[Entinel]

I prefer having the numbers as opposed to globally unique usernames. It destroys the incentive to steal high value usernames through scams and social engineering attacks. I don't get random friend request from people who aren't even in servers I am because they don't know the numbers to send a request. It also gave Discord a reason to sell Nitro because for a fee you could just change the numbers to 1234 or whatever. You will see an increase in scams as people aim to steal high value usernames to resell them as well as an increase in spam. We've seen this behavior on Twitter for years.

[nvarsj]

Yeah, this happens on literally every other popular platform without discriminators.

It feels like a huge regression in usability. Discriminators are one of the things that make Discord cool. And it seems like the only reasonable solution that scales for hundreds of millions of users.

[RadiozRadioz]

I disagree that discriminators fix the rare username problem. The way I see it, they just move the problem.

Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"?

If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros.

I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.