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On the Perils of Owning a Vanity Username

shahart.al

1–3 of 3 posts

Re: On the Perils of Owning a Vanity Username

#3

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.

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.