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Comment by codeisawesome | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate how open the dev is being and I like the article! But I have a moral annoyance towards username squatting, especially by folks who don’t actually participate in the network…

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This is exactly why I end up making usernames non-unique in many of my online projects (such as learnawesome.org). It makes things more complex to implement, but at least nobody has to compromise on the online nicknames they want.

besides the technical implementation, duplicate usernames seems confusing to users, which is why i’ve never given it too much consideration. is there a reliable and obvious way you differentiate users in the ui? i assume the primary key of the user on the backend moves to something like email or phone number (or just a unique id key i suppose). i’ve seen some projects use a randomly generated image/sprite for this, which isn’t as reliably obvious as i’d like (not to mention not as broadly accessible).

Discord, game platforms, etc. do this with a discriminator. You're not Bob, even though that's what everyone sees - you're Bob#1337 internal to the system, and people need your "full name" to locate you if you aren't already friends.

yah, have seen that too. not a fan since it really doesn’t reduce cognitive load or complexity.

I don't think it practically matters. I never add people by it. I'm in games or in Discord servers with them and just right click -> add.

Totally respect this. I'm curious about your thoughts about pizza/pizza on infogami:reddit. Is it better to make them public, till someone steals them? should they be disallowed?

early on, it's a free for all. grabbing the special names feels scummy, but I get why they're grabbed. Silent, ghost accounts, I don't feel are detrimental to the community. (but I'm totally open to education about why that sucks)

I think twitter has nearly completely de-emphasized the actual "@Username" handle in favor of the display name. I recently went to create a twitter account for an app/service that I launched and when I inputted my desired username "@MyCoolApp" it gave me basically no indication that it was already in use, and just silently used "@AppMyCool" and set the account display name to the name that I chose.

It's kind of annoying since I would like to have chosen something different, but I'm not bothered that much about it.

I'm not sure about this, but my assumption was that the service provided information on the availability of names.. not squatting. Which to me is different.

Though I suppose one leads to the other

As far as sensitivities go, moral an annoyance is pretty good, no?

Is the Utility to users of the service worth a possibility of annoyance to [dont_know_yet] down the road?

Does this business model not make it easier for the little guys to squat themselves for a small price?

I have gone on a weird rollercoaster of liking the article, but initially disliking the tinybusiness.

My own non-involvement in social media as a person is one thing; but I can't help but really like the idea of creating a little service that could be a tinythorn in a domain squatters operation.

Terrific work!

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