Screen name rant that I've wanted to post for a while

[kahran042]

Dear South Park and The Cleveland Show, and I'm sure that there are more,

Numbers after a screen name are not an indicator of the user's age. In fact, I'm about 99.99% sure that that's not the case most of the time, since otherwise said users would have to change their names annually. Sheesh. :P

Comments

[szaleniec1000]

Though that would be quite a thing.

[thefannishwaldo]

So... if I'm NetUser2, they honestly believe a TODDLER is posting things with reasonably good English and complex thought processes? Bwuh?

[pseudohistorian]

They're not always indicators of a user's age, but I've seen it often enough not to find it unusual in a work of fiction.

I've encountered both users who came up with their handle at a certain age (e.g. "User24") and never changed it as well as users who update that name annually (e.g. "User24," "User25," "User26"), as you described.

[parisntripfan]

Well sometimes they can be, if you use the birth year rather then a particular age... (ie someone born in 1995 could use username95) So you can figure out a person age based on that.

But then with cartoons that don't age - it would require constant updating, and would date an episode to being made in a particular year - which is something they may not want to do - so they use the age instead.