I know little about Mastodon, but it seems like somebody went out of their way to make the cringiest sounding product possible. “Hey man, I just tooted on mastodon!” It really sounds like parody. I hope I am just missing the point.
You might say this is a superficial criticism, but I think naming is important when it comes to social appeal. At least, it becomes important when the naming has gone so horribly wrong.
If they’re changing course there might be hope yet.
"toot" means "fart" where I'm from. Imagine a social network where they referred to posts by users as "farts".
"Your fart was shared by 230 of your followers."
"This fart is NSFW"
"This fart has been promoted"
"Pin this fart to the top of your feed"
It does seem like a poor choice of words. Tweeting on the other hand didn't have a negative connotation until Twitter became what it is today and gave it a negative connotation.
Toot is a sophomoric word for passing flatulence in the US. So hearing “to toot” summons the mental connection of farting which any marketing person on here will probably tell you people don’t want to be associated with their product.
Indeed. This isn't a question of maturity as some rather bizarre comments in that issue claim. The word is just phonetically and pragmatically asinine. Pick a word that isn't associated with comical bodily noises like "choochoo". Would anyone join a service where you "choochoo" at people? It sounds stupid and infantile. "Tweet" is bad enough. "Toot" goes further.
My wife, exasperated at our two teenaged boys, asked me if men ever outgrow fart jokes. I laughed, said maybe, then asked her to pull my finger.
Though when primed with the word Mastodon, I did think of the large trunk and a cartoon-like trumpeting of that trunk. Right after thinking how my grandmother would call her farts toots.
For a while I believe that there was a push by twitter for it to be "twittered" but it's a made up word so we can craft our own tenses. To most english speakers tweet having a past tense of twat is perfectly reasonable (unless you're british but enjoy how quickly you speeded over this comment). Companies use BS word creation as a way to get around trademark collision and validity concerns but I strongly dislike the habit of making new words up so you can get an easy registration. I think it's perfectly legitimate to counter their BS with our own BS shaming them over their easy out and I'd encourage other folks to follow in suit. So, until the end of time, the name of that console is the X-Bone.
When you're naming a thing you should be careful and deliberate in your process - generally coincidences will work against you, though you might get lucky and pull a Kit-Kat[1].
I am on Mastodon, and it feels very much like a non-corporate version of Twitter in its interface and content. I am not surprised that they went with "Toots" to match Twitter's "Tweets".
But it mostly doesn't matter whether they called it "Toots" or "Posts" (or Japanese localization of "Toots", which is what I get), since I mostly don't pay any attention to the UI elements after I have gotten used to it. It might make a difference for acquiring new users, but I don't get the feeling that rapidly growing the network is a priority for Mastodon.
I like "Mastodon" because it's awkwardly long and just sort of sticks out this way, but it's still kind of bad-ass. As a counter-culture social network, not like a silicon valley company, I think it fits well.
"Toot" is cutesy and kind of lame, more of the usual I'd expect from the Free Software world. But I don't love the idea of changing it to "posts". I'd rather they find a different clever name.
Pretty sure it's a pun for the French `tout suite` -- "right now / ASAP". Pretty clever actually given how much value people place on immediacy on social media...
I have this exact same feeling with some Java programmers' fascination with coffee terminology, especially Beans. Maybe because I grind my own beans at home, it always triggers me in some sort of Pavlovian way.
DuckDuckGo is a big one in the stupid naming area. They own duck.com, they suggest using "Duck It" (which kinda works IMO) and they still choose to use the ridiculous "duckduckgo" branding. It's stupid but it's honestly the main reason I'm not using it. That and their crappy duck logo.
Apparently Google owned Duck.com ever since it acquired Duck Corp. in 2010[1], and only 2-ish years ago transferred the domain to DuckDuckGo.
However, Duck is rather generic-sounding and will require $$$ in ad-spend to get name recall. Even though it's awkward, DuckDuckGo is certainly memorable, sometimes that works in a product's favour.
This is, superficially and stupid as it was, why I never really felt comfortable recommending “FogBugz” bug tracker from Fog Creek software. No disrespect to any capability it may have had, but I couldn’t bring myself to recommend something called that in serious conversation.
You might say this is a superficial criticism, but I think naming is important when it comes to social appeal. At least, it becomes important when the naming has gone so horribly wrong.
If they’re changing course there might be hope yet.