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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Same thing for Hacker News - you can't change your username and keep your karma. I guess the designers just don't design for that. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacke...

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A brand new HN account is worthless, so typos don't matter because you can make a new account and redo your single post.

Changing a name that was correct is a totally different problem from a typo at ingest.

I wouldn't want an HN user to be able to ditch her reputation while keeping her karma.

Given your profile shows all your comments and submissions (and would likely still show them if only the name was changed), I'm not sure what the big deal is here.

You learn to recognize the names of active users that post in threads you're interested in. I shouldn't be able to ditch that recognition but keep my karma, and you shouldn't have to look through my history to see if I'm someone you previously recognized.

Eh, maybe I don't see it. I mean, I use a lot of internet forums running scripts like XenForo and IPB, and those let you change your 'display name' whenever the hell you like. Yet I still recognise everyone perfectly fine. There are people on my forums that change their display name, avatar and signature on a weekly basis. I still recognise them just fine.

Same works on Discord too. There you can change your name whenever the hell you feel like it. Again, doesn't stop most people recognising you.

Perhaps not in that case, but regardless, this is the kind of thing should be designed in deliberately as a feature (with an option to bypass it under special circumstances), rather than some accidental/arbitrary technical limitation just because the dev team didn't bother to implement the ability to update the field for whatever reason.

The difference is that changing your username creates a completely new identity. It's not just correcting a typo.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames (or a variant of such) for 'real identities', but ignores the reality that people change their names when they get married. Is getting married a completely new identity? Now the username doesn't actually identify the poster by the name people might recognize, if they gained their rep after getting married.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames

From what I've observed, HN encourages people to use consistent identities, not necessarily real names. 'dang has mentioned a number of times that pseudonymity is fine.

Workaround: Don't change your name when you get married. Less work, it makes genealogy research for your descendants easier. And the only downside is people guess the wrong name because of all the patriarchy.

There are always exceptions. I have a friend who had a bad history with her family, so she really wanted to take her husband's name. But I still believe that keeping your pre-married name is usually the best choice if you don't want your identity to be lost or subsumed.

That's incredibly dismissive of couples who decide to pick a shared family name. There are more downsides than people guessing wrong, but that's beside the point. You're basically arguing that the only reason people do it is patriarchy and giving up your native name is giving up your identity as if it were a form of oppression.

Eh, people choose oppression for themselves all the time. We have a right to determine our own identity, for sure. It's just unfortunate that people just happen to make the choice that supports patriarchy the most often, that you wonder what forces are really in play.

I don't know their policy, but I would guess that if someone has a reasonable explanation like this (or some other small change that doesn't materially affect the ability of readers to recognize the user), the HN team will try to be accommodating. They have always been responsive and gracious to me on the handful of occasions that I've contacted them, although I'm sure my questions were annoying.

I've asked before, they said no.

My guess: the underlying database uses usernames as a primary key and they don't want to update all the comments and submissions just to make a specific user happy. Especially because doing it once would set a precedent for others.

I doubt they'd use the username as the primary key, but either way, I agree the precedent is the biggest concern. They'd get inundated with name change requests if they started making exceptions for people.

The point is that it doesn't need to be that way. Why can't username be an editable field?

Because it creates a new identity. The only way anyone on HN can recognize you is your username. Changing it at will would allow anyone to shed their identity on HN at any time while keeping the karma and account privileges they've accumulated.

Perhaps that is something that's worth allowing, and iirc dang et al have made some vague statements that they may be interested in allowing that at some point, but the ramifications would be substantial. This isn't something that should be taken lightly, nor should it be expected/implicit that a social site will accommodate new identities on-demand.

> Because it creates a new identity.

And?

My anonymous (to everyone but the NSA) username will be a different anonymous username. The karma/privileges are entirely dependent on the quality of my posts, not some inherent value of the username. Also the posts that generated that karma would still be there under the new username.

I'm not too concerned either way , but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Again, identity. You're not anonymous here, you're pseudonymous. Believe it or not, but I do actually recognize a lot of people here by their HN usernames, and I would mind if those were to randomly change all the time.

Anyway, I suspect that if you e-mail HN mods, they could be able to correct your username in no time. But making it any easier than that would, IMO, be harmful to community.

> but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Yes, you don't. But forum managers have been aware of the issue for years

It's a feature that's very easily abused.

What is the abuse? Changing your meaningless identifier?

Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.

The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.

Please explain, I'm honestly curious. Maybe I'm missing something?

> who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers?

Yes, because people will abuse it. If you keep track of violations (especially in moderated forums) it's important to know who did what. And while your primary key on the DB might still be the same, people don't know it, they know your nickname.

Some people would change it every time they comment just for the sake of it

New account creations have some kind of gatekeeping/email verification so it's not as efficient, and admins have ways of checking if this was done with the purpose of evading a ban for example

But if you want to change it because you made a typo or for a similar reason admins usually let you do it (they have to change it for you though)

That can be addressed within the UI. E.g. display the old name next to the new name for a few weeks. After that, just leave a symbol indicating that this username has a change history, which could be presented on click or hover.

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