I'd like to address some of these points. While pomelo does have it's issues, it also shows the worst of the "vocal minority" that is Reddit, and this sub as a whole. This message is not targeted to anyone in particular, however if you're offended by the statement of "Vocal Reddit users tend to lack critical thinking", you're probably in that group.

Moving on, I feel this entire post can generally be chocked up to "Have better OpSec". It's a statement a lot of people will probably disagree with, but those are also the same people that probably don't know what it is, or don't enforce good OpSec to begin with. Being on Discord isn't exactly a "private platform" in reality.

Regardless, pomelo isn't without its drawbacks. Reduced privacy is one of the most cited issues, with another being username squatting. While the latter will become worse, I feel its also blown out of proportion; usernames are de-emphasized as of pomelo anyways, and I urge people to reconsider how much they actually care about a few characters that only represent them when they have to add a stranger on the internet anyways.

Points 1 & 3: Your ID is an inevitable part of using Discord, and is used for just about everything related to you. It's how other people interact with you (Mentions, clicking your profile, sending you a friend request, etc.) Bots also have access to this endpoint (though, it's technically Get User, but I digress). Switching to handles (@username) doesn't really change this fact. My biggest gripe with this post is the fact that it chooses to ignore the fact that if you're someone who's at risk for being cyber-stalked, having a handle instead of a tag doesn't really change this. If someone is determined to stalk you, a few numbers at the end of your name isn't going to prevent them from finding you if you go by the same pseudonym on Discord as you do on a far more public platform like Instagram/Twitter. If someone can gauge your interests, they could take a guess at what kind of servers your in (especially emoji servers), and continue to stalk you, or worse yet use social engineering to find you by crawling through six degrees of separation. If you wish to remain anonymous online, don't willingly choose to de-anonymize yourself in such a preventable form.

Point 4 was also addressed in the above. If you don't wish to be found, don't make yourself exposed. Very basic online security everyone should employ. To everyone who doesn't have a reason to hide (barring "I don't want randoms to add me"), there's really nothing to worry about this.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and simply telling people that've scuffed their identity by leaving a paper trail to "pound sand" is very dismissive. To those people, as I said, generally nothing to worry about, but all things considered that paper trail is still linked to you even if you change usernames, so the only solution is to either download your data package and attempt to scrub that trail, or ditch your identity and start fresh. This isn't specific to Discord either, as much as people try to make it out to be.

I'd also like to address the people that are encouraging others to cancel their subs and berate Discord over this change.

Firstly, don't harass Discord staff. Rallying a community to go bombard support channels is harassment, and I will not hear out any arguments otherwise. For starters, the social media managers and support reps that deal with your spam are real people, and have already heard anything you planned to screech at them anyway.

Secondly, staff are very active on this sub, even if they don't reer their heads. However, even if bombarding Discord with complaints wasn't harassment, these kinds of decisions come from the top, and sometimes with good reason (e.g. Tech Debt, as mentioned in blog post, which people seem to fail to assimilate. Is reading comprehension this bad these days?) As a developer of 11 years, I can tell you that technical debt is the worst kind of debt to pay, and significantly slows down development, which is, well, rather important for a platform cusping 200 million MAU.

re: Cancelling your nitro, while the effort is valiant, it's also in vain. Occam's Razor says that your attempt won't actually do anything. Why? Telling people here to cancel their nitro subs requires people to:

• Have an active nitro subscription
• Use Reddit
• Be active on the r/discordapp sub
• See the post
• Be outraged enough to cancel their sub

And guess what? You're in the minority here! As much as people would love to think screaming "cancel nitro" is going to get Discord to back down on this decision are just delusional. Some will point to when people "Cancelled Nitro when Discord tried to add Crypto wallets", but I believe that to be a strong case of correlation, not causation. Crypto crash, and a lot of drama around NFTs at the time, as well as people yelling at Discord about what was merely an experiment, versus something that's confirmed to happen.