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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

> And for what?

So that you can be identified? (I'm not talking identified in a mathematical sense, but in a informal conversational sense (you know, what usernames are actually used for)). The whole point of a username is that it is the most humanly convenient way to represent a user in text in the context of a certain site.

Because the alternative would be to have thirteen saurik in the same thread debating a topic and you would have no way of distinguishing them. Avatars are an attempt to fix that but it sucks and is bloated for many scenarios.

Sites that do allow you to change username break conversations where people refer to each other using the username (stackoverflow comments are a really common and annoying issue)

Yes, it is annoying when you don't get your first pick but it truly is not a big deal and it solves a real problem.

jay.freeman.178 is an excellent username. You are not your username.

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People can change their legal names, I see no reason why they shouldn't also be able to change their user names.

The problem with breaking continuity in forums and other similar networks can be mitigated via dynamic user name lookups (eg how Facebook does `@` mentions - however I have also seen some forums do this as well), supporting in line quoting (like how message boards often work), nested replies (HN, reddit, etc). Granted there will still be occasions when references slip through the net but us humans have a remarkable ability to deduce the context of the written word even when it doesn't always read perfectly.

I have not seen dynamic user name lookups work well in practice though, where the system has made it convenient enough to actually be used consistently. A different approach might be to leave the name as is for past conversations but use the new name for new interactions (and some way of showing the past name, xxx (formerly yyy) for new posts and xxx (now known as yyy) for past posts) - as is quite common that people manually do in the real world (and on facebook). Not perfect and quickly gets complicated.

I'd argue that a username does not have the same function as a name. My name is not an identifier and most have not chosen their name - which is also why (I believe) the first name change is free of charge where I live. In most cases you can also create a different account. Depending on the type of service this might not be desirable but in others it is exactly what you would want.

Slack handles this quite well actually. I know a lot of people dislike Slack for a lot of valid reasons, but they handle a few things right. If I type a message on Slack saying "hey, @alice, what's up?" then "@alice" gets replaced with the person's real name "Alice". When I send the message, the "Alice" bit in the resulting message becomes a link that will open the user's profile. Additionally, if "Alice" ever changes her name OR username, the name updates accordingly.

I agree with you about the identification part. I was wondering whether we could have a user friendly way to have a system of usernames + "something else" that allowed usernames to not be unique while still solving the identification part.

A possible implementation would be to allow the user to give a "nickname" to add to usernames he wants to identify uniquely that would be visible only for them. For example since I talk now with you I could add to your username "user with whom I discussed identities and usernames" and this (or a short version of it) would be shown next to your username from now on.

A more automated way to do this is to create a unique image for the user based on the content they have posted, when they created their account, not so personal but requires less effort from the user, I'm sure such systems exist in many sites to create avatars. Obviously in this machine learning times we could get to do sth much better.

The former battle.net (now Blizzard App) does what many games do and has the form "Username #XXXX", where the xs are digits. So you can be Frank #0001 and I can be Frank #0002. Steam allows you to tag people on your list with user created descriptions. There are definitely applications out there that make this kind of user experience a priority, I feel like the gaming world is ahead of the curve on this point.

Steam also allows you to change your publicly visible username more or less at will.

There's one "account name" which you pick at sign up, use to log in, and can never change (as far as I know), but you can then pick a "user name". The "user name" is what gets shown in any interaction with other users (forums, profile page, chat, in games, etc) and IIRC it doesn't even need to be unique.

Tagging people on your friends list is a great feature to match, since the tags remain when the tagged user changes their user name, which some people do quite often (whether for a joke or just because they got bored of the old one).

It really seems like a great system and it'd be nice if other systems offered the same degree of flexibility.

Steam has some poorly thought out shit; it has four identifiers, three of them unique:

1. Username, used to login, not visible elsewhere, unique and security related.

2. SteamID, id number which is visible elsewhere and used in their api fairly often; not too different from the username other than being public

3. UrlID - by default a "steamcommunity" link to the user's page is their SteamID, but it can optionally be edited by the user to a custom url. This ID is a globally unique namespace. For example, https://steamcommunity.com/id/gaben

4. Display name ... Yup, the display name. Arbitrarily editable.

Having that many things is dumb. Having an editable url component is dumb (it shoulda just been the steamid forever).

All in all, they're not a good example.

A combination of username, steamID and display name completely understandable in my opinion. User shouldn't be forced to login using a randomly generated ID, but something he can remember and has the option of being private by being able to use the display name.

UrlID can be beneficial for the user so the user can choose a easily spellable identifier for the URL in case he needs to share the link often using voice.

Seems like an optimal system except that the UrlID probably is only a use case not that often. But it still won't really hurt anyone. If it wasn't the URL ID it would be steamID, which does nothing to help to remember the URLs. So why is it poorly thought out if it gives benefits to some usecases without making anyone else worse off?

But now the onus is on other people to create a name for everyone they might interact with regularly. So instead of each person creating one name to denote themselves, each person is now creating multiple names to denote everyone else.

And I don't really see how this is functionally any different to adding digits to the end of your normal username.

If you're referring to the tagging on Steam, it's in addition to the regularly displayed username. If you're not, I guess I'm not sure what you're talking about.

In Steam it is actually the case that a user can select their own display name (distinct from the account name used to log in) and change it at any time (and there's very few restrictions on what you can set it to, the system doesn't care if every single one of your friends has the same display name).

This function is separate from the "tagging" feature, which is helpful for keeping track of those friends who frequently change their display names and avatars. It's also possible to view the list of previous display names a given user has had, at least if you're friends with them.

It is battle.net again

Glad to hear it, had no idea

It's actually Blizzard Battle.net, now.

I wish I was making this up. Maybe they're trying to get their chat app acquired by Google.

And as a user, that system is _utterly terrible_

"I want to add you as a friend so we can play games together, what's your name" Mrguyorama + random junk I didn't choose

It's user unfriendly

Would you rather be xXTheRealMrGuyoramaXx or mrguyorama_123 instead? I really don't see how it's that different. It solves the problem of first come first serve, without forcing people to come up with the random meaningless bits themselves.

For Battle.net, you can just give out your email address and that works fine.

Discord does this as well, plus you can change you public username on every servers.

Asymmetric keypairs, where your nickname is associated to your public key. It's the only reliable way to do it across multiple sites. But then you have a keypair to protect.

> A possible implementation would be to allow the user to give a "nickname" to add to usernames he wants to identify uniquely that would be visible only for them. For example since I talk now with you I could add to your username "user with whom I discussed identities and usernames" and this (or a short version of it) would be shown next to your username from now on.

That sounds a bit like SDSI & SPKI's nicknaming functionality. Entities were identified by keyhashes, but you could (and in practice would) give them nicknames or use others' nicknames for them.

> Because the alternative would be to have thirteen saurik in the same thread debating a topic and you would have no way of distinguishing them.

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.

In the real world you can see the other person.

In the real world we have faces/voices/personalities etc. and an insane amount of context that we associate with a person, in most cases two people can have and use the same name and there won't be any confusion because the context is trivial. In written form this information is greatly reduced. This gets increasingly apparent on the internet where the number of participants can be huge and the time spent with each one minimal.

Your examples are games, which greatly limit interactions both in number of people and in time. I don't jump in and offer help in a game that ended 4 years ago. Everything is already in a very specific context.

It is often desirable for the username to be consistent across the entire site, if you recognize the username you remember past interactions and conversations which gives you a better context. This is a valuable part of a community.

Sure, there are places where you deliberately want to maintain pseudo-anonymity, where you'd get a new username in each discussion. But that's something else.

My name is Cory. Despite sharing that name with 120k other people in the U.S., occurrences of misidentification due to having the same name as somebody else are very rare and usually often resolved by merely using my last name instead.

If your apps' users report problems with identifying people, just allow users to add more specificity to their username. "People always get me confused with this other user 'chairdude', can I change my display name to 'armchairdude'?"

If thirteen 'saurik's want to have a fun time and create a confusing discussion thread together, so be it.

Mohammad Mohammad has over 2200 profiles on Linkedin.

And unique usernames don't solve that problem either. If I know a guy named "Mohammad Mohammad" and I want to find him on LinkedIn, I already don't know his unique username should he have one.

If I know him in person and ask for his LinkedIn, he can just send me a link to his profile. If Mohammad is advertising his LinkedIn presence, again, he can provide a link to his profile. Adding in unique usernames doesn't help much in this case.

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