> It just takes a bit of planning.

Haha, no it just takes forcing user account name changes.

github.com/copilot, github.com/claude, github.com/models, basically everything you can think of for the last few years has been through this approach.

"Hey, remember the username you've had for twenty years? Yeah we want it now"

It's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.

And yet it's worth it for the network effects, sadly. These companies should be regulated, the moats are just too deep.

I like that the EU recognised this and did start to regulate that these companies need to interoperate.

I wonder how they prompted these users to change their usernames. Was it just a "we need your username for our business, so comply" notice?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210702114132/github.com/copilo... some proof this was an actual user

Looks like he's now https://github.com/ogcopilot

Some more discussion on similar things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38380344

You can plan every "top level" path you'll ever want on the site from now until forever? Or do you mean planning as in plan to force account name changes on users when someone's username conflicts with a new feature name?

You could probably get away with banning all common english words as usernames if you wanted to.

Or put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.

Even if you don’t ban all words, there are some you should filter:

• <https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve>

• <https://xkcd.com/1963/>