TL;DR usernames in the new system are more like friend codes than usernames; Discord should treat them as such

  • surrendertogravity@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    The note at the end about the new system working as a URL system for user profiles is interesting, because around the time the change was announced I saw some people theorizing that the change is rolling out because Discord wants to implement some kind of profile page. pure speculation, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do when the rollout is complete.

    on that note, someone I know got the pop-up to change their username about a day before I did, and they weren’t able to choose my username – and when I got the pop-up, it auto-suggested my previous username. so it seems there is a pre-reservation system that does a reasonable job of letting people with already-unique usernames keep those.

    • eleanorOpossum@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      They auto reserved each username based on account age and how long you’ve been subbed to Nitro as a tie breaker; but that info was buried pretty deep in like one of the announcments. With special exceptions for ““influencers””.

      • surrendertogravity@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Ahhh, I see. I had read that they were rolling the change out based on account age but must have missed the bit about the username auto-reservation. thanks!

    • diamond (she/they)@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I think they definitely could’ve made a profile page while keeping the discriminator around. Something like discord.com/u/diamondburned/4507.

      (For various reasons diamondburned#4507 is not too ideal for a URL, but it’s a small difference. Right?)