [users with that name] so you're blocked from that name altogether."
First off, I believe it takes 10,000 (0000-9999), so that's already wrong, unless Discord cannot handle a 0 discriminator (not too far-fetched). Second, you're not locked out with current system, any more so than with proposed fix. This is actually what brought about names like XxUsernamexX in the first place, to my understanding. There just weren't enough picks left, so we started appending random characters that looked reasonable. This problem actually becomes emphasized with new system, as users pick names, the already-existing 10K Johns for example will take names like john, john1, jon, johnathan, xxjohnxx, etc. Now you've locked the already-existing 9,999 out of having the username John, instead of only those after the initial 10K. The Display Name doesn't resolve this, either, since users can already do effectively the same thing with nicknames, and somehow it's a problem now that will be resolved by making it worse.Don't Know What Discriminator Is
You polled a thread of what was initially maybe 40 people and said, "wow, look at the 40% of our userbase that doesn't know what this number is. I can't defend this, at all, quite frankly. The lack of information on what something is doesn't limit its use or functionality. No one ever told users that Discord was a collection of 1's and 0's in a computer, that were compiled from some language that might not even be readable to them, and probably no one explicitly told them, "hey, Discord is a messaging app," and yet we still know how to use the platform. So let me repeat myself, knowing what something is has NO influence on knowledge of how to use it.
If the concern here is that users don't know how to use the discriminator, that's fine, but that's not what was said, or even implied. The message given was, and I quote, "More than 40% of you either don’t remember your discriminator or don't even know what a discriminator is." For what it's worth, the thread linked in this message actively refers to it as something they know how to use, and know about, the poster asked for the name of it. So not only was the polling bad by being misrepresentative of the millions of users on the platform, but it completely misinterpreted intent. Link to subreddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1311wal/what_is_this_code_called/Summary
Look, I know Discord's not changing this. I could argue all day about this, give clear reasoning for why their proposed solutions are bs with sufficient backup and support for claims, and even if I get the entirety of Discord's userbase on-board with this view, nothing will change. Posts on the subreddit and various servers indicate that Discord will force this upon users, regardless. I only want to make the devs second guess their approach, and understand that they've lost business, lost interest, and will be marked as a media platform to be avoided, in much the same way platforms like twitter, twitch, and youtube are becoming.
I would suggest forgoing usernames outright. Discord already has user-IDs, if we need an identifier, use those. Make them a per-account generated string instead, maybe. You could still get rid of discriminators here like you so much want to, and give users access to whatever display name they want. Realistically, no user will be in a conversation with more than one other user that has a given name, so (at)mentions would not be problematic, especially since as of a few years ago, they already are automatically formatted, even when no discriminator is given.
I am ultimately against these changes, since they only create more problems (I can detail in a post below, summarising some fair points raised by the community, and potentially adding my own), and any problems they are solving are either non-issues (ex: not knowing what the discriminator is), or not Discord's problem to solve (ex: users including non-standard characters in their name).
Discord themselves also seem super tone-deaf to their own reasoning for these changes. See linked post here, from tnr saying to basically add a discriminator. Who'd'a thunk. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/136urpb/comment/jiqdm9d/?context=1000Edit History:
- Fixed spelling, formatting
- Added Reddit link to Discord staff member's statement on this29 -
+1
Aside from the stuff everyone else has said with the risks of hacking and the rise of an account blackmarket, it's also just kind of a lame idea overall. The system was never broken, so why fix it?(And I quite like my little numbers to be honest)
22 -
+1 This update should not go ahead.
There's already so many valid points being made about this to the point where everything I want to say has already been said by hundreds of people.
I don't know where the statistics on the blog about people finding the current username system confusing, but I can safely say they aren't real numbers and there are genuinely no positives to this update. It's a short way to remove the uniqueness of discord and move away from it's originality and charm.
Please Discord, listen to the community. We love your application as it is, we don't want unnecessary changes that we don't have a say in. Be different, keep inspiring and inventing, don't be a sheep and follow bad decisions made by other companies.
Just as a bonus, I'm leaving this Reddit post here as I genuinely think it needs to be read by more people, even if it is an extreme case.
Thanks for reading.
I'm not hating on you Discord, I love the application and I genuinely don't know what I'd do with myself without it. However, this needs to be reconsidered and I wanted to voice my opinion that this isn't a good idea.
23 -
this is such a horrible idea, +1
20 -
Please don't do this. The phish spam and impersonation are going to be so bad
18 -
nitro subscription cancelled
+121 -
+1 will not be getting nitro again like I planned.
If I wanted Twitter's username system, I'd simply use Twitter18 -
Don't forget that Discord is doing this because they're looking to incorporate at $15 billion in the stock market. Cancel your Nitro subs to tank that to $0 to remind them that we brought them this success. This is unacceptable, and was done in complete opposition to the community, and they even said as much in their announcement.
Cancel your Nitro subs so we can make sure this doesn't happen.
+124 -
this is genuinely one of the worst ideas you've ever come up with. +1, do not add
the changes here are lazy; will companies get first dibs as everyone expects? how do you stop impersonation? how do you stop people taking up usernames to sell? what are even the positives to this update? the discriminators are a genius idea- long-time, high profile users with nitro get to customize their numbers, that is a HUGE benefit that is going to cost you tons of subscriptions.
new users are not going to like having to add excess characters to their name- it's never easier than simply four numbers, which are often irrelevant as you usually share servers. you don't need the discriminator unless you really have no server- it's just four characters. your sources on the blog convey horrible unprofessionalism and it's clear that you have no idea the ramifications of this. people are willing to swat others for usernames on other sites- beyond that, we didn't come to discord for it to be like the rest. why are you making it like this?
instagram, minecraft, tiktok, the list goes on- this system has proven to be time and time again, pretentious and easily exploited for profit by people who automate taking up usernames. you're losing incentive to subscribe to nitro and bringing in dozens of bad ideas with it.
you're going downhill. don't cater to the technologically illiterate, and absolutely don't cite a random reddit post as your source.24 -
+1, I think this change is a poor decision for many of the reasons already stated here. If this change goes through, I am strongly considering dropping the service entirely, as this might be the final straw to jump ship.
22 -
What a total bozo move from Discord, what, people can't remember a simple 4 didgets? Your entire basis is a small sample size of what 300, and not even a majority of it as your point for a username change? What a joke, thanks Discord for ruining yourself.
22 -
This is the worst thing discord has ever done and its going to cause more problems than it will solve. I know sooo many people who are cancelling their nitro over this horrible idea. its going to cost you money, make everyone upset, and cause more issues in the username system. Cannot believe that the frankly amazing #0000 system is being replaced for this trash
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The change is utterly without merit and I hope to god it was some exec at microsoft that doesn't actually use discord thinking the discriminators looked clunky, not someone at discord who, presumably, actually uses it being so braindead as to think that twitter is a role model.
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+1 a thousand times over. I've never seen such an abysmal idea. I already cancelled my nitro and cited this username change as the reason why. I always loved that the discriminators allowed me to use my username and remain private-- but now being forced to use my public username means anyone can find me at any time? Or otherwise I'm forced to change it and allow the possibility of someone impersonating me as a public artist and scamming people on discord? Really? Discord is NOT my social media! It's where I chat with my friends and I would like it to stay that way!
How is any of this better? "Oh it's too hard to remember" It's four numbers love, it's really not. Even if maybe explaining whats uppercase and whats lowercase is a bit clunky to do verbally, I can live with that! Most of the time I'm sharing my tag through text anyways, so it's really not worth making such a massive change that only brings on more problems! Forcing everyone to have unique usernames means people with common names are going to end up with more complicated usernames, which defeats the purpose of making them "easier to share" in the first place!
Also if there are 9999 Marks on discord which means there can be no more Marks, how is making it so there's only one Mark allowed on discord an improvement? Are you joking?
I can't wait for people to start sniping usernames of prominent figures and using them for malicious purposes, or to start selling desirable usernames, or harassing those with desirable usernames. This is a massive improvement for sure. (That was incredible amounts of sarcasm, by the way. This is an awful idea, if that wasn't clear.)18
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