Changes to Discord?

June 13, 2023 3:04 PM

I've seen a few mentions recently in the context of the brouhaha at Reddit about enshittification-style changes at Discord. But I use Discord and the only thing I'm aware of is a change to the formatting of usernames (which is still in the process of being rolled out), which seems to me to be not a big deal at all. Can someone explain what's afoot at Discord (if anything) and why people are upset about it?
posted by heatherlogan to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

The discriminator numbers Discord is doing away with served as username squatting prevention. You could still be heatherlogan even if someone else had registered that, because they’d be (eg.) heatherlogan#2398 and you’d be heatherlogan#1951.

Now it’s first come first served, with all the attendant issues (including impersonation, where someone registers a famous company or person name before the actual person or company can; blackmail or harassment via registering someone’s username; buying and selling of desirable usernames; and people trying to threaten or intimidate others into giving up their username).

Also, before, someone well known could register as themselves, use Discord to chat to friends, but still be safe from a mass of people bothering them, since you couldn’t just message or friend-request (eg.) chrispine, you’d have to know the discriminator number as well. Now, nope.
posted by sailoreagle at 3:37 PM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

There is also lingering resentment over Discord’s plan to promote cryptocurrency and NFTs in its apps (which was canceled more than a year ago, after a strong user backlash). And perhaps also about its more recent integration with OpenAI/ChatGPT.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:50 PM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

The app has become more unstable for some users, and most of the work they've done this year has been building unnecessary features, like "super reactions", which are a premium paid version of reactions that play obnoxious animations - that aren't related to the actual reaction emoji, because they're custom. Discord probably doesn't need new features, its core use case is pretty much covered; what it needs is to clean up its client.
posted by Merus at 5:21 PM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: The best recent explanation of concerns about discord I've seen is here (archive.is link to a post on the discord subreddit about recent glassdoor reviews; I found it via this mastodon thread). The username stuff is more a symptom than anything, I suspect.
posted by advil at 5:46 PM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

My first encounter with "super reactions" was by accident- I noticed one of the reactions to a comment looked funny, tapped it, and bam. Tried to undo it and it warned me that my super reaction credit wouldn't be refunded. Not allowing an undo within even a minute? Not great.
posted by yangj08 at 7:58 PM on June 13, 2023

Discord have also rolled out an AI powered chatbot called Clyde and that involved some hastily reversed changes to the Discord privacy policy.

"We generally do not store the contents of video or voice calls or channels..."
posted by Lanark at 6:56 AM on June 14, 2023

A lot of my Kids friends are upset, because Discord's making them change their names, and most of the good/obvious ones are taken. When I was prompted, though, my original name went through without any problems. I'm not sure what that says about me.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:59 AM on June 14, 2023