alt Hacker NewsIsn’t the /photos kind of necessary since usernames are UGC? What if a username is “about” or “contact”?
I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to a user page.
Replies
plutaniano • today at 12:17 PM
I really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign.
tiktok.com/@about
vs
tiktok.com/about
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arcfour • today at 5:14 PM
I remember signing up for an AI inference provider, noticing my profile page was "/<username>" and changing my name to logout which worked but caused some amusing errors. Oops!
dgl • today at 10:26 AM
GitHub manage to do it. Most URLs you'd think of are either redirects to other bits of the site, or accounts owned by GitHub themselves. It just takes a bit of planning.
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YouTube had the same problem.
The oldest account have a direct URL in the form of youtube.com/username. Newer account had youtube.com/user/username (I think most account have both URLs).
Then YouTube was bought by Google and they introduced "channels", so some channels had youtube.com/channel/username.
Then YouTube wanted to become like TikTok and they forced at-usernames some years ago, so now accounts have a URL like youtube.com/@username