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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

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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