good advice.

I’ve read the notes and I still genuinely don’t understand the issue here.

We’ll still have perfectly customizable display names so we can put our pronouns and stuff. We’ll still be able to personalize a nickname for each server. We’ll still be able to change our usernames up to 2 times per hour, so it shouldn’t affect our ability to escape malicious stalkers. And there is no obligation to use the same username as on our social media.

None of these features will be locked behind a Nitro subscription.

I’m begging people to explain here. Is there a big issue that I’m completely blind to, or did nobody bother reading the FAQ?

the usernames now must be completely unique and are separate to display names; aka the same as most socmed systems right now. that’s annoying on its own because discord is not a socmed. it’s a messaging app. anyway this means even if you can change them whenever you want, you shouldn’t, because it opens up your name to being stolen. this also means url hoarding can be a thing on discord now. this also means that people who don’t like to change their name because they want it consistent across platforms can be forced to if they don’t want to be stalked for any reason— and then, should their new name be found; they will have to do that again, potentially eventually running out of any names they even like having. sure, we’ve all had to make names we didn’t like that much on social media before— but discord is not a social media, not to mention they literally had a perfectly good system before and are just deciding to change it.

this also means that anyone besides the FIRST person to have a common name now must change their name, regardless of how attached to it they were before. because it’s going off of seniority.

there’s also the fact that there was practically no good reason for this change. the statistics discord mentions in their announcement of the update are misleading at best and at worst completely untrue. i also struggle to understand the purpose of forcing 9999 people to chose an entirely new name just because that 10000th person wasn’t able to get it too. “only 9999 people can have this name, which seems unfair! so instead of adding a number to make it 99999 or something, we’re going to take away numbers, so now only 1 person can have it!” does not seem like a well thought out decision to me.

as i understand, it also means that only people with latin characters for names can make their usernames, and people without will have to change their names. i’m not going to even go into why that’s dumb.

in short, it’s going to be a huge hassle and inconvenience for many many people, and actually dangerous for other people. and even if it wasn’t, there really is zero good reason for this change besides the homogenization of the internet, which personally i am avidly against.

at least, this is my opinion. i hope it doesn’t come across as harsh.

in short, to use a mangled metaphorical: you know how we're getting bots with really good urls these days? and how those urls are gone forever, locked away from us because some botnet took it? discord is introducing a similar scarcity problem.

FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONS THE PRIVACY THING!!! I love how no one can message me on discord without me personally giving them my 4 numbers even though I use the same username everywhere!! I don't want to loose that!

[ ID: Tags reading: #remember when a bunch of ppl unsubbed from nitro en masse bc of the nft shit and they backpedaled #unsub and make sure u tell them why if u have nitro /end ID. ]