Discord announces a major username transition📱👥

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According to the tech weather, a wind of change is announced on Discord. The famous messaging platform has just announced an important evolution regarding usernames. Let’s find out.

Discord : Change of username structure 😎

Discord is evolving and this concerns the usernames. As a reminder, Discord used to distinguish itself from its competitors with a precise system: a sequence of 4 numbers at the end of each username (e.g.: techgriot#2019). But isn’t it time to evolve? Yes, Discord will « mutate » usernames. From now on, usernames will take the following form: @pseudo. A more common form, which can be found on Twitter for example.

In practice, all Discord users will have :

• A unique username: consisting only of letters and numbers, with a maximum of two special characters,
• A non-unique display name: a new field that allows you to customize your name in a more original way (with special characters, emojis, spaces, etc.) and is infinitely modifiable.

Source: Discord

The update will be rolled out in the coming weeks. All Discord members will be asked to choose a new username, but priority will be given to long-time members. Get ready for a real transition that will therefore take several months 😏

«  We want to be particularly considerate of longtime Discord users who have had their usernames for quite awhile, so we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord., explains Stanislav Vishnevskiy, co-founder of Discord.»

Good to know ✍🏾: your old username (username#1234) will work as an alias and can still be used by another member to find you on the platform.

Facilitate interactions on the platform 🗣

Until now, Discord users had a lot of freedom in choosing their usernames, and they were case sensitive (i.e. upper and lower case). But with the exponential growth of Discord, the problems with usernames also became considerable, with many members no longer able to get in touch.

As for the numbers, the co-founder of the platform said that more than 40% of Discord users could not remember their discriminator (sequence of numbers), or did not know what a discriminator was. Also, 50% of friend requests failed because the member entered the wrong username (wrong discriminator, wrong capitalization, etc.). This is really problematic. Since the purpose of any social-tech platform is to stay in touch and evolve and share one’s username easily like on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Slack, etc…

Thus, the objective of these laudable changes is to

«make it a lot easier for you and all the new users coming to Discord to connect and hang out with friends.»

For the regulars and lovers of the Discord concept, the change will be difficult to accept, attached to their username, but seems necessary to ensure the sustainability of the platform.

Sources : Discord, KultureGeek