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Discord has announced that they will be doing away with their current username scheme. In the coming weeks, they plan to make all of their users move over from the previous 4-digit code scheme to new unique names. The reason? Well, they claim that the current system makes it too difficult to find and connect with the people you’re looking for.
As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular, more problems have emerged. The technical and product debt we incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people. The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord co-founder, chief technology officer
Previously, you had a name and a 4-digit discriminator; this allowed many accounts (up to 9,999) to have the exact same name. Now, you’ll have to choose a unique name starting with an “@” entirely comprised of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, a period or an underscore, and no other unique symbols. The one little bonus here is that this is only for usernames; it’s comparable to other sites like Twitter or Instagram. And in turn, you can have your display name be whatever you want (as long as it doesn’t violate the ToS).
Your new Display Name will be how you primarily appear and will be your most prominent form of identity. Think of this as your main name. You will be able to change your Display Name whenever you want, even minute to minute.
Granted, you can’t move over to this new naming system just yet. You’ll have to wait until the app prompts you to do so. And it’s going to go based on when you joined Discord, so expect to wait if you’re not an early adopter.
Reaction has been split; a lot of users don’t want to give up their digits, and are coming up with reasons it,s a bad move (I don’t know enough about Discord to tell you if they’re right). On the other hand, this is probably going to fix a lot of issues when it comes to searching for users.
Source: CNET
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