[rglullis]

Again, that's a total midwit dismissal.

Scuttlebutt has a context and a meaning behind it. People might hear it without knowing the context, think "that it's a weird name, why is it so?", and then judge whether they like it or not. But to just hear the name and claim that it is inappropriate/bad/not-to-be-used because it reminds you of something that has nothing to do with the original context is ridiculous.

[yownie]

it's not ridiculous and countless FOSS projects will keep banging their head upon the wall forever till they actually learn it.

[rglullis]

Please name one FOSS project that has found its success after being renamed to something more "appropriate".

[lukan]

Codemonkey became codemirror. And it is now quite well established (in chrome dev tools for example).

But usually FOSS projects don't get renamed at all, or if they do the renaming causes so much drama that kills the project. So nothing changes, also not obscure design choices - and they remain niche.

[rglullis]

Was the name change motivated by general public rejection or branding issues?

Was it holding back mindshare growth?

Why greasemonkey" and "tampermonkey" didn't change their names?

[lukan]

You should probably ask the maintainer those questions. All I know he did made that decision at some point(before it took off) and he likely had a reason. Probably to be taken seriously, as he wants to live off his work. (I think he can)

And greasemonkey and tampermonkey are not really mainstream, nor do they make money as far as I know.

[rglullis]

I searched a bit to see if I could find myself the answer, and what I found instead is that there is another project called "code monkey", which seems to an educational tool to help people learn to code. That would explain the name change a lot better than "the author changed the name because he wanted to be taken seriously".

Besides, the original criticism of Scuttlebutt was "it will never catch on because it has a silly name", not "it will make money". By making it about "making money" you are moving the goalposts a bit, aren't you?

[RankingMember]

No offense, but you're repeatedly using the term "midwit", which demonstrates that you have a higher-than-average tolerance/liking for non-layman vocabulary, and so might not be the best judge of what the average person is going to accept. Most people are not going to bother looking up the etymology of a word before dismissing a product named using it. Personally, I'm not a fan of the name because it's a word that, like "jitterbug", I associate with old people, because the only people I've known to use it in conversation are over 65.

Orgs spend millions on naming/branding because they know a name that doesn't hit right to the ear is going to be at a disadvantage. The vast majority of folks aren't going to bother giving your product a second thought if it doesn't appeal to them or has a negative connotation in their head right off the bat, regardless of the name's deeper relevance or origin.

[rglullis]

My point (in relation to the top the of the thread I responded to) is that there are other things beyond the name that are more important/relevant when evaluating why the product wasn't successful.

If Scuttlebutt had an amazing feature that had a viral component to attract people, was easy to use and had no roadblocks for distribution, it would likely succeed, regardless of the name (like github).

But it's not. Scuttlebutt is a complex system, requires users to understand concepts like public keys and distributed systems, content discovery literally involves chasing other people around the internet to spread the gossip to you, the client was primitive, the development team had a size of one, etc, etc, etc... Those factors are way more relevant to understand why it hasn't taken off. Even if Scuttlebutt had a perfectly "appropriate" name, it wouldn't matter.

To put it another way: "Glimpse" is a fork of GIMP, and the author forked only because of the name. How many people actually cared enough about it to switch? How many people left Photoshop and started using "Glimpse" because that was the tipping point? Or the inverse: look at the whole Twitter -> X "branding". How many people left Twitter because of the name change vs because of the other changes since Elon took over?

[rzzzt]

How many people are calling the website X (and just X, no née-s and formerly known as-s)?

[rglullis]

That's a separate problem, but that also shows that names (good or bad) are not really a make-or-break attribute of a product.

[corobo]

Aye, and most people who use social networks are midwits!

Butt in the name will absolutely make the project a joke and cause it to misfire. As a fellow midwit I only just heard of the project and dismissed it before I got to the technical pain in the arse you describe it being in other comments.

Butt, lmao. Now Mastodon has disowned the term they should start calling their messages toots.