If CockroachDB was being sold to the average person, it'd be an awful name from a branding perspective.
In reality, it's being sold to nerds who probably aren't as off-put by the name and are more interested in what it does as a database. To hit the point home, the database is designed with resilience in mind, just like actual cockroaches!
For something being marketed to the masses, Mastodon isn't great branding. Nobody thinks of Mastodons when thinking of any form of communication, but we all hear birds tweeting every day and have been used in real life to send messages. When asking people to think of something "cute", nobody is going to say "a mastodon". The term "tweet" is considered cute and inoffensive. But "toot"? Most people I know associate that word with flatulence.
Maybe the use of the word "toot" is an subtle admission that most of what people will say on social media is basically shit?
I'm sorry, but nerdy programmers who work on open source are terrible at marketing and have been so since time immemorial. If they could have simply named their software better, they might have had a shot at a "Year of the Linux Desktop". It's like they forget that most people aren't geeks, and then they wonder why the general public doesn't [knowingly] use any of their stuff.
> Nobody thinks of Mastodons when thinking of any form of communication, but we all hear birds tweeting every day and have been used in real life to send messages
This seems like backwards reasoning. If you named a new platform after pigeons, which were actually used for transmitting information, you'd get critics saying "It's so archaic, nobody has used pigeons for 80 years!" Birds carrying messages is just as "extinct" of a metaphor as Mastodons are as an animal.
Except, with Mastodon, there isn't even a metaphor. At least Spotify (to look at another example), which is a terrible name, is a non-sense word without any baggage.
You know, you should really be able to just look at the current landscape of popular services to see pretty clearly that having a good name means absolutely nothing whatsoever in terms of becoming popular.
Every single popular service today has an utterly awful name. It did not stop them.
Facebook sounds like what it is. Twitter has been discussed in this thread elsewhere (bird imagery makes sense). Google is essentially a nonsense word that turns out to be a real word based on a really big number (which makes sense).
Someone recommended finding evidence of people complaining about names back when these services first came out. I don't recall ever thinking any of these names were stupid, despite other issues I had with the services.
If CockroachDB was being sold to the average person, it'd be an awful name from a branding perspective.
In reality, it's being sold to nerds who probably aren't as off-put by the name and are more interested in what it does as a database. To hit the point home, the database is designed with resilience in mind, just like actual cockroaches!
For something being marketed to the masses, Mastodon isn't great branding. Nobody thinks of Mastodons when thinking of any form of communication, but we all hear birds tweeting every day and have been used in real life to send messages. When asking people to think of something "cute", nobody is going to say "a mastodon". The term "tweet" is considered cute and inoffensive. But "toot"? Most people I know associate that word with flatulence.
Maybe the use of the word "toot" is an subtle admission that most of what people will say on social media is basically shit?
I'm sorry, but nerdy programmers who work on open source are terrible at marketing and have been so since time immemorial. If they could have simply named their software better, they might have had a shot at a "Year of the Linux Desktop". It's like they forget that most people aren't geeks, and then they wonder why the general public doesn't [knowingly] use any of their stuff.