How did you choose your username?

🚀 jsreed5

Feb 16 · 3 months ago · 👍 taichara · 😄 1

17 Comments ↓

🚀 jsreed5 [OP] · Feb 16 at 14:21:

Mine comes from a pseudonym I used as a child to protect my identity online. I dropped the pseudonym years ago, but the username stuck--many of my real-life friends who first met me online still call me "Reed".

☕️ Morgan · Feb 16 at 14:34:

It's my name :)

🌻 softwarepagan · Feb 16 at 14:45:

Someone had called me a "software vegan" because I always use FOSS if I can. I'm also a pagan/heathen, so I put them together.

🍺 mrrobinhood5 · Feb 16 at 17:25:

mine used to be robinhood [at] hotmail [dot] com but the times having simple usernames are gone. In order to protect my privacy and identity I kept it the same all these years. I got older so MrRobinhood was the natural choice. I added the 5 because its my social security number, home address, and credit card number.

👤 jdcard · Feb 16 at 17:28:

It is the username assigned by my first ISP back in 1996. Their usernames were usually your first initial followed by (the first few characters of) your last name. They already had a user named J. Cardoza who had been assigned "jcard", so they added my middle initial to my username, becoming "jdcard". When I needed a domain name for my website the various combinations of "jamescard" were already assigned, so I bought jdcard.com, and jdcard became my user ID broadly around the net.

🚂 MrSVCD · Feb 16 at 19:00:

I like old and "weird" tech and my old nick was often taken.

🚀 stack · Feb 16 at 20:17:

Early on I embraced and constructed Forth-like stack-based systems, and it became the way of life for me, long before there were 'full-stack' engineers, 'stack overflows' and 'substacks'...

⛵️ olav · Feb 16 at 20:59:

It‘s my name (and a 4-letter-word)

💀 TestUser · Feb 16 at 21:15:

I think my user name origin is self-explanatory.

🐦 wasolili [...] · Feb 16 at 21:30:

"waso lili" means "little bird" in toki pona and I think was chosen because I was watching the Futurama episode that featured "Little Bird, Little Bird" by Elizabeth Mitchell when I decided to sign up for the toki pona subreddit.

> I got older so MrRobinhood was the natural choice. I added the 5 because its my social security

@MrRobinhood5 - you must be really old to have gotten such a low SSN. Congrats on your health and longevity.

🤖 gamma · Feb 16 at 22:47:

Random word that sounded good as a username

☯️ leoperbo · Feb 16 at 23:01:

I didn't choose it, it chose me... Naaah! First three characters of my name and lastname, two first characters of my mother's lastname... It's my nickname everywhere since 1998.

By the way, at that time, it sounded like "Copernicus" to me, funny and smart, like the dog of the Doc Brown in Back to the Future, big deal.

😺 taichara · Feb 17 at 11:48:

I'd like to say there was some great meaning or moment attached, but alas I just made it up in the mid-90s and stuck with it ever since, lol

🍀 gritty · Feb 17 at 14:46:

I made it using diceware, a way to choose passwords and usernames using real dice. I changed it to gritty from the original "gritnot" that diceware came up with.

🍀 gritty · Feb 17 at 14:47:

— diceware

link here

📷 sjlxndr · Feb 17 at 17:39:

initials plus surname minus vowels. have used a version with vowels but old Unix systems like <8 char usernames

🤖 gamma · Feb 18 at 00:47:

@gritty diceware is a great idea, takes possible bias out of the selection