> Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.

I would assume that there’s pressure for “growth“, and pushing discord as a Reddit or forum replacement. It’s probably just that.

Could be. The baffling thing is there doesn't seem to be much consideration by those community leaders for how different these mediums are. It would be like if HN converted overnight into an IRC server or mailing list. Those formats just don't make any sense given the context.

I dunno, people complain about maintaining a forum software stack, so maybe that's where this stems from. Could be a market worth trying to capture, a 5 minute deploy that truly requires no maintenance ever. And if you want it private, just set the robots meta to noindex, problem solved.

What I'm talking about is the opposite, actually - users keep forcing it into places it doesn't really want to go, it's a chat client not a message board/wiki/etc. And while Discord has catered to it a little bit, it's not really been something they pushed hard yet (threads/etc are still there but very optional and very low adoption from users). I think unique usernames are potentially a sign of that changing, with more public (not just inside a private community) functionality being put forth in a real way.

I'll always be surprised on how badly teamspeak dropped the ball (although it seems that they finally have an open beta for teamspeak 5!).

Discord would probably win at the end anyway, especially because of the need for self-hosting (even though I don't think it was that bad... there were quite a few open servers),

But they had such a dominant position and, while Discord kept evolving, TeamSpeak just stayed the same... With the network effect that they had, I think with just some small improvements (mostly on the text chat support) they could stay relevant for a long time.

To be fair , Teamspeak UX is superior for voice only. At least on my opinion. Chat is another thing, but it was not meant for that.

> Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board.

What? Why?

Names are never unique. That's not how names work. Why would usernames be different?

> Names are never unique. That's not how names work.

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.

> 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.

The issues are.. trivial at most. If you can't find someone based on their name in a large community, that can't cause any problems, because... how did you learn their name? If you know who they are, you can find them. The situation where you're given a piece of paper and told "find a specific person by this name, but not anyone else by the same name, within X time period or you lose this game" doesn't actually arise "IRL".

I'm confused. What game are we playing? I just need to add my friend Ryan so we can play a game together and there are 10,000 other `ryan`s when I type "ryan" into the username search field.

There is no username search field in that context. The "username search field" requires the person's username + their unique friend code (otherwise known as a discriminator). If you know to look for a "ryan" you would know their friend code. You either share a server with them, or met them outside the Discord exosystem.

It's that last point there, that Discord seems to want to tackle... We will have to wait to see how, but I hope they don't ruin the server paradigm and aim to become a subreddit type ecosystem.

That global username thing seemed like a weird (bad) architectural decision to me back then, glad they came to realise that. Same thing with whatsapp, apparently they are growing in the username direction instead of that horrible telephone number thing.