Snippet: The Value of a Name ☇

Grant Blakeman:

For as long as I’ve been using Instagram people have wanted my short, two-letter username. Like here on Ello, I am @gb on Instagram. Some people have asked politely, some have dug up my email address and offered to buy it, but more than anything, multiple times per week I get password reset emails from Instagram that I didn’t request, and every so often, I would get authorization code texts for the Gmail account that was tied to my Instagram handle. When I saw that text—the one about my password being changed—I knew someone was after my Instagram account.

I don’t get the sense of entitlement with short names on social networking. I understand it’s more convenient, but what happened to simply picking something else? Maybe I’m the crazy one for not thinking that I deserve the user name “Eric” on every social networking service.