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Comment by lynx97 | Hacker News Reader

Means "punishment" in german, weird name.

And "discord" means "disagreement", "lack of harmony", "arguments" in English. Even weirder name for a chat application in an even more commonly used language.

"Slack" associates pretty strongly with "slack off" (get no work done) too, so that one's also strange.

I think "Zulip" has the best naming of all these.

The only explanation I can offer for “Slack” is that its founders and top brass have been adherents of the “parody religion” Church of the SubGenius, and have successfully interposed themselves into the everyday business machinations of a wide swath of Western businesses.

Meanwhile, “Discord” wouldn’t surprise me if it were a product of the Discordians themselves, a similarly disorganized “parody religion”.

Slack is also allowance in budgets (time, finance, materials) to allow for unplanned pressures, demands or constraints.

Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge. Prior to that, it was going to be "linefeed".

Did you read that on the English Wikipedia or something? Have you ever heard of "backronyms"?

I read it directly from the founder and former CEO, who included a screenshot from November 2012, about 9 months before the August 2013 release, of him using that acronym as a code name. https://xxcancel.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225

Also see: Slackware.

I always preferred Discordianism over CofSG, but both were cool.

I figured Slack referred to slack in task time estimation i.e. the amount of extra time allowed in a task. Collaborating on Slack would count towards that time.

Zulip definitely is the worst naming if you don't go off of what the name means literally

slack and discord are very good household names, same with twitter (rip) and google etc.

nobody's gonna say "hop on Zulip"

Discord is on brand for many of the "discussions" on there.

What does Zulip mean?

"Discord becomes strife cause that means kinda the same thing, strife becomes strafe cause that's a gamer term"

is the completely german-less train-of-thought I could imagine leading to this name

Building strafe.chat and expecting people to not expect it’s a D/s chat app is hilarious.

Also “strafe on your desktop”. Plus this is obviously entirely vibecoded.

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