While the world stays focused on Twitter and its continuing troubles, there are a number of other social sites that are flourishing. Discord is one of those sites, but a new change has users having fits, with some saying the site is copying Twitter in the worst way.
On Wednesday, Discord announced it was “changing our username system to make it easier for you to connect with your friends and to give you more control over your identity on Discord!” Basically, since 2015, Discord usernames have been case-sensitive, with a number attached – called a discriminator.
“This lets you have the same username as someone else as long as you have different discriminators or different case letters,” the company said. “However, this also means you have to remember a set of 4-digit numbers and account for case sensitivity to connect with your friends.”
Discord said it wanted to “make it easier” to find friends while allowing users to still use their preferred names on the site. How is it doing this? By “removing discriminators and introducing new, unique usernames (@username) and display names.”
Does that @ symbol look familiar? It should, because that’s what Twitter uses for its own usernames. Discord said names have to change from “discriminators” to “(@username).” While it’s getting rolled out slowly, the change is mandatory for all users.
The thing is, the whole discriminator thing is why a lot of people gravitated to Discord in the first place. While Twitter is meant to be social, and for users to be rewarded by getting attention, Discord is a different beast.
Discord demonstrated permitted characters for the change:
- Latin characters (a-z)
- Numbers (0-9)
- Certain special characters
- Underscore ( _ )
- Period ( . )
It also shared restrictions:
- Usernames must be at least 2 characters and at most 32 characters long
- Usernames are case insensitive and forced lowercase
- Usernames cannot use any other special characters besides underscore ( _ ) and period ( . )
- Usernames cannot use 2 consecutive period characters ( . )
- (.a.b. is allowed, a..b. is not allowed)
- Usernames are unique to each user and no two users can share the same username
- Usernames (and Display Names) must adhere to our Community Guidelines. Some examples of Usernames that are not permitted include:
- Usernames used to impersonate Discord, Discord staff, or Discord system messages
- Usernames used to impersonate an individual, group, or organization
- Usernames that attack other people or promote hate
- Usernames that contain sexually explicit language
Well, that’s a lot of rules. Unsurprisingly, this news was not met with fanfare from users. The most common refrain? Well, take a look.
And that’s not the end of the rant. “Also seriously this is a MASSIVE break and will wreck a LOT of long-standing (like decades old at this point) links people have had to your system, business cards, etc.”
The main point of contention is losing a name because it gets claimed by someone else during the rollout of the change. Another issue is the only latin characters. “[It] sucks to be you if you’re from a non-US country that uses more than 7-bit ASCII and enjoyed that Discord had first-class Unicode support before,” WolfWings said.
Is that the only unhappy camper? Not by a longshot.
This user commented on their own post with a nice dig: “[Discord] i hope you’re proud of this awful system.”
Others are asking for at least a reevaluation.
This user said the change is antithetical to what the site is all about.
“Discord is not Twitter,” they said. “I don’t need or want public exposure on it.”
Change is never a welcome proposition to legacy users of a site, we all get that. However, with this type of backlash it seems like Discord is moving away from what made it popular in the first place. On the other hand, Twitter is failing and it’s only a matter of time before another site steps up and delivers what Twitter used to provide. It could very well be Discord.