Twitter Stopped Letting New Users Pick Their Usernames During Sign-Up Years Ago (daringfireball.net)

Makes sense not to reserve usernames for people who are just using the account to follow and don’t tweet themselves.

This is a problem Twitch runs into, there are many more people watching than streaming but everyone has an account name and can stream so a lot of names are taken.

Reduces sign-up friction I guess. Signing up for something and finding your default usernames are already taken is always annoying.

I was working at Xbox when we made the same change there. Web analytics were showing a massive drop-off in signup as users struggled to think of a good gamertag that wasn't already taken.

At the time you had to pay to change your gamertag so when we introduced this you got a free change after it had generated one instead.