discord’s new username system
Discord is moving to a new username system. In general, the blog post explaining the reasoning for the change doesn’t seem to be thought through at all.
the problem to solve
The blog post goes on to complain no one knows how to add friends. Specifically…
Across Discord, almost half of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with, mostly because users enter an incorrect or invalid username due to a combination of missing discriminator and incorrect casing.
This isn’t a great experience, and we want to fix it. We want Discord to be a fun, easy place to hang out with friends, and it’s often just too difficult or complicated to connect with the people you care about.
So what’s the best way to fix this problem? Discord claims that the best way to fix this problem is to make it easier to type a name when one is verbally communicated to you. I think they are completely wrong.
the new system
First, I need to briefly mention how the new system works. You can read about the specifics of the new system in their corresponding help article, but I will describe an abridged version of it briefly here for convenience and in case of link rot.
Usernames may only contain…
- Latin characters
atoz - Numbers
0to9 - Underscore
_ - Period
.
…and only one account may have a particular username.
They also try their best to claim that a username is just and only a technical necessity.
Think of this merely as a technical necessity. This username will be used only for connecting with other users (friending) and telling users apart when you check their profiles.
I think this is the main mistake Discord is making here. It seems obvious to me that many people will treat this as a way to identify themselves and not as merely a way to exchange contact details. (See: A Group is Its Worst Enemy)
the failure
The new system fails to address the problem they are trying to fix.
You try to share your username outside of Discord. Unfortunately, you either can’t remember the discriminator, have to explain which letters are uppercase and lowercase, or have to try to specify which special characters your name uses.
Here’s why:
- It is not easy to verbally communicate many usernames. For example, you can’t translate the spoken words “dot foobar two” to one canonical username. You’d have to disambiguate between
dotfoobartwo,.foobartwo,.foobar2, etc. What about “four words all uppercase”? How do you spell “kristen” or “christen” anyway? - What if you prefer to have a non-english name or don’t know English? There is not exactly one way to romanize a foreign name — in fact, there are often multiple romanization standards for each language.
- If you have a common username, you will now be forced to change your username to something else that you will now have to remember.
additional benefits
They also claim this new system will provide additional benefits.
This username will be used only for connecting with other users (friending) and telling users apart when you check their profiles.
But you can change the username twice every hour, meaning that on its own, it will be useless for verifying someone’s identity. What if I know @foo is a user I should keep my eye on, but then they change their username to @bar?
a better solution
The problem they wanted to fix was making adding friends easier, but I feel like there is one obvious solution they did not consider (or at least, fail to mention the consideration of in their blog post): friend code systems.
Like the Nintendo Switch or Steam, give everyone a meaningless number or code which can be exchanged either as a string or as a scannable QR code in order to add someone as a friend.
This code will not have meaning and is very unlikely to be read by the user as a part of their identity and instead seen as merely a way to exchange contact details.
it’s a bad choice
All in all, this new policy seems like a weirdly bad move to make. First of all, communicating a username to someone verbally is a very specific, narrow use case. I’m not at all certain that this is a major problem for most users. Maybe I’m wrong and a majority of users want to add people on Discord while meeting up for the first time in person AND they also don’t have their phones available. But this seems unlikely to me.
And, not only does the new system fail to address this problem, it opens the box for other problems I haven’t even brought up yet, such as the squatting and commodization of desired usernames.
Discord has identified a problem and, without thinking about the problem critically, chosen the wrong solution.
