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> Because the alternative would be to have thirteen saurik in the same thread debating a topic and you would have no way of distinguishing them. In the real wo

> Because the alternative would be to have thirteen saurik in the same thread debating a topic and you would have no way of distinguishing them. In the real world, people almost always go by their first name, and we don't have this problem. When two people in a social circle have the same first name, we don't turn and say "well everyone has to use their whole name, always, now." Rather, we adjust our names (usually someone gets a nickname, or goes by their last name). The steam system allows multiple people to have the same display name and it works just fine. Sure, people can troll with it when they join your tf2 server (and then you kick them off). The blizzard system also works great. The unique identifier is there, if all other forms of attempting to add a friend fail, but mostly you end up working contextually.

fiatjaf 9y ago
In the real world you can see the other person.
tjoff 9y ago
In the real world we have faces/voices/personalities etc. and an insane amount of context that we associate with a person, in most cases two people can have and use the same name and there won't be any confusion because the context is trivial. In written form this information is greatly reduced. This gets increasingly apparent on the internet where the number of participants can be huge and the time spent with each one minimal. Your examples are games, which greatly limit interactions both in number of people and in time. I don't jump in and offer help in a game that ended 4 years ago. Everything is already in a very specific context. It is often desirable for the username to be consistent across the entire site, if you recognize the username you remember past interactions and conversations which gives you a better context. This is a valuable part of a community. Sure, there are places where you deliberately want to maintain pseudo-anonymity, where you'd get a new username in each discussion. But that's something else.

fiatjaf 9y ago

In the real world you can see the other person.

tjoff 9y ago

In the real world we have faces/voices/personalities etc. and an insane amount of context that we associate with a person, in most cases two people can have and use the same name and there won't be any confusion because the context is trivial. In written form this information is greatly reduced. This gets increasingly apparent on the internet where the number of participants can be huge and the time spent with each one minimal. Your examples are games, which greatly limit interactions both in number of people and in time. I don't jump in and offer help in a game that ended 4 years ago. Everything is already in a very specific context. It is often desirable for the username to be consistent across the entire site, if you recognize the username you remember past interactions and conversations which gives you a better context. This is a valuable part of a community. Sure, there are places where you deliberately want to maintain pseudo-anonymity, where you'd get a new username in each discussion. But that's something else.