> The reality is that a relatively small handful of privileged early adopters get good usernames that match their identities, and everyone else gets screwed. These identifiers then act like tatoos that you got a long time ago and are stuck with for the rest of your life: people end up reminded every day of a sport they can no longer play due to an injury ("hockeystar") or loves lost ("iheartjessie"), attached to a joke that is no longer funny or to a thought that they found adorable as a 13 year old (when you are legally asked to "choose a username": a modern era coming of age scenario) but which adults find inane, or to a nickname that means something different than you realized to some people and now can't change.
The best happy medium is a user name that can change. But so many places make them static (sometimes for reasons no better than they just made "username" the foreign key in their users table)
> I come from the ICQ time
Likewise; that's why I used it as an example ;) I think comparing ICQ to IRC is a bit disingenuous as they occupied slightly different use cases.
Plus at risk of repeating myself, I'm not arguing against users names on the whole; just systems which have user names that cannot be changed
To be honest, given user names are just an arbitrary reference, you could probably also include phone numbers, IP addresses, social security, national insurance and house numbers into the list of prior art as well.
Not that I'm advocating the use of numbers instead of names. Twitter I think gets it right where they give everyone a number which is fixed but you can assign yourself a name; which can change. Most of the time people choose not to, But the option is still there.