lilac 💀🦋🌺

@lilac

i'm lilac

she/her
teagrrl.dev/

professional games industry web engineer and games hater

lilac 💀🦋🌺@lilac5/5/2023, 2:45 AM

dante, personally @dante

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 12:12 AM

how can i be as irritating as possible to the right people about what an incredibly bad and disappointing idea the discord username thing is

discord is about group spaces i could give a fuck about discoverability

but if you are having trouble sharing your discord handle then i mean you could always change your discord handle to something easier to share

and then if your chosen handle is already taken, no problem! there can be duplicates thanks to the discriminator

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 12:27 AM

discriminators are clever, they make it hard to guess someone's handle even if you know what they usually go by, and they make discord handles immediately identifiable at a glance. i don't know why you would give up identity protection and brand recognition™ just so Mike#6137 is now mike6137

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 12:49 AM

"with the current system, what do you do when there are already 10,000 mikes?"

i dunno man, with the new system, what do you do when there's ONE fucking mike?

the answer is that you pick some ugly, totally arbitrary junk to staple onto your name. maybe you're mike_ now or mike2 or mike. or mikearoni or realmike or anything else. who knows

you know what would help make this more memorable and less ugly? if the junk were taken out of the name entirely and used a standard format, so it's always there and we always know what it looks like. a four-digit number, perhaps

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

X @xkeeper5/4/2023, 12:22 AM

hey

have you linekd your work / school / fortnite account yet

hey

Plum @plumpan5/4/2023, 1:04 AM

LINK YOUR PSN ACCOUNT SO YOU CAN BECOME THE One True Gamer

ruby @srxl5/4/2023, 12:49 AM

my username is 4 letters. there's no way in hell i'm getting that claimed. this sucks

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 12:50 AM

i don't want to be lexyeevee again

GFD @GFD5/4/2023, 1:05 AM

3 letters! and i used to have a super old account which would get close‐to first dibs now, but Discord deleted it. :c

Céleste ΘΔ&@pinkie5/4/2023, 1:02 AM

it especially seems odd because discord... already has ways to add people as friends without worrying about their exact username? the local search function on mobile is how i regularly add people i meet in person, and online the sorts of people that i'm adding as friends can just type their username and let me copy-paste it, if i'm not just already in a discord server with them because most of my friends on discord are people i've met through groups?

even beyond all the issues in implementing a username system, it really feels like the problems that it purports to solve aren't ones that really exist

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

Stryx-9 @hootOS5/4/2023, 12:39 AM

i never thought about it like that. i've not been mass-attacked by people who would try an guess my handle to harass me directly, so my main feelings toward the shift is positive because it means i don't have to worry about people getting my discord handle wrong if i tell it to them verbally or finding the wrong account or something like what sometimes happened on twitter (until i nuked my accounts lol).

but, to be honest, it's only been an issue like... once. so, i dunno. there's a lot of cons for such a seemingly meaningless switch like this, so i imagine there had to be some reason the switch was made? like maybe it made the backend messy as shit and unoptimized or something? but i dont know, i could be putting too much trust into a tech company to make wise choices that aren't just impulsive and based off of one person's personal experience rather than their average users.

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 12:42 AM

consider:

when you have a zillion users, switching to regular usernames means that almost no one's username is actually just the name they normally go by

so almost everyone is going to have some junk attached

currently, that junk is standardized, and always present: it is a four-digit number

after this change, that junk is both optional and completely arbitrary. are you hoot? are you hootos? are you hoot_os or hoot.os or was it hootos_? are you something else entirely because all of those were taken?

ash @hierarchon5/5/2023, 4:41 AM

under the current system, "hootos", "hootOS", "hoot os", and "hoot OS" are also all valid identifiers that refer to separate usernames. taking a look at my friends list, I see about half of them have at least one plausible 'variation' (insert/remove space, capitalization), and I have a couple people on my friends list where I could probably give literally a hundred plausible different variations on their username that would be pronounced identically. the problem's already present.

eevee @lexyeevee5/5/2023, 8:47 AM

requiring a single global identifier for everyone will surely only make it worse though

and discord could collapse all those together if it wanted to. surely that would be a less disruptive change

ash @hierarchon5/5/2023, 11:23 PM

imo both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. the fact that they're changing suggests they have reasons (user studies, internal metrics, whatever) to believe that the global unique username approach is worth the pain of change. here's one argument for it: discord is the only online communication platform where if i met someone in person, i would have to pull out my phone to tell them how to add me, because i don't have my discriminator memorized.

like, my heuristic here is that if it worked the other way and then they changed it to work the way it does now, i think people would probably be about equally mad, which suggests that it's more change aversion.

Annie D @ann-arcana5/4/2023, 12:40 AM

I already have enough problems with creeps and spammers sliding into my DMs out of nowhere from other servers, the last thing I want is MORE discoverability, so even randos from other social media can start harassing me too.

Kauko @kauko5/4/2023, 3:00 AM

People already can't message you just with your name (they have to add you as a friend first), and you can already turn off getting messages from people just because they're on the same server as you, I don't think anything changes with this

Nire Bryce @NireBryce5/4/2023, 12:45 AM

he reads his email as of two years ago fwiw. do with this what you will

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

@HypnoLop5/4/2023, 1:06 AM

What I'm really upset about is losing the magic of having gotten my birth year as my discriminator >w<

cassie @porglezomp5/4/2023, 1:07 AM

I get less ugly but how is it more memorable to have a mandatory number no matter what

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 1:10 AM

it's always there. i don't have to think about "did they put some underscores in or what", i know there is always a four-digit number

granted i'm having to use my imagination here because i can't remember the last time i actually had to memorize anyone's handle for anything, which would seem to render this entirely moot

Plum @plumpan5/4/2023, 1:30 AM

Eevee girl, I am self banned from making a fuss so please go off about this in my stead. I just read the official blog post and I'm not going to say a single negative thing about it here.

Thank u

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 1:37 AM

💙

im too tired to do much today so thank god someone made a bad computer decision for me to focus on

Kauko @kauko5/4/2023, 3:04 AM

I don't think either system is great. I had the exact same problem they described in the blog post where I was slightly mistyping in someone's name / discriminator because they rewrote the number wrong or of a case sensitivity issue and we had to go back and forth three times to get it added

I do kind of wonder if Steam has the right idea where you just can't add people by name and either have to go through their profile or use a friend code or quick invite (Steam community URLs have optional unique identifiers but that's separate from Friends / chat except for discoverability)

eevee @lexyeevee5/4/2023, 5:04 AM

even steam is built around a public Presence, though; discord emphatically isn't. it even actively resists being used that way. and there's already a thing you can simply copy/paste to someone so they can send a friend request — it's your name + discriminator!

case sensitivity is arguably annoying but they could fix that much less disruptively. they could even decouple display names in DMs without doing usernames

gull *Plus!*@gull5/4/2023, 3:55 AM

if it were up to me? id just add the alphabet to the digits list. Base 36 discriminators. i doubt there will ever be 1.7 million 'mike's on Discord.

ebu @ebu5/4/2023, 2:08 PM

me rerolling until I get @Ebu#fuck

gull *Plus!*@gull5/4/2023, 4:13 PM

this is why my idea is the superior idea. #fuck for the #fucklords

hail the fish @hailthefish5/4/2023, 7:44 AM

like, obviously what you do in the current system if you get 10k mikes is add another digit to the discriminator. bam, instant support for way more mikes for one low price!

also wasn't being able to choose your discriminator one of the special extra features special people could pay extra for? I used to have nitro but cancelled it over discord's big AI announcement

Leolin (list of names in bio)@FaeAlchemist5/4/2023, 10:36 AM

Even though we never needed a discriminator for our account, we liked that it levelled the playing field. The idea that the fist Mike to turn up is the real Mike is something we've always found uncomfortable about most account systems.

Plus all lowercase is aesthetically ugly, and means even though we'll "get" our preferred username, it really won't be.

Glaire Daggers @glairedaggers5/5/2023, 1:35 AM

Funny how people have been using phone numbers for like a hundred years or w/e but Discord thinks people are just totally incapable of remembering or writing down a 4 digit number long enough to punch it into Add Friend and forget about it.

@damon5/5/2023, 3:57 AM

i get their point on mixed case usernames being confusing but did they ever consider NOT MAKING THE UTTERLY ASININE DECISION OF ALLOWING MIXED CASE USERNAMES

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