Social App Discord Goes the Twitter Route, Simplifies Usernames

thewrap.com:

blog post, co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy explains that while there’s a novelty to the app having a special naming system, it’s easier to remember the standard handle convention used by the likes of Twitter and similar services.

The numeric discriminators of the #0000 days, while clear in purpose, could be easily forgotten or confused, with people misremembering the orders of numbers or forgetting digits altogether.These pitfalls to the numeric discriminator system aren’t relegated to anecdotal situations.

In his post, Vishnevskiy includes some startling figures to illustrate just how overdue a change to the system was, including the fact that “across Discord, almost half of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with, mostly because users enter an incorrect or invalid username due to a combination of missing discriminator and incorrect casing.”Given the boom in relevance Discord’s seen, especially during the height of the pandemic, it makes sense that issues once sequestered to a few have now become a problem of the many, something Vishnevskiy acknowledges in the blog: “The technical and product debt we incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people.”The idea underpinning the discriminator system was to ensure anyone could have any username they wanted, and if there were redundant preferences, they would be differentiated via the numbers after the name.

But now, Discord joins the pool of other social apps that opt for a simpler @ system.The blog post clarifies Discord didn’t jump to this industry-standard solution immediately.