I'm sick + a 3 paragraph rant about Discord

06/08/2023 at 06:06 AM PT

Sometimes, it feels like my body is out to get me. Last night, I didn't go to sleep until about 00:00, and then my body had the audacity to wake me up at 05:00. Why did it do that? What did I do to piss my body off? Anyway, I'm sick. It started yesterday, but I feel even worse today. I was supposed to go to a dentist appointment, and we were supposed to leave to go camping for a couple days, but I'm not sure either are happening now. I really, really don't want to go camping. Normally, I love camping, but my mom wanted to take my little brother and his friends, all of which literally do not stop screaming the entire time they are present. The last time his friends came over, I am not exaggerating when I say I had a headache for two days. It's awful. The children combined with me being sick are certainly the equation for poppy to lose her mind, but hey, maybe I'll get out of it.

Another reason my life is extremely difficult (im joking), is the discord username update. I've always found names really important. I spent years trying to get a "cool" name on minecraft. When I finally got the name "poppyseed" it wasn't even the name I was originally going for, but I really quickly fell in love. I built most of my online identity around that name, using @ignpoppyseed for most of my social media, but the holy grail of names for me was always just "poppy". I've never had a shot at the minecraft name poppy, since the account who currently has it, has since 2015, and is still an active player, but on discord, it was different. The poppy#0001 tag was passed around a lot when I first started rebranding to poppy. Sometimes, when I had nitro, I would briefly claim it, but most of the time, someone else had it. In July of 2021, I don't know what possessed me to try, but using my brand new nitro free trial, I claimed the poppy#0001 tag. It's been "my" tag ever since. Even though it required me to actively pay for nitro to keep it, I loved that name so much. Discord was the only place where I could get my actual name, what people actually called me.

A few weeks ago, Discord announced a cool new update. "Usernames on Discord are evolving", they said. "Oh cool" I thought, "I wonder what this is about". I read through the article. Nevermind. Not cool. Discord had announced that they were switching the system from a discriminator based system, to a unique username system just like other social media. Even though it's been nearly 5 weeks since the change was announced, I'm still livid. 23 months, $230 spent almost exclusively to keep my Discord tag, only to have Discord rip it away from me because they wanted to be like the other platforms? And don't even get me started on how much money I turned down because I wanted to keep my tag. If you're actually curious, I had an offer of about 200 USD. If you total all of the offers I ever recieved, it would be close to $2000. Was turning down that much money kind of dumb? Maybe. But I think it proves my point better than anything else. I cared deeply about my tag, and for Discord to literally acknowledge that they were taking the #0001 tags away, despite them being meaningful to people in this quote: "We recognize that this is a big change. There may be hiccups with this process, and it may be tough to part ways with that “#0001” that’s meant a lot to you over the years.", just felt like a kick in the teeth from a company I poured so much time and money into.

I held out hope though. Maybe discord would announce a change where people that had #0001 tags that could be converted into usernames would have their name reserved? I hoped, and I waited. Day passed, and they finished rolling usernames out to partnered and verified server owners. Poppy still wasn't taken. I checked every day by sending a friend request to the username "poppy". Then, on June 6th, Discord released the ability to change to the new username system to a small group of 2015 Discord users. I checked less than 10 minutes after this was announced. "poppy" was gone, I checked some of my friend's names, and the name of my discord bot. "arctic" was gone, "egirl" was gone, "catgirl"? You guessed it, gone. The user of one account I checked had a display name that implied they hacked the account they claimed the name on. I think this illustrates a really obvious problem, that every social media network that has unique names will experience. Accounts are going to be hacked and stolen, so that people can have the names they want. In the best example of this, Naoki Hiroshima lost his Twitter username, @N, because someone wanted it (or I think more accurately, didn't want him to have it). Obviously, complaining on my blog isn't going to change anything, but realistically, I don't think anything will. Discord is a huge company, and as long as they don't lose $50,000,000 as a direct result of a change, they don't really care what happens.

I didn't expect this post to be a 3 paragraph rant about Discord, but if you know me, you'll know how beyond livid I am. I don't know what my username is going to be, because as much as I use it, I really hate the name "ignpoppyseed". A friend of mine jokingly suggested a name, and it's silly, but I honestly might end up using it. Anyway, thank you all for reading my insane rant. I'll see you all next time.

Thank you all for reading! ~poppy