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Riot is now Element

element.io

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Re: Riot is now Element

#231

Post by neutronicus »

Multicomp wrote: post #158
neutronicus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp sounds like "what's up" - it definitely suggests conversation The other two are meaningless, but at least monosyllabic - "I'll Skype you," "I'll Slack you," "I'll ... Element you?"

I plan to use a phrase like 'lets connect on Element'. Element is a much better name than Riot. Lot less of a hard sell to convert normies.

Yeah, I guess the polysyllable "hop on a Zoom call" has already entered the corporate lexicon, and "hop an an Element call" could just as easily displace it.

Re: Riot is now Element

#232

Post by rovek »

bovermyer wrote: post #215
rvz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're pissed about Element, you must be absolutely livid about Apple. Nope. 'Apple Computer Inc.' already marketed themselves specifically first in 'computers' and that association was built over the years. After they had success in products that weren't attached to only 'desktop/laptop computers' it made sense to remove 'Computer' from the name. The same was done for Tesla Motors Inc. to Tesla Inc. This is mor…

Sorry, you missed the point of my comment. I was addressing the original commenter's dislike of the specific name Element because of its generic nature.

I also missed it, I'd say it's not a good example. Apple is not a generic word, it's very specifically about fruit or tech which are concepts with little-to-no overlap. Element is a word that appears throughout life and technology with both specific and generic usages which will often closely relate, in a confusing way.

Re: Riot is now Element

#233

Post by billyruffian »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #157
neutronicus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a "Riot" is a kind of boisterous conversation - like a chat, but less commoditized and more populist

I'm not a native speaker, but I associate a riot with group violence, vandalism, looting, that kind of thing.

I am a native speaker (UK) and concur. My grandmother would always threaten to "read us the riot act" if we were in real trouble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act

Re: Riot is now Element

#234

Post by untog »

bartread wrote: post #98
teekert wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, I don't see any problems with the name? I like it.

Try googling "element", and then try googling "whatsapp". See the difference? I get frustrated when brands, products, and even more so OSS software projects, choose names that have too many other meanings/brands associated with them because it can make it unnecessarily difficult to find relevant information using current search engine technology[0]. I've had situations where I've been clicking through pages and pages…

Try Googling Windows, Android, React, Java, Python, Ruby, Assembly, C(!)... it seems like things have worked out OK for all of them. IMO worries like this are overblown.

Re: Riot is now Element

#235

Post by School-Cotton »

torstenvl wrote: post #202
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp can be an extremely confusing name for non-native English speakers. I'm from Spain and I think 90% of the time I see it written in Spain, it's written wrong (wassap, whasapp, wuatsapp, whatsap, watsap, wuassap, wuassapp, whatsup, watsup, etc.). Sometimes a phonetically "transliterated" version is used instead, like "guasap", which I find more tolerable because at least then it becomes a genuine Spanish word,…

Tangential, but I would recommend considering "What's up?" to be the standard informal/low-register idiomatic greeting in American English. It's like "Ce faci?" in Romanian - indeed you'll sometimes get even native English speakers responding with "Good, and you?"

I second this, as an American. “What’s up”, “hey”, or “yo” (or some combination of the above like “yo, what’s up?”) are all extremely ubiquitous and way more common than more standard greetings like “hi” or “hello”, I in my experience.

Re: Riot is now Element

#236

Post by bovermyer »

CydeWeys wrote: post #229
bovermyer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you missed the point of my comment. I was addressing the original commenter's dislike of the specific name Element because of its generic nature.

And you're missing the point that "Apple" is a decades-old brand that everyone knows. It doesn't need to be explained to anyone now. Element is a new chat app that people won't have heard of and thus does need to be explained, and the "Element" name isn't helping in that regard because it's extremely generic and has nothing to do with messaging. Even worse, it has bad name collision problems; I just Googled "element…

I was talking about when Apple originally came about, not Apple today.

Re: Riot is now Element

#237

Post by jjice »

holler wrote: post #221
subroutine wrote: post #52

Discord is next.

I think they'd have to change more than their name. The entire nomenclature of their app is gaming focused. That would also expose them to great risk of losing their core user base, at a time when another company Guilded has just launched a strictly gaming-focused chat app.

They've started to make changes, like changing their TLD from .gg to .com, and they removed the game store. They had a popup after a recent update describing the changes and why their doing it (to appeal to more than just gamers). I think that other than those bits of branding, it can be pretty gamer agnostic, though I haven't used it in a workplace to actually catch the inconsistencies.

Re: Riot is now Element

#238

Post by Nasrudith »

ashkante wrote: post #206
izietto wrote: post #9

I don't like the new name, is too generic. I think an original alternative would have been better, like Trello, Slack, ...

Agreed. Generic names are difficult to find help on, especially in the software world. Like that modelling tool which was mentioned a while back - "Hash". Imagine googling for "Hash syntax error". What's next, an ITIL-enabled accounting system called 'IT'?

Yeah - it is a pain trying to search for technical support for overloaded terms. Matrix is an especially bad one given the mathematical terms. I think Riot was a terrible choice for a messenger name, especially for an encrypted one (doing the work of politicians to demonize it for them) but it would still be easier to search for because preciously there weren't IT questions about riots.

Re: Riot is now Element

#239

Post by athenot »

istjohn wrote: post #153
srg0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looking at you, git

For any other confused Americans: Git is a term of insult with origins in English denoting an unpleasant, silly, incompetent, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. As a mild oath it is roughly on a par with prat and marginally less pejorative than berk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

One of the best pranks I've seen is people getting endorsed for git on LinkedIn, from coworkers who don't think quite so high of them as pretended during office hours.

Re: Riot is now Element

#240

Post by easytiger »

detritus wrote: post #186
easytiger wrote: post #48

Press release pro tip: sidle in what the company or app does very early in. Verging on all of the releases I read on HN don't do this but are for companies I've not heard of. So you leave knowing almost nothing about the company

This is one thing I always loved about The Economist - it didn't matter how obvious an entity might seem, they would always qualify what it is when mentioned in an article, never presuming upon their readers' knowledge, eg. "...Google, an internet search engine, ..." - ed: typo

You have to consider than in 100 years, people may not really widely know what Google was.
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