You could argue your preconception point as a negative as well. To quote the GP: > The reality is that a relatively small handful of privileged early adopters

You could argue your preconception point as a negative as well. To quote the GP: > The reality is that a relatively small handful of privileged early adopters get good usernames that match their identities, and everyone else gets screwed. These identifiers then act like tatoos that you got a long time ago and are stuck with for the rest of your life: people end up reminded every day of a sport they can no longer play due to an injury ("hockeystar") or loves lost ("iheartjessie"), attached to a joke that is no longer funny or to a thought that they found adorable as a 13 year old (when you are legally asked to "choose a username": a modern era coming of age scenario) but which adults find inane, or to a nickname that means something different than you realized to some people and now can't change. The best happy medium is a user name that can change. But so many places make them static (sometimes for reasons no better than they just made "username" the foreign key in their users table) > I come from the ICQ time Likewise; that's why I used it as an example ;) I think comparing ICQ to IRC is a bit disingenuous as they occupied slightly different use cases.