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by RankingMember
843 days ago
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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. |
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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?