6 ms·

I really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign. tiktok.com/@about vs tiktok.com/about

account42 7mo ago
This has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.
- reddalo 7mo ago
  I wonder why we left ~ for @. Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?
  - andrewshadura 7mo ago
    Wikipedia claims it was invented as an ad-hoc convention by some Twitter users, and eventually it became so popular Twitter started turning @username into links.
    - dmacedo 7mo ago
      It was, and and the same with ReTweets (RT) and #hashtags, some of us were even there since the SMS days and witnessed that formal adoption
  - syncsynchalt 7mo ago
    The ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This shorthand was adopted by shells like sh/csh and emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web page on a site. Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.
    - varun_ch 7mo ago
      It makes sense in a chatroom if you direct a message @someone (at someone), or if you direct a tweet @someone. So I guess the natural progression of that is @someone becoming the identifier.
    - giantrobot 7mo ago
      > For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular. I think this makes sense if you pronounce the action. On Twitter you'd tweet [at] user(s). I think it made even more sense back in the Twitter via SMS where you had to send a message to Twitter's number but direct at a particular user.
      - kksidnsjd 7mo ago
        [dead]
    - extraduder_ire 7mo ago
      Twitter was limited to what was easy to enter on a T9 keypad. Of all the available characters, @ was a good one to go with.

account42 7mo ago

This has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.

reddalo 7mo ago
I wonder why we left ~ for @. Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?
- andrewshadura 7mo ago
  Wikipedia claims it was invented as an ad-hoc convention by some Twitter users, and eventually it became so popular Twitter started turning @username into links.
  - dmacedo 7mo ago
    It was, and and the same with ReTweets (RT) and #hashtags, some of us were even there since the SMS days and witnessed that formal adoption
- syncsynchalt 7mo ago
  The ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This shorthand was adopted by shells like sh/csh and emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web page on a site. Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.
  - varun_ch 7mo ago
    It makes sense in a chatroom if you direct a message @someone (at someone), or if you direct a tweet @someone. So I guess the natural progression of that is @someone becoming the identifier.
  - giantrobot 7mo ago
    > For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular. I think this makes sense if you pronounce the action. On Twitter you'd tweet [at] user(s). I think it made even more sense back in the Twitter via SMS where you had to send a message to Twitter's number but direct at a particular user.
    - kksidnsjd 7mo ago
      [dead]
  - extraduder_ire 7mo ago
    Twitter was limited to what was easy to enter on a T9 keypad. Of all the available characters, @ was a good one to go with.