Think about it ... people who have you in their addressbook already have nicknames for you.
People who you let see your first and last name can already see that.
About the rest of the people - why do they care?
Only because you want your REPUTATION to be communicated to others in English. Hey it's "someguy22"!!
Yeah that's a pretty limited thing. Could be useful but really, how often do we remember names of others? Only celebrities. And who actually cares about Aziz Ansari and his sex life? Or any of the other dudes who we never met? Or why is one dude "the" Bill Gates and the others with same name are not verified by Twitter? My point is, think about what is the sociological meaning behind usernames.
I recognize people's usernames all the time on HN (including yours) and other communities. I gravitate towards people who write good stuff and I learn to avoid the usernames of people that are unreasonable.
I'd say it's less about broadcasting your reputation and more about letting other people make that judgement about you out of their own interest.
From him spelling it out to me when I asked him on transit?
I've got 100% of my contacts either by them spelling out their contact to me, or by them entering it into my contacts app, or by me telling them my email, and they sending an email to that.
For all these use cases, 193938939302002 is a useless identifier.
So how should I handle emails, when I want to allow people to register emails?
Have you ever considered that verbally spelling something out may be a sign of a problem? If you were taking someone's credit card number, would you have them go one digit at a time over the phone, then read it back to them and so on, or email it so you can copy and paste it? Or how about just have them autofill a form?
Same here. John gave you a card? Cool, maybe it can have a QR code you can scan. Or do you enjoy reading and typing long URLs and having to double check them?
How do you handle emails, you ask? Well, how do people enter their emails? They can visit your site and the emails get autofilled. They can bump phones or use bluetooth or any number of ways that don't require verbally spelling things out.
And anyway, if you haven't allowed someone to email you, why should they be able to spam you?
> Have you ever considered that verbally spelling something out may be a sign of a problem? If you were taking someone's credit card number, would you have them go one digit at a time over the phone, then read it back to them and so on, or email it so you can copy and paste it? Or how about just have them autofill a form?
I don’t use CCs, but I (and my parents) have memorized the Kontonummer and Bankleitzahl (and, from that, you can concatenate the IBAN).
> Same here. John gave you a card? Cool, maybe it can have a QR code you can scan. Or do you enjoy reading and typing long URLs and having to double check them?
If a URL is designed well (HN’s aren’t), this is very easy. Wiktionary and Wikipedia do it well, reddit’s is also okay, e.g. https://redd.it/7wwtqy – most sites, in fact, work nicely like this.
> Cool, maybe it can have a QR code you can scan.
Most don’t.
Maybe you remember the time, just a few years ago, when everyone knew their phone number and email, and their friends’, by heart? Why force people to change that? Relying on autocomplete and autofill for everything is horrible, and creates massive network lock-in.
Why not remembee your friend's IP address by heart? Come on. No one is "forcing" people to forget their friends' numbers. They could have always entered it even now. They CHOSE to stop remembering new ones and just press the thing in their contacts.
Are you one of those people who remembers every password on every site, because you think a password manager will one day screw you?
> Why not remembee your friend's IP address by heart?
51.15.1.223 is my server, in case I need to SSH into it.
> Are you one of those people who remembers every password on every site, because you think a password manager will one day screw you?
I remember two of them, the password to my password manager, and the password to the email that I’d need to reset the password to my password manager.
It’s always nice to use automated tools such as a digital contacts app or a password manager. But you shouldn’t rely on it.
During the @googlemail.com to @gmail.com switch for German gmail addresses, I told Google not to switch. A few years later, in '16, Google auto-switched me anyway, so I selected "undo". In that moment, Google (probably due to a sync bug) wiped all my stored passwords in Chrome, all my contacts, all my emails, and my entire Calendar. On all connected Android devices as well.
It took me ages to get back to have everything working again after that, because I relied on this technology. I’ve lost contacts to some friends that I’ll never be able to get back, because I only had them in Google contacts, or in Gmail.
So I won’t ever support any suggestion that would make me rely even more on these. I’m self-hosting everything now, I’ve got backups everywhere, and, just in case, I’ve got the most important info memorized.
But this is an example of a remote company controlling your identity. Stored passwords in Chrome shouldn't rely on some server. You should be using an app (preferably open source) that has your own biometrics and passwords as seeds from which to derive keys that can get the master key, which is stored encrypted with those keys on YOUR computers (and maybe some cloud backups). I think that is how Apple's keychain does it.
That's a totally different problem to remembering info of CONTACTS.
Think about it ... people who have you in their addressbook already have nicknames for you.
People who you let see your first and last name can already see that.
About the rest of the people - why do they care?
Only because you want your REPUTATION to be communicated to others in English. Hey it's "someguy22"!!
Yeah that's a pretty limited thing. Could be useful but really, how often do we remember names of others? Only celebrities. And who actually cares about Aziz Ansari and his sex life? Or any of the other dudes who we never met? Or why is one dude "the" Bill Gates and the others with same name are not verified by Twitter? My point is, think about what is the sociological meaning behind usernames.