why do you not have employees to listen to users

Go message support team; very cool and good. Write honestly far too much with a too laggy device that makes every word painful, but it's worth it because someone's actually reading it.

Thanks for writing in. I'm sorry for any inconvenience.
 
Our general support team is unable to provide insight regarding your inquiry and I truly apologize for the trouble at this time.

This is not the reply of a human being that read my statement. It's doubly insulting because in the reply before it

We believe this change will be a positive one for the community, and we remain open to feedback and suggestions about how to improve it.

But, you know, if that was the case, they'd have noticed the state of this site over the last month.

So, let me paste my post here for posterity.

this change to our username system was implemented to simplify the process of connecting with your friends on Discord. 

This change makes it *harder* to connect with friends on discord.

The reasons for this are a few.

First, instead of being able to use the name "melgibson", I now have to -decide- some random additional characters or modifications to it, which slows down saying it out loud and creates confusion on how to pronounce the name. "Mel Gibson, but the o is a zero" is a sentence that requires remembering the context and the whole sentence to have a chance of successfully adding someone. "Mel Gibson, tag 3187" is not particularly *easy* to remember, but it is easier to digest because it's compartmentalizable. Name Name Numbers, generically, is something as a 'chunk of information' humans are well trained to recall for pretty lengthy periods. So the previous system works *slightly* better for the person receiving the information. I won't deny that it's *slight*, and for anyone who manages to have a non-mangled name that is a word chain or name-like -- what precious few of those there will be -- it'll be significantly easier.

Second, I now have two different names with my account: a "user account name", which is the one people need to know to add me... and a "global nickname", which is the one I would *actually consider as my name*. It'd be the one I remember, which is a problem, because now instead of having to remember "my actually desired name, plus four random digits", I have to remember "what arbitrary combination of garbage did I have to modify my name with to make it work". This change means that I, the communicator, am more likely to not remember what I need to know.

For an infinitely funnier way of explaining this, compare the passwords "Tr0ub4dour%3" and "CorrectHorseBatteryStaple", courtesy of xkcd. What this change does is make the average user have to use the former as their username, instead of being able to conveniently just say "Troubadour", one uncommon word; and have four digits appended.

If I have "Dil4p1d4t1on" as my simplified username, but "Dilapidation" as my set name, I'm not going to remember that it's the former and I'm *extremely* confident that that holds true for most users. The thing that makes discriminators so nice and clean is the very fact that I can, in fact, just have the name I actually wanted, and that's the name that I see in all locations. It's "invisible", which directly causes the "people don't know their discriminator" issue...which means that you did a good job with making it be a non-issue. People see it, and ignore it, forgetting it existed! That means that to all thousands of users choosing "Chris", they ALL got the exact name they wanted and *don't feel bad* about the tag being there. "It's just how the platform works".

Third, I have friends who use characters besides a-z0-9 in their name. Like, they use spaces. And diacritics. And *non english characters*. I sure want to tell my boon companion Arisa that she now can't be "ありさ" to respect her heritage and now has to be "arisa"; and then on top of that having to find something to salt her name with because some person in management has made a stupid decision and can't see that it's stupid.

Fourth, if I do happen to have a nice clean name, I probably have to change my settings so people can't actually add me without having a server in common, because I will get so many requests from malicious actors. That means that now the *new* person has to tell *me* the mangle-name, instead! This is far worse than just giving four numbers at the end of an actually reasonable handle.

This update also eliminates the need to memorize the randomized 4-digit discriminators that were automatically assigned to you with our previous username system.

Every time I wanted to add someone on discord, I could open the application and text them the number if I didn't remember my numbers. While an inconvenience, the discriminator or tag was not a blight because everyone was forced to have one.

The change means that now the average user has a mangled name. This is ugly and unaesthetic, and makes it so that a number of the users who do not get garbage names are going to be harassed over their possessing these clean names because, shockingly, people want to have the name they wanted to have, and there are all too many who will happily be terrible people, slinging every insult and slur known if it has a chance of increasing their odds of getting it. And it will work, and will make people feel terrible about themselves.

The discriminator or tag system means that every person has the "same" level of additional ugly applied to their name, which means that everyone is equal and the probability that everyone gets to have the exact name they actually wanted is maximized.

We believe this change will be a positive one for the community, and we remain open to feedback and suggestions about how to improve it.

Check your support site for the last month. Please. It's filled with "don't do this", and hundreds of better thought out opinions than I can elaborate on adequately. Actually dozens of threads are there all saying "this sucks", one of which has rocketed past all previous threads in the support site's lifetime in terms of total votes.

I don't see how anyone with a brain can't see how miserable this is.

If you have any other questions or need assistance with anything else, please feel free to let me know here

how do i guarantee you aren't also a bot or that tickets won't get silently closed
this isn't specific to this but just something i've had concerns with tickets in the past and i've been wondering if there's anything an end user can do because i've  seen it get complained about basically everywhere for all platforms 

it's super disheartening when it happens

just like how this change sucks