Discord's Recent Announcement made a lot of people mad, mostly because of Hyrum's Law - users were relying on unintended observable behavior in the original username system, and are mad that their use-cases are being broken despite very good evidence that the current system is problematic. I think the major issue here is that Discord didn't go far enough, and as a result, it's confusing users who are unaware of the technical and practical reasons for the username change, or what a username is even for.
TL;DR usernames in the new system are more like friend codes than usernames; Discord should treat them as such
The note at the end about the new system working as a URL system for user profiles is interesting, because around the time the change was announced I saw some people theorizing that the change is rolling out because Discord wants to implement some kind of profile page. pure speculation, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do when the rollout is complete.
on that note, someone I know got the pop-up to change their username about a day before I did, and they weren’t able to choose my username – and when I got the pop-up, it auto-suggested my previous username. so it seems there is a pre-reservation system that does a reasonable job of letting people with already-unique usernames keep those.
They auto reserved each username based on account age and how long you’ve been subbed to Nitro as a tie breaker; but that info was buried pretty deep in like one of the announcments. With special exceptions for ““influencers””.
The note at the end about the new system working as a URL system for user profiles is interesting, because around the time the change was announced I saw some people theorizing that the change is rolling out because Discord wants to implement some kind of profile page. pure speculation, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do when the rollout is complete.
on that note, someone I know got the pop-up to change their username about a day before I did, and they weren’t able to choose my username – and when I got the pop-up, it auto-suggested my previous username. so it seems there is a pre-reservation system that does a reasonable job of letting people with already-unique usernames keep those.
I think they definitely could’ve made a profile page while keeping the discriminator around. Something like
discord.com/u/diamondburned/4507.(For various reasons
diamondburned#4507is not too ideal for a URL, but it’s a small difference. Right?)They auto reserved each username based on account age and how long you’ve been subbed to Nitro as a tie breaker; but that info was buried pretty deep in like one of the announcments. With special exceptions for ““influencers””.