Cross-pollinating from Reddit: The system is often broken by design, because social-media companies (e.g. Twitter) have an incentive to break it. Creating artificial scarcity in their name-space is a way to extort&#x2F;attract users (especially brands and celebrities.)<p>A truly &quot;fixed&quot; username system means abandoning that &quot;gatekeeper of the one true name&quot; business-model, and decoupling identity from names.