On the Perils of Owning a Vanity Username

On the Perils of Owning a Vanity Username(shahart.al)

4 points by shahartal 13 years ago | 2 comments

Why not use your actual name? Why do people have to give themselves stupid nicknames? It's so incredibly childish. I don't get it. My name is John Son-Carity, so that's my user name.

draugadrotten 13 years ago | |

Privacy, for starters.

Using a different nickname for different domains of online services helps preventing the casual google-user from finding out all online activites of a person. Example: I use different nicknames for HN and flashback.org, so you can't find my flashback post history by googling my HN username.

Using different user names also helps me remembering which password I used for that account.