Some gamers take their usernames extremely seriously, viewing them as unique and personal extensions of their identity, not to mention pillars of their online reputations. This will be displayed prominently on user profiles, but unlike the username, it won’t be used for messaging.Īll of this will “roll out slowly over the course of several months,” per the Discord announcements. Paid subscribers to a Discord service that lets them customize their discriminators (among other benefits) will also get “early access,” although neither Vishnevskiy’s post nor Discord’s user documentation offer details.Īt the same time, Discord is also allowing users to pick a non-exclusive “display name” of their choosing. Server owners will get priority, followed by users based on the age of their accounts. In the coming weeks, Vishnevskiy wrote, Discord will start notifying users via an in-app message when they’re cleared to select a new username. Two changes are taking place simultaneously. Almost half of all friend requests on Discord fail to reach the correct person, the executive wrote. But according to Vishnevskiy’s post, more than 40% of Discord users either don’t remember their four-digit codes - variously known as “tags” or “discriminators” in Discord-speak - or know what they are in the first place. If your username was “SgtRock,” you might have suddenly found yourself with the handle “SgtRock#1842.” To help people to find their friends across servers, Discord made those four-digit codes a visible part of usernames. But as Discord grew, the San Francisco-based company decided to expand its messaging system - initially limited to conversations within shared groups it calls “servers” - to the entire platform. The approach differed from social platforms such as Twitter, which has always required users to select unique names.ĭiscord assigned each username an invisible four-digit identifier to distinguish them from duplicates. That was part of the company’s aim to let users represent themselves freely, according to a detailed May 3 blog post by Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy.

What’s the deal with Discord usernames?ĭiscord users have long been free to choose any name they wanted, even ones already in use. A Reddit thread on the change drew more than 4,000 comments, the vast majority of them angry or at least unhappy.

But it’s a big deal for people who rely on the mid-sized social network to recruit fellow gamers, swap virtual weapons and organize strategy in multiplayer games. The issue may sound trivial compared to real-life concerns such as mass shootings and killer storms.

Sign into discord with username