Changing your username

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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Many of you know that I frequent the free image site Pixabay.com. It has a thriving community of photographers and digital artists. I habitually download their images and use them in my book cover collages. Recently, I encountered a strange phenomenon there. As I know the username of the artists I like, I often search the site specifically for them. Even if I don’t need any particular image, I enjoy seeing what the artists are doing, enjoy watching their latest creations. But sometimes, I can’t find them. Such situations upset me. They feel like I lost a friend.

At first, I thought they canceled their Pixabay account. It happens. I also made sure my spelling of their username was correct in the search box. Once, when that didn’t produce any positive results, I decided to search Google for one of their images I previously downloaded. And it was there alright, on Pixabay. But the username changed. When I encountered such a change several times, for different users, I started wondering: why would people do that? It makes them harder to find. Don’t they want to be found?     

I know that sometimes creatives use different aliases for their works in different genres. Writers do that all the time: write romance under one pen name and science fiction under another. But I never encountered an occasion when a creator would change their name for all their work, both past and future. Maybe because Pixabay is a social media (to a degree), and the name change is easy to perform? Still, a username change doesn’t make sense to me. Do people change their username on Facebook? On Instagram? Does it make sense to you? Could you guess why users might do that? Tell me in the comments.