Isn’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.

reddalo 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

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plutaniano 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

tiktok.com/@about

tiktok.com/about

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account42 an hour ago | parent [-]

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

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reddalo 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

I wonder why we left ~ for @.

Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?

	▲	andrewshadura 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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dgl 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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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nkrisc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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account42 an hour ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	nkrisc 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Or put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.

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deaux 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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stavros 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	account42 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.