Yeah: unique usernames chosen by the user is an inherently elitist mechanism that only works for a small number of early adopters to a platform; the vast, overw

Yeah: unique usernames chosen by the user is an inherently elitist mechanism that only works for a small number of early adopters to a platform; the vast, overwhelming, dominating majority of the billions of people on earth who might become a user of your platform end up with semi-random strings of numbers and even symbols to establish their unique name. The only fair and reasonable thing to do is to randomly assign enough of the username to put everyone on an equal playing field... which is how Discord used to work, but--as is all too typical--I guess some engineer or product manager failed to really think through how this actually feels for the hoi polloi in their zeal to slightly improve some metric.