this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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What did Discord change?
They are changing the way usernames are being handled. Instead of letting them be whatever you want with the identifying tag after it, they are requiring it to be a unique username
Oh right, that change. I personally didn't think that was a big deal. Instead of having Username#1234 now you might have Username_1234. What am I missing?
It’s one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of changes. It’s just a weird one to suddenly push onto a platform, especially when the previous solution is better in every single way
True. But I can somewhat understand why they're changing it. When they started working on Discord they probably didn't think it would blow up the way it did. The use of the discriminator is probably a bit confusing for some less tech savvy people. And @username has pretty much become the standard everywhere 🤷♂️
Someone pointed it out to me recently the discriminator probably isn't the driver for the change. The real driver is they committed a very dumb mistake originally, with regards to capitalization in usernames.
For example, in Discord the user names Hyperz, HyperZ, hyperz, hyperZ, HYperz, etc... can all be distinct usernames.
With the same discriminator? Like Username#1234 and UserName#1234 can both exist? If so, yes that's a rather big flaw.
Yep
Yeah that’s definitely fair. It could make it a pain trying to deal with impersonators as well now that discord has become massive
I feel like if discord just did a better job of explaining it, then there wouldn't be any problem. I've heard it's a problem for content creators as well because they could remain semi anonymous by being pewdiepie#6381 but now they have to be @pewdiepie and actively claim that or else it sells on markets for thousands. That's another problem, now username sellers will be a thing, when they weren't before. Personally I'm kind of upset by this change. If it was about the weird ASCII characters people have in their names, why not restrict it. Most people don't have them so they would be unaffected.
Me too. It also contributes to the inevitable crisis of username unavailability over the years. With the # discriminator you didn't have to worry about running out of your unique username. And it also helps future generations long after we're all gone from this planet.
This is the issue I don't understand. I mean, I get your point. But when you can set your display name to whatever you like on servers anyway, what does it matter what your handle is? I don't think having 1 million Johns with different discriminators is any better than having @john through @john1000000.
Because the name john shows up in your friends list. Just john. Not john8576. Yes the hashtag discriminates it and makes it the primary key, but it isn't shown. Yes you're technically john#8576, but nobody sees that part. You're just john.