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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

I'm surely bikeshedding, but isn't Bluesky a terrible name for a social network?

Loads of names seem bad until they stop being words and turn into meaningless tokens. "iPad" received a ton of criticism, and now basically nobody cares.

But even with that said, I thought "Bluesky" seemed perfectly fine as a name. It's perhaps tying itself a bit to being an "escape" or "clean start" (implicitly "from twitter", now that many people are dissatisfied with Elon's leadership), but nobody is going to forget that aspect of the social media landscape for a while, so I don't think it's a problem.

So is "Threads" in my opinion. But I downloaded Threads regardless.

Threads is an amazing name for an focused around conversations.

wait really? i thought "Threads" was pretty genius. it's a social network where people post threads. people already know and use the word "threads". you post tiktoks on tiktok, reels on reels, and threads on threads.

It's entirely happenstance, but I like the accidental reference to BBC Threads (the nuclear war TV film). Not only is it a "post apocalypse" evacuation site to many people, but the opening narration of the film muses on how society depends on the "threads" between us and others. Essentially describing the network effect that social media platforms live and die by

How is it bad? I hate Facebook as much as the next folk, but Threads is pretty good because it's the most possible generic name you could give a Twitter clone. The term has been in use since the 90s to refer to the format of basically every textual exchange, and IMO it works exactly because it's so shallow.

Also props to the logo designer, I really like the fact that it's a thread.

Threads looks like absolute genius as a brand name next to "Bluesky" although Bluesky also looks genius next to "Mastodon", like how many people picked randomly on the street could even spell that one.

Mastodon at least comes with "toot", can't beat that.

Threads is a fantastic name, in my opinion. It is self-descriptive, it trademarks an English word, like Windows, everybody knows how to spell it, and works in multiple languages. What's not to like?

Everyone made fun of "Twittr" and "Tweets" when it was still new

At least they were reasonably portable words that worked in most Latin-based languages.

Whereas Bluesky is firmly English, and probably tilting more towards American corporate English in terms of "Blue sky thinking". Substitute CielBleu as a thought experiment.

It's also generic. There have been tons of products/brands called "Bluesky."

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