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by notahacker 2636 days ago
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.
2 comments
thaumasiotes 2636 days ago
> 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.

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notahacker 2636 days ago
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

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dkersten 2636 days ago
> 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?

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notahacker 2636 days ago
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.

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cr0sh 2636 days ago
> Most social networks would see rewarding early adopters as a benefit rather than a drawback.

But in this particular case, they weren't the early adopters...

The real "early adopter" was robbed of his name, for a (imho) is a lame excuse.

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