4 ms·

Easy solution: Assign all accounts a unique and randomly generated ID, and allow everyone to then use the handle they want. If someone wants to write a @handle

Easy solution: Assign all accounts a unique and randomly generated ID, and allow everyone to then use the handle they want. If someone wants to write a @handle in a post or a comment, a list shall appear, asking them to choose the account they wish to link to. IDs shall be public, and the list shall present itself as something like "@Max 36hf28bcd ; @Max 9jv1tcsh ; @Max b63avg960"

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
It turns out that cryptographic gobblediguuk is difficult for humans to understand. Even if your conscious mind knows it's a meaningless jumble of characters, your visual processing system evolved over millenia and honed with decades of schooling to read text fast is automatically failing to parse it in your visual field. So your users will self-train to ignore them. A solution is to display the random nonsense as a unique image. More pleasant to look at, much easier to discern differences. There exist competing standards and services to generating images from random numbers, because it turns out the most universal way of doing this is abstract colorful shapes, which fall into that uncanny valley of approximating but not quite successfully imitating abstract art; And most people seem to think that's ugly. Maybe that dall-e thing could generate good images to represent hashes? What does it output if one inputs nonsense?
- throwaway290 4y ago
  1. System assigns each user a random visually unique (no lookalikes) ID, and assigns a visually unique colorblind-friendly abstract image generated from user's ID (like you say) as default avatar. 2. User is free to change avatar and username, except there must be no visually similar avatar-username combinations across userbase. The restriction is enforced any time the user changes avatar or username. 3. System ID is shown to screen readers in place of avatar. 4. Whenever user interacts with another, if they have not communicated before, profile image or system ID is made more prominent for validation.
phendrenad2 4y ago
That isn't a solution, because people who want to have a memorable/unique username are not interested in sharing it with others, and they will move to a platform where they don't have to. Probably part of Twitter's appeal early on was the ability to get there early and grab up an account like @cookies or @milk.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I guess we as a society have to decide if we want a market on usernames. I don't think we need it. And if the majority of users agree and switch to a platform that doesn't value usernames, then the few people trying to monopolize usernames (like the people who swarmed to twitter to grab handles) will be left on a barren platform.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Absolutely. I only said that what was referred to as an "easy solution" isn't.
smilekzs 4y ago
Basically Discord then? You have a human-readable handle that is not guaranteed to be unique, and disambiguated by the last 4 digits (?) of your actual UID (which is a number)?
armchairhacker 4y ago
Discord does this. You can choose whatever name you want. Then your name has ‘#’ and 4 random numbers appended to it, like ‘Foo##5142’. The # and numbers are greyed out and mostly hidden so when you see peoples ids, unless your explicitly looking for it your brain only pays attention to the name part. IMO it works really well
- ev1 4y ago
  I had discriminator #9999 of a common last name and received death threats (for over a year) and support ticket impersonation "hey I lost access to my account", random friend adds and DMs trying to phish, constantly being sent tokenstealer malware. This ended in the funniest way possible: being banned for using third party client Ripcord (presumably, no other offenses, happened shortly after trying it out). My prediction for a system similar to the one parent suggests is that people will continually keep creating accounts until they get something like "Max a0a0a0a" or "Max 000000e" or something by chance, and then that becomes """valuable""" and the same thing happens.
egypturnash 4y ago
Discord does this and it's really annoying. Especially if your usual handle is actually sufficiently unique that you've never had a name collision on any site, ever. It's almost as annoying as trying to remember anyone's ICQ number. "Easy" solution: all account names must be at least ten characters long, single dictionary words and common first names are illegal. Make everyone spend some time picking a Good Handle.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  As long as you can login using your email address you don’t need to remember it. Never mind that I don’t even know the number on my account nor the password, that’s what password managers are for.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Login is not the problem, sharing your contact info off the top of your head is.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Absolutely hate any service that does this, and won't use them.
- Victerius 4y ago
  Cool.
silisili 4y ago
Stadia does something like this. Thought it was a neat idea too.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

It turns out that cryptographic gobblediguuk is difficult for humans to understand. Even if your conscious mind knows it's a meaningless jumble of characters, your visual processing system evolved over millenia and honed with decades of schooling to read text fast is automatically failing to parse it in your visual field. So your users will self-train to ignore them. A solution is to display the random nonsense as a unique image. More pleasant to look at, much easier to discern differences. There exist competing standards and services to generating images from random numbers, because it turns out the most universal way of doing this is abstract colorful shapes, which fall into that uncanny valley of approximating but not quite successfully imitating abstract art; And most people seem to think that's ugly. Maybe that dall-e thing could generate good images to represent hashes? What does it output if one inputs nonsense?

throwaway290 4y ago
1. System assigns each user a random visually unique (no lookalikes) ID, and assigns a visually unique colorblind-friendly abstract image generated from user's ID (like you say) as default avatar. 2. User is free to change avatar and username, except there must be no visually similar avatar-username combinations across userbase. The restriction is enforced any time the user changes avatar or username. 3. System ID is shown to screen readers in place of avatar. 4. Whenever user interacts with another, if they have not communicated before, profile image or system ID is made more prominent for validation.

phendrenad2 4y ago

That isn't a solution, because people who want to have a memorable/unique username are not interested in sharing it with others, and they will move to a platform where they don't have to. Probably part of Twitter's appeal early on was the ability to get there early and grab up an account like @cookies or @milk.

woojoo666 4y ago
I guess we as a society have to decide if we want a market on usernames. I don't think we need it. And if the majority of users agree and switch to a platform that doesn't value usernames, then the few people trying to monopolize usernames (like the people who swarmed to twitter to grab handles) will be left on a barren platform.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Absolutely. I only said that what was referred to as an "easy solution" isn't.

smilekzs 4y ago

Basically Discord then? You have a human-readable handle that is not guaranteed to be unique, and disambiguated by the last 4 digits (?) of your actual UID (which is a number)?

armchairhacker 4y ago

Discord does this. You can choose whatever name you want. Then your name has ‘#’ and 4 random numbers appended to it, like ‘Foo##5142’. The # and numbers are greyed out and mostly hidden so when you see peoples ids, unless your explicitly looking for it your brain only pays attention to the name part. IMO it works really well

ev1 4y ago
I had discriminator #9999 of a common last name and received death threats (for over a year) and support ticket impersonation "hey I lost access to my account", random friend adds and DMs trying to phish, constantly being sent tokenstealer malware. This ended in the funniest way possible: being banned for using third party client Ripcord (presumably, no other offenses, happened shortly after trying it out). My prediction for a system similar to the one parent suggests is that people will continually keep creating accounts until they get something like "Max a0a0a0a" or "Max 000000e" or something by chance, and then that becomes """valuable""" and the same thing happens.

egypturnash 4y ago

Discord does this and it's really annoying. Especially if your usual handle is actually sufficiently unique that you've never had a name collision on any site, ever. It's almost as annoying as trying to remember anyone's ICQ number. "Easy" solution: all account names must be at least ten characters long, single dictionary words and common first names are illegal. Make everyone spend some time picking a Good Handle.

tinus_hn 4y ago
As long as you can login using your email address you don’t need to remember it. Never mind that I don’t even know the number on my account nor the password, that’s what password managers are for.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Login is not the problem, sharing your contact info off the top of your head is.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Absolutely hate any service that does this, and won't use them.

Victerius 4y ago
Cool.

silisili 4y ago

Stadia does something like this. Thought it was a neat idea too.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]