[clra]

Well, it feels weird to defend Instagram, but here we go. The important lines from the article are these ones:

> Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.

> It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.

I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.

I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.

---

[1] https://www.instagram.com/_sussexroyal_/

[2] https://twitter.com/Sussexroyal/

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

Why does the absence of posts indicate inactivity? He said in the article he uses it to like posts, but not create content. That doesn't sound inactive to me.

In fact, Instagram basically encourages this type of account use. Any time you try to browse the site they try to get you to sign-up, even if you have zero intention of making your own posts.

It sounds like the guy would have given the account name over either way, so why couldn't they have simply contacted him first and asked?

[zamadatix]

"would you give up your account name" "No" "We have changed your account name"

Is 10x worse than "we have changed your account name". If you're going to do something and there aren't any alternatives don't act like it's a question unless an extremely high ratio will say yes.

[littlestymaar]

What about "would you give up your account name" "No" "Ok fine, I'll have to find a new name. Have a nice day sir.".

This story pretty much sounds like “All animals are equals but some are more equals than others”[1] to me.

[1]Georges Orwell Animal Farm (his best book IMO)

[jdsully]

Isn't the whole premise of royalty that we are explicitly not equal?

[littlestymaar]

But as far as I know, US citizens[1] don't recognize sovereignty of the British Crown since 1776… In that particular days, they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.

[1] (and Instagram is owned byt a majority of American citizens)

[lucozade]

> US citizens[1] don't recognize sovereignty of the British Crown

While that is clearly true, a surprising number of US citizens do, in my experience, recognize the celebrity of British royals.

The number of times I've been asked about Prince William's children is, quite frankly, astonishing. To such an extent that I even Googled their names so I did't appear too much like I couldn't give a crap.

> they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.

Right, but those Founding Fathers were pretty good at words. They were very careful to not say that everyone is equal. Largely because most of them didn't actually believe that. What they were most concerned about was someone not lording it over them. They were entirely relaxed about lording it over others, for example.

[jdsully]

The story is about a UK royal taking the handle of another UK citizen. Instagram must recognize the sovereignty of the UK crown while doing business in the UK.

[sbr464]

Great reference. Perfectly fitting.

[will_brown]

>"would you give up your account name"

Sure will you give up all my data, metadata and shadow profile? Oh and don’t forget to forward me all funds you have made selling my data and or serving me Ads to date.

I’d really like ICANN to take away the Instagram domain and reassign it to some royals at their request while we are at it.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

I'm not talking about proposing a false question under the pretense that you're going to take it regardless of the answer.

Your assumption that Instagram can grab anything they want just shows the normalcy of this type of behavior. Maybe we, as the consumers of these products, should step up and say that is not cool? If you do it to that person, what is to stop you from doing it to another in the future, to me?

I think it should also be a signal to any one that creates a brand, a business, on Instagram. Instagram can instantly snatch your livelihood without even contacting you.

I'm proposing people being human and remembering that just because a URL path might be a technical creation, there is still a human being behind that and we should treat people as we want to be treated.

[thaumasiotes]

> Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.

I don't understand online services' obsession with making sure public-facing identifiers are unique. This is not close to true in any other area. How many British guys can be named Harry?

If there could be two World of Warcraft toons named Joe, maybe there wouldn't be so many xX_KillStealr69_Xx-es running around.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

Wouldn’t the same issue apply to email addresses or domain names? At some point there needs to be a unique identifier or ID to locate the right destination.

How else could this be accomplished, especially when we are talking about URL structures that need to be somewhat short in length?

[miah_]

Blizzard accounts are Unique only in that they have a unique number appended to the end. For example there can be many 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' accounts, but only one 'eeeeeeeeeeeee#1432'. The games only show 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' during play.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/75767

[Crespyl]

Discord takes this approach as well and it seems to work fine there.

I tend to like the approach Valve takes with Steam, which is to completely separate the "account name" (unique, unchangeable) from the "display name" (non-unique, change more or less as often as you want).

[Spivak]

It is kind of weird that the account name is unchangeable since it's really only visible to the account holder and not tied to anything else. I agree that it should be unique since it's a sign-on credential but it really ought to be a label for the account number.

[lambada]

Just because it’s relevent... although steam officially states that the account name is unchangeable; if you contact support with a good reason and get the right person they can and do change your account name to another free one of your choice.

I have uh personal reasons for having done this and I know of others who have as well.

I’m not sure why they don’t roll it out more wisely - though I can say it did cause a couple of bugs until I signed out and back in on every steam device.

Each steam account does have atleast 3 internal unchangable account numbers that are exposed through APIs for developers to integrate with and use for things such as enforcing bans etc.

[covercash]

Discord does the same.

[thaumasiotes]

In this particular case, I'm guessing -- based on the URLs -- that in order to have the Instagram username "sussexroyal", it's also necessary to be located at www.instagram.com/sussexroyal . This is a design mistake. The URL identifier does not need to be the public-facing identifier, and it shouldn't be. You can have the Duke of Sussex as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y6llflk9 and the guy in Sussex who roots for the Royals as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y2q9g6uo .

There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier, nor is there a good reason to do it. ICQ got this right, way back at the beginning. But somehow everyone forgot.

[dragonwriter]

> There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier

Yeah, there is: it's a major UX improvement, because the URLs at issue are entry-point URLs, which need friendly names for the same reason domains for public-facing services (which are key components of entry-point URLs) do.

It's true that in the general case objects don't necessarily need a URL component that matches their friendly name, but this is not the general case.

[alistairSH]

It seems like a major UX improvement, but is somebody looking for Prince Harry's Instagram account going to know http://www.instragram.com/sussexroyal, or are they going to enter the app and search "Prince Harry", click the first link, and then "Favorite" that account for future reference?

I know I personally very rarely type a direct URL. Either it's already bookmarked, or I google it.

[dragonwriter]

> It seems like a major UX improvement, but is somebody looking for Prince Harry's Instagram account going to know http://www.instragram.com/sussexroyal

Instagram accounts (and similar social media IDs) are often communicated in print, and parsing and accurately transcribing things that work like natural language is a lot easier than something like an arbitrary base36-encoded identifier.

They are also sometimes communicated via orally or via radio, where being able to hear and remember is even more affected by the using natural language.

[notahacker]

But instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo, and being able to find someone from remembering their handle is much better than remembering the handle and then wondering which of the multiple people called sussexroyal you're after when the search results come through

Needless to say, the most prominent and memorable identifier being non-unique has all sorts of uses for trolls and spambots too.

[thaumasiotes]

> Needless to say, the most prominent and memorable identifier being non-unique has all sorts of uses for trolls and spambots too.

Sure, but it has more uses for people who would like to have a reasonable name. This is just the "knives can be used to kill people" argument.

[notahacker]

The option for a reasonable name still exists (and site owners don't have to arbitrarily confiscate it to give it to more PR-worthy people), it just might be a slightly longer reasonable name with a disambiguator built into it instead of a common first name or cool dictionary word, and you get a reasonable URL as a bonus. I'd probably rather be found at instagram.com/johnsmithspringfield than instagram.com/jh9fjhfgjhg (or 'search for "John Smith" and scroll through 300 entries') anyway.

Of course with unique identifiers you probably don't get to call yourself elonmusk, POTUS or amazon

[dkersten]

> instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo

Since there are a limited number of memorable names available, anyone late to the party gets stuck with non-memorable names. Why not even the playing field?

[notahacker]

Most social networks would see rewarding early adopters as a benefit rather than a drawback. Besides which, TheThreeWordName or JohnBSmith1982 is still a lot more memorable than a random alphanumeric string.

As another person said further down, it's why we have domain names rather than IP addresses. Sure, the way in which they're distributed might be suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as making everyone have to remember the IP address or rely entirely upon a search function that returns ever-changing results.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

You really think that? Why do we even have domain names then? Why don't we tell everyone to remember IP addresses?

[OJFord]

Sure, but Instagram isn't an email or domain name provider, so the point is that it doesn't _have_ to have this problem.

It's opted in to the problem by deciding that display names need to be unique. It's not right or wrong, it's apparently just been decided that that's desirable for the product.

[drb91]

> encourage a more lively and current community

Ahh yes, nothing more lively and current than watching senior citizens coo over monarchs.

In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.

[jamespo]

It was hardly an anarchist playground in years gone by

[blattimwind]

> In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.

???

Instagram is a mainstream everything-is-an-ad site and has been since I've first heard of it.

[hombre_fatal]

> nothing more lively and current than watching senior citizens coo over monarchs.

You underestimate the reach here. When it comes to Prince Harry and Meghan, it's like saying only senior citizens care about the Kardashians.

[chrisseaton]

> watching senior citizens coo over monarchs

Nobody in this situation is a monarch or ever likely to be a monarch.

[daenz]

The term was used incorrectly, but to me it's obvious what they meant: non-functioning political celebrities.

[yashap]

Yeah, zero posts and doesn’t even have a profile pic. It’s a dead account, I don’t have much of an issue with Instagram’s policy to “steal” handles on accounts like this.

[RandallBrown]

Or maybe he just likes photos and follows his nephews or something.

[lightgreen]

Not choosing sides but have to say that he can still do that with his old now renamed account.