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Isn’t the /photos kind of necessary since usernames are UGC? What if a username is “about” or “contact”? I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to
by nkrisc 8mo ago
Isn’t the /photos kind of necessary since usernames are UGC? What if a username is “about” or “contact”?
I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to a user page.
- dgl 8mo agoGitHub manage to do it. Most URLs you'd think of are either redirects to other bits of the site, or accounts owned by GitHub themselves. It just takes a bit of planning.
- deaux 8mo ago> It just takes a bit of planning. Haha, no it just takes forcing user account name changes. github.com/copilot, github.com/claude, github.com/models, basically everything you can think of for the last few years has been through this approach.
- stavros 8mo ago"Hey, remember the username you've had for twenty years? Yeah we want it now"
- account42 8mo agoIt's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.
- stavros 8mo agoAnd yet it's worth it for the network effects, sadly. These companies should be regulated, the moats are just too deep. I like that the EU recognised this and did start to regulate that these companies need to interoperate.
- efilife 8mo agoI wonder how they prompted these users to change their usernames. Was it just a "we need your username for our business, so comply" notice? https://web.archive.org/web/20210702114132/github.com/copilot https://web.archive.org/web/20210702114132/github.com/copilo... some proof this was an actual user
- nkrisc 8mo agoYou can plan every "top level" path you'll ever want on the site from now until forever? Or do you mean planning as in plan to force account name changes on users when someone's username conflicts with a new feature name?
- account42 8mo agoYou could probably get away with banning all common english words as usernames if you wanted to.
- nkrisc 8mo agoOr put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.
- teddyh 8mo agoEven if you don’t ban all words, there are some you should filter: • <https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve> • <https://xkcd.com/1963/ https://xkcd.com/1963/>
- datawars 8mo agoUntil you invent a product or concept name that is taken by one of the users ;-)
- account42 8mo agoIn that case it's not really different if the usernames are prefixed to be clearly identifiable as usernames - most companies still wouldn't want any user accounts that look like official company accounts.
- plutaniano 8mo agoI really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign. tiktok.com/@about vs tiktok.com/about
- account42 8mo agoThis has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.
- reddalo 8mo agoI wonder why we left ~ for @. Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?
- andrewshadura 8mo agoWikipedia claims it was invented as an ad-hoc convention by some Twitter users, and eventually it became so popular Twitter started turning @username into links.
- dmacedo 8mo agoIt was, and and the same with ReTweets (RT) and #hashtags, some of us were even there since the SMS days and witnessed that formal adoption
- syncsynchalt 8mo agoThe ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This shorthand was adopted by shells like sh/csh and emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web page on a site. Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.
- reddalo 8mo agoYouTube had the same problem. The oldest account have a direct URL in the form of youtube.com/username. Newer account had youtube.com/user/username (I think most account have both URLs). Then YouTube was bought by Google and they introduced "channels", so some channels had youtube.com/channel/username. Then YouTube wanted to become like TikTok and they forced at-usernames some years ago, so now accounts have a URL like youtube.com/@username
- arcfour 8mo agoI remember signing up for an AI inference provider, noticing my profile page was "/<username>" and changing my name to logout which worked but caused some amusing errors. Oops!