

However, a lot of privacy related issues are bubbling up to the surface.

If you miss out on landing the Steve handle, sorry: you’re probably going to be St3ve from now on. All of our Steves will fight to the death in order to become the one true Steve, shorn of numbers forever. Very soon, Discord will ask you to amend your username to something more specific. It remained like this for about 8 years, and now we’re at the point where everything is changing.

A drawback of this system is that if 9,999 Steves already exist, then we're all out of Steves because this is the maximum number you can have of one particular username. If another Steve signed up, they’d be Steve#3858. If you wanted to be Steve, into the chat you’d go as Steve#3857. This is just another way of saying “We put a four digit number at the end of your username”. When people started wanting to talk to their friends located in other servers (essentially, another chat room) Discord introduced a friend system and a number system called “discriminators”. They wanted you to jump straight into the chatroom-based action. When Discord launched back in 2017, the developers didn’t want you to try and sign up only to be told “Username taken”. What is going on over there, and why are so many people concerned about the upcoming alterations? Discord, the Voice over IP (VoIP) and instant message communications tool, is changing how usernames function in a major way soon. Many users are not keen on this change at all.
