[ID: a series of screenshots of Discord's recent 2023 username system overhaul.
Image 1 reads as follows:
How Usernames Ended Up After Eight Years
As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular, more problems have emerged. 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 biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily. We've heard from tons of people that they've run into problems like these: You try to share your username outside of Discord. Unfortunately, you either can't remember the discriminator, have to explain which letters are uppercase and lowercase, or have to try to specify which special characters your name uses. You meet someone IRL that you want to talk to on Discord, and they say "I'm Phibi Eight Nine Three Six!" You go home and add "phibi#8936" only to find out you added the wrong "Phibi" because your new friend's username is actually "PhlBl#8936". [Note: The letters I B I are capitalized in the second username, whereas the first username is in lowercase. As Discord's current username system is case sensitive, these are distinct usernames.] You want to use a common name like "Mike" or "Jane" but there are already 9,999 Mikes or Janes so you're blocked from that name altogether. You like to change your username a lot and get rate limited. Your friend says they changed their name to "vernacular" but actually it's "vernacular" and you have trouble finding them. We spoke with a lot of you about how you add one another as friends and crunched some numbers. It turns out that: More than 40% of you either don't remember your discriminator or don't even know what a discriminator is. That's a big problem when discriminators are required to add a new friend. Across Discord. almost half of all friend reauests fail to connect the user...
End of image 1.
Image 2 reads as follows:
...of allowing permutations like PhIBI#8936, [capital P, lowercase h, capital I B I] and PHibi#8936 [capital P H, lowercase i b I]. Unfortunately, we found that nearly one-third of our active users would be forced to change their name just to accommodate this. Meanwhile, people from regions where non-alphanumeric characters are common in names, such as Asia, would have difficulty fully representing themselves. So then we considered making that change but also enabling a separate global...
End of image 2 and image ID]
"Our system got confusing. That's why we introduced username squatting, sniping, and sterilization of non-latin charsets!"
Thanks discord.