Discord username changes have gamers worried

A race to reserve Discord usernames has begun.

Starting in the next two weeks, millions of Discord users will have to say goodbye to their old four-digit names. Discord requires everyone to take up a new shared handle at the platform level. For Discord, this is a move toward mainstream social networking conventions. For some users, though, this is a change to the basics of Discord He is – A shift that is as much about culture as it is about technology.

Discord has historically treated usernames with a numeric suffix system. Instead of requiring a completely unique handle, it allowed duplicate names by adding a four-digit code known as a “discriminator” — think TheVerge #1234. But earlier this week, it announced it was changing course and moving toward unique identifiers that look like handles. “@” similar to Twitter.

Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevsky Acknowledge the change It will be “tough” for some people, but he said discriminators have proven to be very confusing. He noted that more than 40 percent of users do not know their unique number, with the result that “nearly half” of all friend requests fail to connect people with the right person, largely due to errors in typing the numbers.

It’s over on RedditVishnevskiy argued that the new handles wouldn’t even appear in the interface which often since Discord would allow users to set a separate, non-unique display name. By running more than 500 down votes on some of the Reddit responses, he called the original system a “middle-of-the-road scale” and rejected ideas such as simply adding more numbers to the end of a handle. “This was not a change that we decided to make lightly and talked about for many years, trying to avoid it if we could,” he wrote.

During the change, Discord users will have to navigate a process fraught with uncertainty and intense competition. Users will need to wait for an in-app prompt until it is their turn to select a new username, which will eventually be rolled out to all users over “several months”. The company will prioritize users based on their sign-up dates on Discord, so people who have their name “long” will have a better chance of getting the coveted name.

This raises many obvious concerns and thorny questions. Depending on who gets to set usernames first, is there anything to stop people from grabbing the distinguished name of a particularly popular content creator? Should Discord prevent this by keeping usernames of popular content creators, even if they’re not in the top rank? This is a problem for a lot of social networks, but unlike some of the fledgling services that are attracting new users, all of these people are already on Discord — in some cases, they may even be paid subscribers.

In a statement to the edgeDiscord said it will try to navigate the change gracefully for its most popular users. “We have created processes for users with high visibility to secure usernames that will allow them to operate on our platform with minimal risk of impersonation,” said Kellyn Slone, Director of Product Communications. “Users with a permanent working relationship with Discord who manage certain partners, verified servers, or content creators will be able to choose a username before other users to reduce the risk of their account being impersonated.”

Many Discord users will fall outside of these boundaries. “As a creator with a relatively large fan base – subject to username snipe by someone with an account older than me,” artist ZestyLemonswho uses Discord to connect with fans, writes to the edge. “I am not a Discord partner, nor am I famous enough to get their recognition, so I would have absolutely no security from my public grasp.” ZestyLemons note that for people who Do Having coveted names, there is a risk of existence crushed or threatened To give it up — something that happened on Instagram and Twitter.

Discord users now understand that there are a lot of accounts with very similar names, only marked with random numbers at the end. But absolute nouns change this understanding. They encourage people to look for believable usernames – if someone catches @verge (our Twitter handle) on Discord, people might be more inclined to believe it’s us.

This leads people to treat their Discord names as part of a central identity – rather than many names indicated by usersSomething like a private phone number. It forces individuals to take a username that represents them elsewhere before someone else does. This ties everyone on Discord to their online identity, with all the potential downsides — like stalking or a simple sense of exposure — that that entails.

Despite concerns about individual users impersonating each other, the dangers of server moderation are less clear — some Discord server administrators have told the edge They weren’t worried. says Emily, a senior group manager pokemon go The team meets on Discord. The server actually asks people to set server-specific surnames that match their surnames pokemon go Coach’s name, so they don’t rely on discriminators to tell people apart.

But Emily isn’t a fan of change. “It’s problematic that Discord is giving in to the usual social media norms,” ​​they said. “The people doing the discernment were kind of smart… it allows a lot of people [to] Sharing the same name without emphasizing the ‘ideal’ username. Disagreement is a more personal kind of social media. You don’t post publicly in the ether — like Twitter or whatever — so having a clever, easy-to-remember username doesn’t matter.”

SupaIsaiah016, Ann Avid geometry dash player who also runs a small Discord server, agrees. SupaIsaiah016 wrote: “The current username and feature system works perfectly well, and has allowed thousands of people to have the same name on the platform in general.” the edge. “Sites that use handles and display names like Twitter have very different reasons for why they use those systems, because it’s generic social media.”

Part of the problem is simply that Discord is asking its millions of stable users to make a major change to their online identity, and there’s no great way to do that without friction. But there’s also a sense that Discord’s old username pattern made it a different, if heavy, kind of social network. For many users, this was part of the appeal.

“Discord was originally meant to be a messaging app, which a lot of content creators use to separate their online lives from their real personal lives,” ZestyLemons wrote. edge Reader SpookyMulder put it another way in the comments of our original news post. “Discord has a kind of false identity culture,” SpookyMulder wrote. “We tend to value Discord’s anonymity freedom more than usual username identities on social media.”

Whether you’re a Discord user who wants to maintain a sense of anonymity or someone who subscribes to a more shareable and easily recognizable platform, the race is on to get the right username for you. But you have to wait and see where the starting line is.