The social app Discord, a favorite of gamers, inadvertently stirred internal strife after announcing last week that it will force its millions of members to pick new usernames.
Now the question is whether the change will escalate into all-out warfare that could include players threatening one another in order to seize control of popular names.
Discord users have long been free to choose any name they wanted, even ones already in use. That was part of the company's goal of letting users represent themselves freely, according to a detailed May 3 blog post by Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy. The approach differed from social platforms such as Twitter, which has always required users to select unique names.
Two changes are taking place simultaneously. In the coming weeks, Vishnevskiy wrote, Discord will start notifying users via an in-app message when they're cleared to select a new username. Some server owners will get priority, followed by users based on the age of their accounts. Paid subscribers to a Discord service that lets them customize their discriminators will also get"early access," although neither Vishnevskiy's post nor Discord's user documentation offer details.
Margolin suggests that network effects - that is, the fact that users and their friends are already on Discord, making it difficult to leave - will most likely outweigh the current outrage, whose impact is difficult to assess. But there's still a potential for serious blowback, as some gamers have been known to go to extreme lengths to obtain coveted usernames.
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