The author lists a bunch of gripes with alphanumeric usernames but I'm fact many of these shortcomings are not worth a switch away towards non-unique, freeform names (John Smith), or towards random ID allocation (whether purely numeric or word-like).
In spite of what I'd personally have bet on a decade ago, I don't actually know many international users who complain about alphanumeric handles. People can/should still have Unicode-ish display names on top of handles, change those, and be searched by those. Twitter does this well for example.
But a human-readable, ASCII-friendly, user-chosen unique handle is the best thing I've seen so far for disambiguation on a social network.
In spite of what I'd personally have bet on a decade ago, I don't actually know many international users who complain about alphanumeric handles. People can/should still have Unicode-ish display names on top of handles, change those, and be searched by those. Twitter does this well for example.
But a human-readable, ASCII-friendly, user-chosen unique handle is the best thing I've seen so far for disambiguation on a social network.