Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> The only solution is to develop systems that don’t have usernames.

I disagree that this is the only solution. The OP comes very close to discovering an alternative one: don't allow users the power to select their own arbitrary username.

When a user makes an account on your site (and if your site actually needs publicly-displayed usernames in the first place), give them the option of, say, ten usernames generated by the site itself; these don't need to be numeric codes like WeChat does, they can be pronounceable phrases in the same manner that Gfycat generates URLs. Everyone will end up with names like "questionable wet aplomado falcon", "each unlawful harlequin bug", "icy inferior iceland gull", which honestly isn't any worse than the average name I encounter on Reddit or elsewhere.

The biggest downside(?) of this approach is that it makes it harder for someone to build their personal brand, but the older I get the more I think it's a bad idea to use a consistent nickname across different websites.

> they can be pronounceable phrases

Pronounceable in what language?

Why should Vietnamese or Icelandic users have to use English user names? It is really necessary to enforce English hegemony at such a fundamental layer of the software?

For comparison, imagine if your randomly generated user name was one of the following 5 (these are all combination of three words):

    1. sao-chep-nong-pha-vay
    2. giu-phep-ca-ngua-bay-chu
    3. hai-hung-ngon-luan-boi-phan
    4. hon-ba-kinh-can
    5. xuoi-van-ri-do-truoc

and that's what you needed to remember when you signed in and what other people had to quote or @mention when they reply to you.

It's easy to hijack a consistent username too. If you're "foobar123" on a dozen sites I could register "foobar123" elsewhere and do damage to your "personal brand" pretty easily.

> The biggest downside(?) of this approach

I tried this approach for a service awhile back, and the biggest hurdle was educating the users. Even determining what to call it was a huge challenge, as it’s clearly not a ‘username’.

In what way would the user need to be educated? Social products like IRC, Twitter, and Reddit have accustomed users to seeing opaque, often-nonsensical strings next to every action taken by every user, and the only difference here is that a given user hasn't had the opportunity to select their own opaque and nonsensical string to associate with their actions. They wouldn't even need to remember this string to log in, because sites use email or third-party login services for that (and even if they did need to know their own username to log in, their browser would remember it for them).

I’ll happily accept any wireframes you may have that wouldn’t increase friction beyond the typical “choose your username and password”.

You may be overestimating the typical non-hackernews user. It’s at least as challenging as getting users to use things like 2fa and/or recovery codes.

New wireframes don't need to be made, because this paradigm already exists in a roundabout way. For many websites that I have signed up for, any attempt to register an already-taken username will present the user with multiple suggested alternative usernames. It's been decades since I signed up for Gmail, but I'm pretty sure that on the sign-up screen you would enter your name, "John Smith", and then your desired email, "johnsmith@gmail", and then when that failed you would be given a list like "john_smith@gmail", "smithj@gmail", "johnsmith2@gmail", etc.

This is the same UI flow as the above, except that it's not based on anything that the user has already entered and it doesn't provide any way for the user to override the suggestions, which actually makes it simpler than the existing flow.

i let people to write their name and then generate a unique username from that, by removing any non letters and adding a number if neccessary.

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