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A race to reserve usernames is kicking off on Discord:
Starting in the next couple of weeks, millions of Discord users will be forced to say goodbye to their old four-digit-appended names. Discord is requiring everyone to take up a new common platform-wide handle. For Discord, it's a move toward mainstream social network conventions. For some users, though, it's a change to the basics of what Discord is — a shift that's as much about culture as technology.
Discord has historically handled 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 resemble Twitter-style "@" handles.
Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy acknowledged the change would be "tough" for some people, but he said the discriminators had proven too confusing. He noted that over 40 percent of users don't know their discriminator number, which leads to "almost half" of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person, largely due to mistyped numbers.
Over on Reddit, Vishnevskiy argued that the new handles wouldn't even show up in the interface that often since Discord will allow users to set a separate display name that's not unique. Carrying more than 500 downvotes on some Reddit replies, he called the original system a "halfway measure" and rejected ideas like just adding more numbers to the end of a handle. "This was not a change that we decided to do lightly and have been talking about doing for many years, trying to avoid it if we could," he posted.
During the change, Discord users will have to navigate a process that's fraught with uncertainty and cutthroat competition. Users will need to wait for an in-app prompt for when it's their turn to select a new username, which will eventually roll out to all users over the course of "several months." The company will assign priority to users based on their Discord registration dates, so people who have had their name "for quite a while" will have a better chance to get a desired name.
Users are compelled to choose a common handle to avoid chances of being impersonated
This raises a lot of obvious fears and thorny questions. Depending on who gets to set their usernames first, is there anything stopping people from taking over a particularly popular creator's distinctive name? Should Discord prevent this by holding usernames for well-known creators, even if they're not first in line? This is a problem for a lot of social networks, but unlike with some fledgling service attracting new users, all these people are already on Discord — in some cases, they're probably even paid subscribers.
In a statement to The Verge, Discord said it would be trying to navigate the change gracefully for its best-known users. "We created processes for high-visibility users 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 standing business relationship with Discord who manage certain partner, verified, or creator servers will be able to pick a username before other users in order to reduce the risk of impersonation for their accounts."
A lot of Discord users will fall outside those boundaries. "As a content creator who has a relatively large fanbase — my handle is subject to username sniping by someone with an older account than me," artist ZestyLemons, who uses Discord to connect with fans, writes to The Verge. "I am not a Discord partner, nor am I famous enough to obtain their recognition, so I will absolutely not have security with my public handle." ZestyLemons noted that for people who do get desirable names, there's the risk of being swatted or threatened to give it up — something that's happened on Instagram and Twitter.
Discord users understand right now that there are a lot of accounts with very similar names, distinguished only by random numbers at the end. But absolute names change that understanding. They encourage people to look for believable usernames — if somebody nabs the one and only @verge (our Twitter handle) on Discord, people could be more inclined to believe it's us.
"It's a bummer that Discord's giving in to the usual social media norms."
[...] Despite fears about individual users impersonating each other, the risks for server moderation are less clear — and some Discord server admins told The Verge they weren't worried. "I don't think the change will be a big deal for admins + mods," says Emily, an admin for a large Pokémon Go meet group on Discord. The server already asks people to set server-specific nicknames that match their Pokémon Go trainer name, so they're not relying on discriminators to tell people apart.
SupaIsaiah016, an avid Geometry Dash player who also runs a small Discord server, agrees. "The current username and discriminator system worked perfectly fine, and allowed for thousands of people to have the same name on the platform overall," SupaIsaiah016 writes to The Verge. "Sites that use handles and display names such as Twitter have very different reasons as to why they use those systems, as they are public social medias."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Monday May 08, @07:43PM (13 children)
To be clear, I've never actually used Discord and don't know much about it. That said: Some time back our small company was looking for something to use for IM. We were using Google Hangouts via Pidgin but that became unusable (in part because you can't use it if TFA is enabled). There's just really nothing left out there that's worth a crap, so ultimately I ended up rolling our own using Prosody [prosody.im] on our own server.
Someone in the company had suggested Discord. From what I saw I just did not get why/how a bloated, proprietary POS like that became so big. Still don't get it. Maybe it's better than it appears(?).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @08:05PM
Because Slack is worse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by helel on Monday May 08, @08:37PM (4 children)
The number 1 factor is just luck. There's a whole slew of these chat room/voice chat combination apps out there and having one on hand fills a useful niche for real-time communication. Network effect means it's more valuable for the individual user to be on the same platform as everyone else they're trying to talk to so it was pretty much inevitable that one of them would dominate the market and since they're all largely interchangeable it was just luck of the draw that it was discord instead of slack or gilded or whatever.
As for open source or open standard competition? Walking just one normie through setting up SIP or non-gmail email is a pain in the ass. Getting people to sign up en mass is nigh impossible although maybe Musk has accomplished it for Mastodon? Time will tell.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday May 08, @09:26PM (2 children)
I'm sure you're correct. From what I read I guess gamers tended towards Discord and I suppose that's what made it take off. For anyone whose company is looking for simply IM functionality with things like group "conference" chats etc, prosody has really worked out well for us, and it's easy to set up in pidgin using XMPP.
As soon as anything starts tending towards the travesty called "groupware" I have no interest...don't even get me started. "Groupware" is a great way to end up with a lot of employees who do no real work and spend all their time wasting everyone else's on "groupware"...but I digress.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 09, @05:00AM
I was in a few groups on Slack before touching Discord, but I found Slack to be really cumbersome. Discord is much easier to use.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday May 09, @11:51AM
I've had to use Discord a few times, and in every single case what it was being used for should have been done with a web board. The exchange wasn't instant real-time chat, it was messages covering a range of different topics posted over a period of days or even weeks, but all combined into one infinite-scroll flow of often unrelated gunk that you had to plough through in case something on the one topic you needed to know about had appeared since last time you looked.
So it goes beyond just "is it a good IM platform", it's "is it being used for a purpose that's even remotely close to what it was designed for"?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @09:29PM
The numbers over there certainly have jumped up, but I expect the majority of them who came over to not stay because of "I don't like this because it isn't exactly like Twitter." Heard this for years in the late 90s and early 00s regarding Microsoft. "I hate M$ with a passion and would love to switch to Linux, but for this one thing." People who complain that LibreOffice is confusing because the ribbon buttons aren't the same as Office happily accept a complete redesign when Office changes version numbers. There's a number of different psychological reasons people won't buck the herd, but an additional advantage Twitter has is a huge reluctance due to good old narcissism. It doesn't mater if the only daily "engagements" your tweets get are from your mom and a couple of stalkers, if you have thousands of followers you don't want to give that up and start over somewhere else.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Monday May 08, @09:30PM (3 children)
Socially they targeted gamers early (as early as 6 yr/old roblox players) while technically they kept to port 443 (so no issues with firewalls), allowed self-hosting (no moderation issues) and provided native and in-browser clients to everything under the sun.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09, @02:24AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 09, @08:06AM
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412085582359-Text-Channels-Text-Chat-In-Voice-Channels#h_01FMJT3SP072ZFJCZWR0EW6CJ1 [discord.com]
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 10, @07:56PM
I use live text and video regularly on Discord in groups of about three to six.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday May 09, @08:06AM (1 child)
It's basically IRC with too many colors, running in your browser with 15 layers of Web-two-oh garbage and of course data collection thrown in. You're not missing much.
I have a Discord account to get onto the chatroom of a popular open-source project, because the author of said project is big on Discord and doesn't like to reply to bug report on Github. So when I need answers to my technical question, I have to log into this awful server - complete with reCaptchas, advertisement, and a million scripts to block in Noscript. And then it's just IRC. Really, that's all it is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09, @10:04AM
This is more or less my experience. It's a shitty IRC client with to many mods installed.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 09, @01:51PM
As far as Instant Messaging clients, etc. go, it's the least poop. It was also marketed hard towards gamers and is "simple" to use. Certainly easier than getting your tech-challenged gaming buddies to use IRC or something like that. Plus they have easy video and audio chat. I've been able to setup my own private server and use audio/video(game streaming) easily, without being on some giant channel as well. Probably the biggest thing that got me on Discord was the fact that Dungeon Defenders has a community server (pretty big server) that keeps the original alive and kicking. After that, it was easier to use than Steam Chat. Steam Chat is that tacked on after-thought that's probably serviced by a 2-main team or something. It's buggy and crap. Never-mind, it's probably at least a 3 person team, 1 to manage, 1 to sub-manage, and 1 to code.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by EJ on Tuesday May 09, @12:58AM
I don't know why they're making me change my username.
My actual, legal name is "Robert'); DROP TABLE Usernames;--"
I use that on every site!