• copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Whether or not it’s a good change is likely mostly subjective. I’m guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

    Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

    I’d even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don’t need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

    • EvilColeslaw@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      So, the actual reason for the change is likely their dumb handling of capitalization in the original scheme. To use your username as an example:

      copygirl#1234, Copygirl#1234, COPYGIRL#1234, CopyGirl#1234, etc

      Every permutation of capitalization is available as a distinct username. And with the low price of Nitro you get to customize your discriminator, which could make impersonation a very real problem.