zlacker

Many people on HN have nicknames that are confusing in normal English prose. Extreme and artificial example: someone owns HN:the. The @user convention strongly implies that the person mentioned actually owns twitter.com/user, which is often not true. Some kind of "this is a username not a word" convention is useful; I chose the Lisp quote character, to prevent the username from being evaluated in the context of English prose.

Since I am the only person on HN who does this (my meme has not taken root), I'm not going to take your concern about my idiosyncrasies contributing to the insularity of HN too seriously.

>>tptace+(OP)
I completely agree that this idiosyncrasy of yours doesn't really change anything, as long as you alone do it.

This isn't clear from your comment, but: you do understand that I said Twitter users' use of @user is annoying and offputting to outsiders, not an example to follow?

That said, this isn't a big issue for me; feel free to ignore this comment!

>>Joachi+B
Twitter isn't insular. My mom knows Twitter conventions. That's not from my influence: I think she may still her mail on AOL.