But there's still a potential for serious blowback, as some gamers have been known to go to extreme lengths to obtain coveted usernames. Margolin suggests that network effects - that is, the fact that users and their friends are already on Discord, making it difficult to leave - will most likely outweigh the current outrage, whose impact is difficult to assess. In a commercial sense, he said, “there's this tension between what would be appealing to a larger market and what are the main users.” Social platforms tend to be heavily used by a small group and very lightly used by a much larger group, said Drew Margolin, a Cornell University professor of communications. That might not be far from the truth, experts suggest. In the Reddit thread, complaints range from “don't fix what isn't broken” to accusations that the changes are mostly designed to attract new and often younger users who might be put off by the complexity of the existing system. Many also don't appreciate changes being thrust upon them. Some gamers take their usernames extremely seriously, viewing them as unique and personal extensions of their identity, not to mention pillars of their online reputations. ![]() This will be displayed prominently on user profiles and in chat, but unlike the username, it won't be used for messaging.Īll of this will “roll out slowly over the course of several months," per the Discord announcements. Paid subscribers to a Discord service that lets them customize their discriminators (among other benefits) will also get “early access,” although neither Vishnevskiy's post nor Discord's user documentation offer details.Īt the same time, Discord is also allowing users to pick a non-exclusive “display name” of their choosing. Some server owners will get priority, followed by users based on the age of their accounts. In the coming weeks, Vishnevskiy wrote, Discord will start notifying users via an in-app message when they're cleared to select a new username. Two changes are taking place simultaneously. Almost half of all friend requests on Discord fail to reach the correct person, the executive wrote. But according to Vishnevskiy's post, more than 40% of Discord users either don't remember their four-digit codes - variously known as “tags” or “discriminators” in Discord-speak - or know what they are in the first place. If your username was “SgtRock,” you might have suddenly found yourself with the handle “SgtRock#1842.” To help people to find their friends across servers, Discord made those four-digit codes a visible part of usernames. But as Discord grew, the San Francisco-based company decided to expand its messaging system - initially limited to conversations within shared groups it calls “servers" - to the entire platform. ![]() The approach differed from social platforms such as Twitter, which has always required users to select unique names.ĭiscord assigned each username an invisible four-digit identifier to distinguish them from duplicates. ![]() That was part of the company's goal of letting users represent themselves freely, according to a detailed May 3 blog post by Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy. A Reddit thread on the change drew more than 4,000 comments, the vast majority of them angry or at least unhappy.ĭiscord, which says it has 150 million monthly active users, has no plans to reconsider the new policy, according to a spokesman.ĭiscord users have long been free to choose any name they wanted, even ones already in use. But it’s a big deal for people who rely on the mid-sized social network to recruit fellow gamers, swap virtual weapons and organize strategy in multiplayer games. The issue may sound trivial compared to real-life concerns such as mass shootings and killer storms. Now the question is whether the change will escalate into all-out warfare that could include players threatening one another in order to seize control of popular names. SAN FRANCISCO – The social app Discord, a favorite of gamers, inadvertently stirred internal strife after announcing last week that it will force its millions of members to pick new usernames.
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