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Comment by dan_manges | Hacker News Reader

They gave one reason in the post. They wanted usernames to be case insensitive, so that if there's a user named BigBird, somebody else can't sign up as bigbird. Case insensitive usernames are also helpful to minimize support issues when somebody forgets the exact case they used when they created their account.

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Am I insensitive in wondering "Why not just limit it to lowercase, ASCII chars"?

I don't think you're insensitive, but on a site which wants to foster users who care about their profile and persona on the site, freedom to display a username how they like could be a valuable feature.

Yes, because lowercase ASCII does not meaningfully capture how names are written in most of the world. If you want to cater to a global audience, it is simply not sufficient.

As they say in the article, they are trying to serve a global audience. As is easily googlable, Spotify was developed in the Baltic; the developer's own names likely contain non-ASCII characters.

Interesting, I felt foolish about an hour after having written this post, realizing that in most scenarios, it really shouldn't ever be any amount of effort minus half a second of planning and felt foolish for writing off unicode. (Normally I go the other route, unicode all the things).

I suppose I feel that I was probably right to call myself arrogant then, to find out what you noted about Spotify's creators/creation. Interesting, thanks for the perspective check

I don't think you were all wrong - there's a difference between username and name. My name has a space in it, but they won't allow me to represent that in the username. And if my name is already used by someone else as their username, I can't use it as mine. This doesn't bother me, so long as my name is displayed properly in the UI (if at all).

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