Being able to mention (not pinging) users is absolute necessary in questions and answers. Everything else would make it unnecessarily difficult to comply with CC-by licenses of many posts all around the internet. Being able to mention user names also helps to differentiate between different approaches in answers.

samcarter‭ I fail to see the applications you mention being realistic or useful. Can you share some examples?

My answer concerns Q/A posts (questions and answers) (mainly the main category), not blog, nor comments.

samcarter‭ Also, since you mention licenses; I figured it would be fairly obvious I’m talking about referring to other users on the network for a personal exchange with them. Quoting content, and providing necessary attribution, is of course not something I’d ban.

From the question I answered:

I want to notify specific users

That’s what I have a problem with. Or otherwise crafting an answer in the context of a particular named user.

Being able to mention user names also helps to differentiate between different approaches in answers.

I’ll make the assumption that I understand what you mean here. I’ve seen it on Stack Overflow, and even done it myself, so I understand its uses. But I still don’t like it. It’s a very crude way to solve something that the software should’ve aided us in.

Quoting content, and providing necessary attribution, is of course not something I’d ban.

How will you differentiate if a user mentions somebody to provide attribution or for other reasons?

I very much agree that notifying specific users in posts is not a good idea, but mentioning is imho completely OK. We are all humans here, it should be ok to treat each other like a human and say things like "Inspired by the answer by @Donald Duck " instead of just giving the link.

The advantage of linking to an answer rather than refering to it as "the answer by @sam" is that in general a user may post more than 1 answer to the same question, and at the time of mentioning them they may have only posted 1 answer. This means the mention is unambiguous at the time of posting, but becomes ambiguous later.

I can see a benefit to having shortcut ways of linking to answers.