The social app Discord, popular among gamers, caused internal conflicts after its announcement of making its millions of members pick new usernames last week. Discord will be moving away from its traditional four-digit tag identifier system in an attempt to make it “easier to connect” with users. Instead of the four-digit identifier, users will now have a unique alphanumeric username with an “@” symbol in front of it.
Now the question is whether this change will escalate into a full-scale online war with players threatening one another in order to seize control of popular names.
While the issue may sound trivial to non-gamers, it is a big deal for people who depend on the mid-sized social network to recruit fellow gamers, exchange virtual weapons, and coordinate strategies in multiplayer games. A Reddit thread on this topic drew more than 4,000 comments, and most of the users are upset.
The app states that it has 150 million monthly active users, and has no plans to reconsider the new policy.
Discord Usernames
Discord users were free to choose any name they liked, even ones already in use. According to a comprehensive blog post on May 3 by Discord’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Stanislav Vishnevskiy this was a part of the company’s goal of letting users represent themselves freely. The approach made it unique from other social platforms like Twitter, where users had to select unique names.
Discord assigned each username an invisible four-digit identifier to distinguish them from duplicates. But as Discord grew, it decided to expand its messaging system to the entire platform. They previously limited conversations within shared groups called “servers”. To help people to find their friends across servers, Discord made those four-digit codes a visible part of usernames. If your username was “SgtRock,” you might have suddenly found yourself with the handle “SgtRock#1842.”
While this seemed to work for a while, more than 40% of Discord users either don’t remember their four-digit codes. These are known as “tags” or “discriminators” in Discord lingo. According to Vishnevskiy’s post, some users even did not what they were in the first place. Almost half of all friend requests on Discord failed to reach the right person, the executive added.
Changes
Two changes will take place simultaneously. According to Vishnevskiy, Discord will notify users via an in-app message when they are cleared to select a new username. This will be implemented in the coming weeks. Some server owners will get priority, followed by users based on the age of their accounts. Users who have paid for a Discord service to customise their discriminators will also get “early access”. Neither Vishnevskiy’s post nor Discord’s user documentation offers details on this.
At the same time, the San Fransisco-based app also allows users to pick a non-exclusive “display name” of their choosing. This will be displayed prominently on user profiles and in chat. But unlike the username, this cannot be used for messaging.
The processes will “roll out slowly over the course of several months,” per the Discord statement.
Issues
Some gamers take their usernames extremely seriously, as unique and personal extensions of their identity. The username also helps them build their online reputation. Many users are not happy with the changes. 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 have stayed away because of the complexity of the existing system.
Experts suggest that the suggestion may not be far-fetched. Some 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. 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.”
Margolin adds 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. But there is still a chance for a serious blowback. Especially when some gamers have been known to go to extreme lengths to obtain coveted usernames.
Consequences
Gamers warn that this move could create a black market for desirable names. Or even use dangerous threats to force their surrender. This ranges from online harassment campaigns to “swatting” — the notorious practice of making fake crime reports to police to provoke an armed law enforcement response against an opponent.
