Brace yourself: Discord is going to make everyone pick a new username

pcgamer.com:

Discord(opens in new tab) is making changes to its usernames that will finally eliminate the four-digit «discriminators» that make them so unwieldy. It's also adding a new Display Names option, so the way you appear to other Discord users can stay the same—or be changed to (just about) whatever you want.

To be honest, Discord has always been a bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to usernames. Every now and then I have to provide my Discord user info to a game publisher in order to take part in a presentation on the platform, and literally every single time I have to look it up in the app. I can remember the name, sure, but the number? No chance. Complicating the situation even further, usernames are case-sensitive, so phibi#8936, for instance, is different from PhIBI#8936.

Discord has come to recognize that this system isn't ideal. Co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy explained in a blog post(opens in new tab) that Discord adopted the current system in order to ensure that nobody ended up locked out of a name they wanted to use, and that the discriminator numbers were made publicly visible so users could be sure they were chatting with the proper person when they're connected across different servers. It worked, but the kludgy approach created a «technical debt» that started to get seriously out of hand as Discord's userbase grew.

Vishnevskiy detailed several scenarios in which the Discord username system causes headaches, but what it all ultimately comes down to is simply that «our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.» 

And the numbers are stark: More than 40% of Discord users either don't know their discriminator number or don't even know what a discriminator