The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Andrei Zmievski, a San Francisco software engineer, asked Twitter in 2008 to let him claim the handle @A. After he took over the dormant account, he discovered the downside: Whenever a Twitter user enters @ plus the letter A—"I’m @a bar"—the tweet fills Mr. Zmievski’s feed.

The cool name has rendered part of Twitter’s function “useless,” Mr. Zmievski says. “It’s the price I have to pay.”