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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the /photos kind of necessary since usernames are UGC? What if a username is “about” or “contact”?

I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to a user page.

YouTube had the same problem.

The oldest account have a direct URL in the form of youtube.com/username. Newer account had youtube.com/user/username (I think most account have both URLs).

Then YouTube was bought by Google and they introduced "channels", so some channels had youtube.com/channel/username.

Then YouTube wanted to become like TikTok and they forced at-usernames some years ago, so now accounts have a URL like youtube.com/@username

I really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign.

tiktok.com/@about

tiktok.com/about

This has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.

I wonder why we left ~ for @.

Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?

Wikipedia claims it was invented as an ad-hoc convention by some Twitter users, and eventually it became so popular Twitter started turning @username into links.

It was, and and the same with ReTweets (RT) and #hashtags, some of us were even there since the SMS days and witnessed that formal adoption

The ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This shorthand was adopted by shells like sh/csh and emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web page on a site.

Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor.

For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.

It makes sense in a chatroom if you direct a message @someone (at someone), or if you direct a tweet @someone. So I guess the natural progression of that is @someone becoming the identifier.

> For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.

I think this makes sense if you pronounce the action. On Twitter you'd tweet [at] user(s). I think it made even more sense back in the Twitter via SMS where you had to send a message to Twitter's number but direct at a particular user.

Twitter was limited to what was easy to enter on a T9 keypad. Of all the available characters, @ was a good one to go with.

I remember signing up for an AI inference provider, noticing my profile page was "/<username>" and changing my name to logout which worked but caused some amusing errors. Oops!

GitHub manage to do it. Most URLs you'd think of are either redirects to other bits of the site, or accounts owned by GitHub themselves. It just takes a bit of planning.

> It just takes a bit of planning.

Haha, no it just takes forcing user account name changes.

github.com/copilot, github.com/claude, github.com/models, basically everything you can think of for the last few years has been through this approach.

"Hey, remember the username you've had for twenty years? Yeah we want it now"

It's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.

And yet it's worth it for the network effects, sadly. These companies should be regulated, the moats are just too deep.

I like that the EU recognised this and did start to regulate that these companies need to interoperate.

I wonder how they prompted these users to change their usernames. Was it just a "we need your username for our business, so comply" notice?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210702114132/github.com/copilo... some proof this was an actual user

Looks like he's now https://github.com/ogcopilot

Some more discussion on similar things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38380344

You can plan every "top level" path you'll ever want on the site from now until forever? Or do you mean planning as in plan to force account name changes on users when someone's username conflicts with a new feature name?

You could probably get away with banning all common english words as usernames if you wanted to.

Or put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.

Even if you don’t ban all words, there are some you should filter:

• <https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve>

• <https://xkcd.com/1963/>

Until you invent a product or concept name that is taken by one of the users ;-)

In that case it's not really different if the usernames are prefixed to be clearly identifiable as usernames - most companies still wouldn't want any user accounts that look like official company accounts.

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