[dgl]

GitHub 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]

> 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.

[efilife]

I 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/copilo... some proof this was an actual user

[varun_ch]

Looks like he's now https://github.com/ogcopilot

[varun_ch]

Some more discussion on similar things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38380344

[stavros]

"Hey, remember the username you've had for twenty years? Yeah we want it now"

[account42]

It's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.

[stavros]

And 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.

[nkrisc]

You 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]

You could probably get away with banning all common english words as usernames if you wanted to.

[teddyh]

Even if you don’t ban all words, there are some you should filter:

• <https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve>

• <https://xkcd.com/1963/>

[nkrisc]

Or put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.

[datawars]

Until you invent a product or concept name that is taken by one of the users ;-)

[account42]

In 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.