This causes all kinds of pain irl, it's not really a good example. IRL has the same issues non-unique usernames do. It's almost irrelevant in a small community because of the number of members. It becomes a problem in large communities because you can't find someone based on their name.

Discord's issue was downplaying the discriminator so much that a lot of people didn't realize they existed. That if you wanted to add someone, they weren't uniquely identified by username alone.

They probably could have solved that by making the discriminator more prominent early on in the app's lifecycle.

I tried this approach for a service awhile back, and the biggest hurdle was educating the users. Even determining what to call it was a huge challenge, as it’s clearly not a ‘username’.

I disagree that this is the only solution. The OP comes very close to discovering an alternative one: don't allow users the power to select their own arbitrary username.

When a user makes an account on your site (and if your site actually needs publicly-displayed usernames in the first place), give them the option of, say, ten usernames generated by the site itself; these don't need to be numeric codes like WeChat does, they can be pronounceable phrases in the same manner that Gfycat generates URLs. Everyone will end up with names like "questionable wet aplomado falcon", "each unlawful harlequin bug", "icy inferior iceland gull", which honestly isn't any worse than the average name I encounter on Reddit or elsewhere.

The biggest downside(?) of this approach is that it makes it harder for someone to build their personal brand, but the older I get the more I think it's a bad idea to use a consistent nickname across different websites.

Is copy/paste also too much to ask of technology's current generation?

I have several friends who use Discord as their primary social outlet. The vague way this change is being rolled out is causing a lot of heartburn for them.

It's strange to have a social platform force everyone to change their screen names. The vague way that they're rolling out the change over "several months" without any indication of timelines is making it worse.

From a product point of view, it would ease the pain if they would have communicated each person's username selection date in the app. Instead, they gave vague advice to watch for some unspecified in-app notification to pop up at some time in the next few months. For people who are anxious about keeping their screen names, this is a recipe for anxiety.

The number of services that don't allow this is also insane. Its as if they use the username itself as a key, rather than one that is masked from the user allowing such changes.

no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath

On the other hand, they won't let you change your login name, which would hint that they're using it as a unique identifier of some kind internally, which seems like a bit of an antipattern.

I contacted PG a while back about changing my username to something else, and he replied

"Unfortunately due to a design flaw in HN there is no way to change usernames."

In the real world, people almost always go by their first name, and we don't have this problem. When two people in a social circle have the same first name, we don't turn and say "well everyone has to use their whole name, always, now." Rather, we adjust our names (usually someone gets a nickname, or goes by their last name).

The steam system allows multiple people to have the same display name and it works just fine. Sure, people can troll with it when they join your tf2 server (and then you kick them off).

The blizzard system also works great. The unique identifier is there, if all other forms of attempting to add a friend fail, but mostly you end up working contextually.

Is that even surprising? Some names are just so common that people use them all the time and ends up as John, John_ , John-, John1, John11. John100

I suppose it's not technically possible, but I for one would not mind a possibility to update your user name (even if only once).

Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Any of the phone-number-based social apps (which have a poorer UX because of it, but still all allow changing usernames seeing as phone numbers change)? Also I believe Skype does allow changing usernames.

But it's not actually the user name they want since it is required to have a special number attached to it. Which is the part that makes it confusing, and also a restriction.

The difference is that I’m almost never in a game with another Aeolun, so now everyone can see that nice looking name instead of Aeolun442, even if I still need Aeolun#442 to have people add me to their friends list..

There is a 1:1 mapping of Instagram <-> Threads user names, so even if they let you change it in the app you wouldn't be able to get a shorter one if someone has already claimed it on Instagram.

IMO separating identity from display-name is an under-used design choice, especially if you think your system needs to scale up to lots and lots of unique accounts.

I think Steam is an easy example of a service which does it right: Many people (usually in different social circles) can use the same name, you can change your display name easily, other people can see some previously-used names, and you can assign custom names to friends to avoid confusion.

> Pre-supplied questions make the guessing problem worse.

Personally I've love to have the option of choosing my own question.

All too often the pre-supplied questions suck in various ways. Some might be patently insecure (ex: name of highschool), inapplicable (name of first pet) or just too ambiguous to rely on (name of street you grew up on, if you moved a lot.)

With a custom question, I could craft something both secure (at least against non-family) and also unambiguous to future-me. Ex: "Your worst encounter with bees occurred in what place?"