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Ask HN: Nicks how often are they used these days?
In 90s we always have referred to each other by nicks, it was elevating sort of personality not assigned to you from birth but realized these days people get confused when you do that even in my nerdy circles.
IMO it is a loss.
- loktarogar 6y agoStill common in gaming circles. I've met some of my gaming friends many times and they're still their nick to me.
- mod 6y agoI have a bunch of my online poker friends from 10 years ago on Facebook, but when I run across their feed, their usernames flash into my head immediately. When we talk about the others, we only refer to nicknames.
- Minor49er 6y agoThey are still the norm on IRC-based chat applications and various forums. If you move away from social media networks, you will see nick usage a whole lot more
- _bxg1 6y agoWhat's a "nick"?
- 0xdeadb00f 6y agoNickname. "nick" for short; the IRC term is also 'nick'
- nailer 6y agoA handle. An online name seperate from IRL identity.
- cjbprime 6y agoStill common in infosec, gaming, and even just Twitter/Instagram accounts if the owner prefers to show a nick rather than their real name..
- noodlesUK 6y agoI have a couple friends (in their 20s) who have nicks that they use pretty much exclusively for online communication, but it’s increasingly uncommon. I’ve got a unique enough real name that I can use my first name on many services no problem, and if not my first+last is almost globally unique. People with more common real names often find more use for pseudonyms. I see it much more in the infosec community than anywhere else.
- maps7 6y agoI miss everything about how 'pseudo anonymous' used to be the norm on the internet
- achairapart 6y agoThanks Facebook for that. They somehow decided that your real life persona should be === to your digital one.
- nalllar 6y agoWhat does legally changing your name to your nick count for? Joking aside, still see nicks commonly. Discord is almost exclusively screennames, IRC's as it ever was. Twitter is a mix of real/screenname, often with the same people having an RL name presence which is less used/more carefully curated.
- txt 6y agoI was just chatting with some girl about this..Back in my AOL days you would get hit with the 'YOU=' or 'U=' as soon as you entered a chat. Mostly because we had thousands of aol logins and was always on a different account.
- partisan 6y agoMy wife plays video games with a group of players and though they all know each other’s real names by now, they still call each other by their game names. They call me “Mr. YYYY” where YYYY is my wife’s nick name.