Adding four random digits to people's names was a brilliant solution to two common problems with usernames (users wanting the same username and usernames of notable personalities getting leaked), and now they're just going to the exact same system everyone else uses with all of its attendant problems? Fuck off
As somebody in the tech industry, many here suspect that it's due to the corporate promotion/performance rating system
Product managers, product designers, UX designers, are all judged by the amount of "impact" that they can make on the product they're working on. If the product works perfectly fine and nothing gets changed/added, they don't get a good rating, don't get promoted, and can even get fired because they didn't do anything
So they end up making changes, just any changes they can as long as it can move some objective metric up (active users, user session time, positive actions taken by users, etc.) so that they can point to it and say "Look, I improved the product by making X change which caused Y metric to go up Z percent"
I bet you anything the A/B experiment that YouTube launched to remove the sorting old from new improved some user watch metric or maybe even some ad revenue metric (newer videos have more relevant ads? idk) so the feature got launched
If the product works perfectly fine and nothing gets changed/added, they don’t get a good rating, don’t get promoted, and can even get fired because they didn’t do anything
Jesus. One of the oldest IT jokes is that if your IT guy is always running around solving problems and fixing things and putting out fires and keeping the company afloat fire him immediately, and if your IT guy spends all his days fucking around in his office playing Doom give him a raise.
What drives this corporate culture? I see this every time someone gets a promotion or a new position. Let's create bullshit for bullshit's sake to say we did bullshit on our review? I mean what ever happened to keep it simple stupid and if it isn't broke don't fix it? If the product works and you're the #1 metric in the world then....keep up the good work?
What drives this corporate culture? If the product works and you’re the #1 metric in the world then…keep up the good work?
It's top down. The bigger a company gets the more and more every employee and project needs to be quantified into some number that can be put on a balance sheet or quarterly earnings
Revenue and profit must keep going up every single quarter. Growth must continue to be infinite even if the market is already almost completely saturated by a monopoly. It doesn't matter if a product is perfect. It needs to make more money thus change must happen to the product one way or another
There's also, i don't know what to call, it, but I get the impression most executives, especially since Reagan when being an executive started to be a profession unto itself, don't know or care what the companies they nominally run do. The actual function of the company is to make short term profits for shareholders and they don't give a shit what the product is., So they just try to squeeze blood from a stone and that's often destructive to the company's actual product because there are basically psychopathic paperclip maximizers jerking people around to make an arbitrary number go up instead of skilled managers trying to support the product.
Just like all the constant unnecessary UI redesigns, it's a bunch of people constantly having to justify their own employment. And what happens when you run out of obviously good things to implement (that you're actually allowed to do)? Well, you gotta go back to the drawing board and figure out problems no one is actually having. Can be fantastic to make Number Go Up but that doesn't mean it's good.
I bet you anything the A/B experiment that YouTube launched to remove the sorting old from new improved some user watch metric or maybe even some ad revenue metric (newer videos have more relevant ads? idk) so the feature got launched
I'm willing to bet that older content gets a lower engagement rating by some internal YouTube metric. I know for a fact that they grade contributor-accounts based on the regular and frequent release of content. So you get more YouTube Points for doing a dozen 1-hour long videos a week that are crap and forgotten as soon as they're published than a single 1-hour long video that's wildly popular and heavily referenced for years on end.
Removing the ability to sort from old to new means that you're on the page looking for stuff longer, are more likely to get distracted, and spend more time on their site, which increases revenue. It's a no-brainer for them
Yeah the company known as a hosehold name for searching info gimps the utter shit out of [searching info] because investors or some shit.
dae member when videos used to buffer all the way to the end if you just left it on pause? didn't matter if you had shitty dial-up internet, you could buffer anything and watch it all without interruption if you were patient enough.
and then (for bandwidth reasons) they made it so all video players just buffered a handful of seconds ahead of where you were at, meaning if your download rate was lower than the bitrate of the video, then fuck you, you're watching this as a slideshowwith all the insistence on algorithms and machine-learning and predicting everyone's next intrusive thought or quantum position, you would have thought they'd have figured out dynamic buffering or something, where videos only buffer a little initially, then once it figured out you were trying to watch the whole video it would go ahead and buffer the rest.
My buddies call it "Enshitification", the inevitable point in a tech products lifecycle where, having become essentially a vital public utility, the company starts making it less and less usable for reasons that only make sense to them in an attempt to squeeze blood otu of a stone, not realizing that making their free product worse won't inspire people to give them money to continue to use hte thing they already weren't paying for.
I'm 1000% sure this decision comes from some ass-wipe in a business suit who doesn't understand how the internet works.
They wrote out a long post explaining exactly what they were thinking. TL;DR: the current system has plenty of problems too
I read their post, and to put it politely I'm unconvinced that people are so dumb they cannot copy+paste their name and number in a message to someone else that they want to add as a friend.
I can actually 100% believe that. A substantial number of people aren't able or perhaps willing to just google how to do basic stuff.
I’m unconvinced that people are so dumb they cannot copy+paste their name and number in a message to someone else that they want to add as a friend.
Well that sounds like a you problem. Discord has to account for the real world where people are in fact that dumb, not whatever world you live in. From their post:
Across Discord, almost half of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with, mostly because users enter an incorrect or invalid username due to a combination of missing discriminator and incorrect casing.
Discord will never release this stat, but I would bet that that number won't decrease by more than a couple percentage points despite this change. Because people will still make typos, go "oops" and then make a second friend request for the person they're actually after.
Discord: usernames are currently extremely complicated and this results in people failing to remember or communicate them, so we're making them simpler
You: wtf I can't imagine the logic behind this change and also there's no way it will actually help the problem
:gamer-gulag:
Discord: usernames are currently extremely complicated and this results in people failing to remember or communicate them, so we’re making them simpler
I'm saying that I don't think that Discord has made a convincing argument that this is the case.
What do you mean they haven't made a convincing argument? About which part? The fact that discord usernames are extremely complicated is self-evident. That this results in people failing to remember or communicate them is something everybody who regularly uses the program has learned through experience (and also follows logically). That they are making them simpler is beyond debate.
Which part do you need stronger evidence for?
The fact that discord usernames are extremely complicated is self-evident
No they're not. This conversation will never advance because we completely diverge on this essential point.
Normal usernames people are used to: case-insensitive alphanumeric string with maybe a couple of hand-picked special characters
Discord usernames: case-sensitive alphanumeric string with any number of special characters and a randomly generated code at the end which is typically never displayed
Sorry but you're just wrong on this, denying it is like denying the grass is green lol
case-insensitive alphanumeric string with maybe a couple of hand-picked special characters
Have widely-noted problems
case-sensitive alphanumeric string with any number of special characters and a randomly generated code at the end
Solves many of those problems
Even if they are more complicated than the industry standard your continued insistence that they are "extremely" complicated is incoherent to me. Discord is making this change because every tech company reaches a point where their growth slows down and in order to chase their old growth numbers they start fucking with systems that work, and at best come up with something that is equally good but more often than not come up with something worse and the userbase is stuck going along with it.
Discord is making this change because every tech company reaches a point where their growth slows down and in order to chase their old growth numbers they start fucking with systems that wor
But they've explained exactly why they don't think the system they're fucking with works well. This isn't just a case of changing stuff to change stuff, they're changing something which is problematic to address those problems.
Also notice how at first you were like "they're not more complicated" and now you're like "ok they are more complicated but it's worth it"
Discord doesn't think it's worth it. It's as simple as that. Now you understand what they were thinking. But keep moving the goalposts.
Discord doesn’t think it’s worth it.
I've never denied this. I've only said that I do think it's worth it, and that I find Discord's explanation lacking.
Discord usernames aren't so incredibly complicated in a way that this change will fix.
What's the difference between UserName#2345 and username2347305 (because "username" and "username 2345" was taken already)?
The biggest issue they had was capitalization making a difference, no one paid attention to that but it could be fixed by just making all the upper case letters lower case.
Also don't take their metrics at face value, how do they know it's not "gone to to the person they want to match with"? Maybe the recipient just didn't want to accept for some reason. There's certainly friend messages I've purposely ignored.
What’s the difference between UserName#2345 and username2347305 (because “username” and “username 2345” was taken already)?
There are two differences. First off, username2347305 was chosen specifically by the user and they know that every single digit is part of their username. UserName#2345 simply goes by UserName 99% of the time and might literally have no idea that #2345 is even part of their username. They didn't pick it, and they never see it. The latter is also not case-sensitive so there's no way of miscommunicating or misremembering that aspect.
Also don’t take their metrics at face value
Ok ignoring metrics, I can speak from personal experience that trying to communicate your discord name to another human being and have them add you as a friend is a fucking nightmare which will be a million times better after this change.
They want the dumb demographic. The smarts will stay and adapt no matter what but you gotta cater to those dumb dumbs if you want the big bucks
Why not just use a friend code system where it's just a longer number or base62?
Actually the system they're switching to isn't that bad. Hopefully you can use anything you want in the display name so it can be funny like on Twitter.
That's basically what it already does with the Discord ID system, but that's primarily for developer stuff.
I'm sure there are legions of people too stupid to figure out you need the four numbers to find your friend but if they really care they'll figure it out. I'm sure a ton of people get confused by Twitter since your display name and @ can be different. But even if that's the reason for the change I don't think the internet needs to bend over backwards to appeal to the LCD of idiots.
Hot take there’s a certain level of difficulty that things on the internet should have because if you aren’t competent enough to get past that roadblock you also aren’t qualified to access the information you can receive.
Like, you should need to set up a VPN in order to access Facebook. If you’re not capable of setting up a VPN I don’t trust your ability to sort through what you’ll find there.
