Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A lingering farewell to the username

api.slack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 94 posts

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#31

Post by daxelrod »

daenney wrote: post #13

When this started rolling out it caused havoc for us. Without any warning that this was happening half of the people in our org got their display_name set to their full name, and the other half got their handle. For no apparent reason. Within the technology parts of our org everyone knows each other by handle, and we still let people pick their own handle when they join. It's even pretty common to only know people by…

See https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205240127-mention-a... for a description of the UI for atting a duplicate display name.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#33

Post by pdwetz »

im3w1l wrote: post #24
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

That does sound pretty annoying, but it seems the simple solution from your end is to have a system for how you generate logins.

I think the point is that he's avoiding the product rather than change his process, and that he's hardly the only one.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#36

Post by abtinf »

StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

I am in a number of different slack orgs. With one email address, I join whatever org I want.

> I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time... I just can't remember which email address I [use]

I think I see the problem. I'm not sure how this approach allows you to function on the internet at all.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#37

Post by slfnflctd »

voidifremoved wrote: post #30
systematical wrote: post #16

In general the idea of a username is slowly being killed of across the web. In the 90s when I got my first computer few would have been "crazy" enough to user their real name. The anonymity of the web back then was so much fun. Google and Facebook really started to kill that off and nowadays most sites just use an email address for a login if they are not already using your Gmail or Facebook for auth. Long live the u…

Requiring comments be attached to a real identity invariably does the exact opposite of what it intends to and lowers the quality of commentary. Sure, some people use the cloak of anonymity to perpetrate abuse, misinformation or low-effort participation, but the alternative has a chilling effect on potentially thoughtful commenters who don’t want to become targets. It doesn’t really get rid of the anonymous abuse or…

> potentially thoughtful commenters who don’t want to become targets

I almost never discuss politics, philosophy, important personal subjects or really anything of substance on Facebook. It's become purely for staking a tether to a few hundred key individuals I want to keep track of but don't need/want to talk to more than very rarely. Most of these contacts are not close friends or people I see any point in arguing with (especially after seeing the content of the most prolific posters).

Do you remember when Google actually encouraged people to use anonymous user names? [What a 180 they did!] This was the default, established early on, for good reason. It is a true democratizer, casting aside all to distinguish anyone but their words and/or choice of posts. With one stroke, it eliminates racism, sexism, ableism, name recognition bias, fashion snobbery and all other means of discrimination by appearance or public life. It also raises the bar for one to be taken seriously, as anything you say can be fact-checked immediately.

The cult of personality infecting user representation on the internet has been a tragedy to watch unfold. People would rather copy and paste words (usually out of context) from someone on a pedestal to glorify or vilify than take the extra step of vetting or responding meaningfully to what they say. I guess I should have expected it, but it's still hard not to be disappointed.

TL;DR edit-- I meandered a bit, sorry. My point is that user anonymity results in a more level playing field for discourse. Certain discussions of substance benefit greatly from this. In the world of real names, ad hominem attacks or hero worship all too easily derail productive debate. This can happen in anonymous forums as well, but from my experience it's much better corrected for in those places.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#38

Post by DougWebb »

adekok wrote: post #28
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

Many email systems support username variants. If you have "username@gmail.com", you can do: username+organization@gmail.com as your slack login. I do this all of the time. Why remember things when you can have a formula to determine which username to use?

Most of the time when I try that, the site's form validation complains that + is not a valid character. Very annoying. I think most of the time it's due to an over-specific whitelist, and sometimes it's due to url-escaping turning + into a space. Or maybe there's a regex and someone doesn't know how to escape literal + characters.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#39

Post by pavel_lishin »

pdwetz wrote: post #33
im3w1l wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does sound pretty annoying, but it seems the simple solution from your end is to have a system for how you generate logins.

I think the point is that he's avoiding the product rather than change his process, and that he's hardly the only one.

Does he avoid banks, too?

I don't really see how his scatter-brained approach to login management is any less of a problem there, or on literally any other system that uses an email as a username or a password recovery mechanism.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#40

Post by pdwetz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #39
pdwetz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that he's avoiding the product rather than change his process, and that he's hardly the only one.

Does he avoid banks, too? I don't really see how his scatter-brained approach to login management is any less of a problem there, or on literally any other system that uses an email as a username or a password recovery mechanism.

I'm all for using a password manager. I also think it's not user-friendly for a single application to force one to use multiple email addresses. It's unnecessarily confusing and annoying.
Post reply on HN