ovengoats

i used to work at a library, running circulation and de facto tech support. one of my jobs was being the person who printed out signs for things.

"out of order", "please don't touch", etc etc. except, as it turns out, people really don't like signs that tell them "do not touch the radiator!" because they'll just touch it anyways.

(source: a teen at my library had to go to the ER because he was winning a dare with his friend about how long he could keep his hand on the radiator)

the solution we came up with, after some coaching from my mother (the resource librarian at the time), was to find a friendly, passive voice to more effectively give credence to the warning

so my new sign read: "Thanks for not touching the radiator! :) "

anyways, let's talk Discord again.

I'm something of a Librarian myself.

a new update is here from Discord about a week and a half after their announcement of "evolving" usernames. if you missed it, my previous post discussing this is linked here. i'd recommend reading it first, and perhaps scrolling through the discourse that followed!

now, as a fellow Librarian, i figured i could go over this new post and show how preemptive-passive language is used to write a Good press release, but that it's just a clever rewording of the same announcement that pissed everybody off in the first place

i can't do my fun code-quote aesthetic here cuz i need to maintain the formatting, so we're doing this with block-quotes. the off-white of blogging:

Since 2015, every Discord username has been cAsE sEnSitIvE and had a number attached to it called a discriminator (e.g., #0001). This lets you have the same username as someone else as long as you have different discriminators or different case letters. However, this also means you have to remember a set of 4-digit numbers and account for case sensitivity to connect with your friends.

ugh, it still italicizes everything? i think conforming this platform's formatting to everyone else's standards might actually be a bad thing. but anyways, we have tone to interrogate!

in the very first sentence of this post they've already villainized the previous username system, manufacturing precedent for this change's advantage.

they could accomplish the same ingrained showcasing of Case Sensitivity by doing EXACTLY what This Sentence is doing. but you know, memes are fun

the post then has a table of contents, and discusses the practical difference of the change. this was already done in their previous post, but reading this new one, it's clear that discord intends for this article to be their Reasonable Response.

that's all well and good. their explanation of the functional change, while biased, is effective and brief.

so let's jump ahead to where they talk about Display Names:

Your display name is how you will primarily appear across Discord. It is your most prominent form of identity on Discord, and it is how other users will see you in DMs where a friend nickname is not set, in servers where a server nickname is not set, and in other places like friend requests.
Your display name can be almost anything (within Discord’s Community Guidelines), including special characters, spaces, and emojis! It allows for uppercase, lowercase, and non-Latin characters. You can also change your Display Name whenever you want – even from one minute to the next. This allows you to express yourself across Discord without needing to change your username.

tch. i can't figure out how to underline text in block quotes because it uses a totally different architecture than the base system. makes it really obnoxious and inconvenient to swap between the two, huh?

the overuse of bold text in this press release may be tempting to dunk on, but i honestly get it. there's a nugget of wisdom commonly brought up in writing online about bold text being easier to read than italics, in terms of accessibility. this isn't a quirky writing style, it's a purposeful decision to make the post easier to read

i make similar considerations! while i do use italics, i avoid overusing them, and break my writings up into small, funny, easy-to-digest paragraphs. reading is pretty hard for me too, honestly.

This is also why I prefer code-quotes, by the way.
It breaks up what would otherwise just be an
italicized wall of text on a white screen.
     -Connor Sheri Shaw, just now

(this isn't the point, but sidebar: i can't actually find any studies that have invariably claimed bold text is better than italics for dyslexia, but i have seen companies trying to capitalize on it. so, you know, do with that what you will)

What was that about Latin?

this is me dropping a text book in the co-founder of Discord's lap (not Librarian), to make something very clear to him:

if you're surprised by how much of the Internet is written in non-latin script, you really need to get out more often.

Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide,
more than half use languages that have scripts that are
not Latin-based. So this change is very much necessary
for not only half the world's internet users today but more
than half, probably, of the future users as the internet
continues to spread.

         -Rod Beckstrom at ICAAN 2009 

these numbers are dated by over a decade, but i can promise you, non-latin script languages continue to exist and be used world-wide, both online and in real life. and if you're reading this and see that as a "problem", i'm going to hit you with a baseball bat

please enjoy this delightfully lo-fi website showcasing the keyboards of non-latin scripts from around the world.

so, advertising use of non-latin characters in bold seems like a move forward, right? wrong! because it's just fluff to muddle that they're disallowing non-latin characters from discord's core usernames

at this point it's easier to just take a picture of the text, instead of attempting to transcribe these several different formats into something universally legible. just makes the whole thing messier, really.

now, consider what they just said: Latin Characters, specifically A through Z. so they mean the latin alphabet, which is not interchangeable with "latin characters", by the fucking way

because if they really meant Latin Characters in general, that would open up more options, but still not address the obvious problem here. made clear by their referring to, in a post about specifying the parameters of the username change, Arabic numerals as simply "numbers"

Discord clearly doesn't care about non-English speakers.

wow! minimum of 2 characters will be great for the first person named "Lu" to use, before being immediately unavailable for everybody else. did you know the fewer characters you have, the fewer unique combinations exist?

seems like the system should account for that. such as by letting you pick your name, and giving you a unique tag for identification.

oh yeah. but i guess when you monetize the identification, well, we've all seen what happened with Twitter

it's great and all that they want to account for people with shorter names. would be nice if they did the same for people whose names and languages are not based in fucking latin script

discord's defensiveness here is not incidental. this entire post was written with the purpose of giving users reassurance, but not actually addressing their concerns at all

here are two quotes that are hilarious back-to-back from the same article:

All users will eventually be required to pick a new,
unique username to use Discord. Because they will be
unique to each user, new usernames will make it easier to
identify and connect with your friends. Your new username
will be unique to you, so share it with your friends when you
want them to connect with you.

followed shortly by:

Your display name is how you will primarily appear across
Discord. It is your most prominent form of identity on Discord,
and it is how other users will see you in DMs where a friend
nickname is not set, in servers where a server nickname is not
set, and in other places like friend requests. 

i gave up on block-quoting. i'm just using the old system now, since it's easier to read and understand. you know what isn't?

being told in the same release "the new username system is to make it easier to add friends and identify you" and "when friends add you they'll be marked with display names, the Most Prominent Form of Identity on Discord". lol.

this reveals that the belief that this system will be less "confusing" or "difficult" is set dressing, justification uncontextualized

But I guess a new feature will fix it.

hey, you know what's even dumber than having two different names on discord?

having three. this is the kind of development mentality that venture capitalists love and users hate: fixing a broken system by adding new systems on top of it, and if the system isn't broken yet, you force it to be

you create the air of how busted the old username system was, despite being in the best interest of truly so many users. writing not with the assumption that the reader will agree, but the requirement

you didn't even answer your own hypothetical question.

the question you posited was "why is the system being changed right now?" and your answer was "to make it easier to connect with friends!"

this is not an answer. the question asked why now, as opposed to another time. your answer is agreeable, empty language designed to make the reader assume that you're right. it's passivity that grants no new information.

if Librarian had to print this out as a concise paper sign, it would read:
"Thanks for updating your username! :)"

and you'd have still not addressed the problem of people not wanting to update in the first place.

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, just a writer. I speak English and passable French, nothing else. I am not an expert on language!

Continue on with Part 3 here!