Hacker News Reader

Comment by bocklund | Hacker News Reader

> We decided to adopt “/e/” as a textual representation for the symbol of “my data is MY data”

Discussion appears to be here: https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/leaving-apple-and-google-e...

I appreciate the reason for the name change, but if the goal is to target laypeople, /e/ is not obviously pronounceable or meaningful for my mom or kids/teens.

View on HN

The other thing is that `/e/`, with the slashes and all, is the exact name of 4chans softcore hentai board.

and without the slashes one of many names of a particularly popular party drug

Call it Evasion OS. I think it's a cool name that has an "e" in it, and it's really about evading the massive data gathering going on.

May as well call it extraterrestrial os because no one on Earth is going to use it

That’s pretty brutal, I’m sure they will have a niche of users.

hahahaha

"Hentai, ecstacy, and data ownership? Take my money." - Grandma

To be fair, people call drugs by myriads of names. Context usually helps to disambiguate between LSD and MySQL.

The default MySQL table engine (MyISAM) isn't actually LSD compliant.

MyISAM hasn't been the default since 2009

Let's just be glad they didn't name it /d/, and then use it to run a Squid cluster.

Not gonna ask. Nope. Not gonna.

Which is why the section in the article continues:

> We understand that this textual representation is not ideal for talking about the project and searching about it.

> We have decided to hold off on change to the name for the beta release. Along with the v1 stable version, we will introduce a new name for the mobile system that will be easy to remember and to adopt.

So: They are aware and have a plan.

I just assumed it was pronounced “slashy-slash”...

That is awesome. I like this name/pronunciation!

And it's very difficult to search for

This should be higher in branding concerns today

If you're not googleable, you're going to have a hard time

I actually miss the days of bastardized short words as product names. Yeh some of them got a bit ridiculous, but they were unique and easily searchable. Flickr, Google, etc. People were creating brands that stood out, were memorable, and they owned their entire results pages.

Now we're using common nouns as names for everything and it has completely broken the ability to search for both the product AND the common nouns.

Totally agree, and I think it’s extremely important to have better branding if you’re actually trying to reach those user groups

This kind of project will never get any kind of attention by laypeople, so it's good that they know that and aren't even trying. Less wasted energy :-)

It's similar to //e which is how Apple IIe was stylized. If it's not going to be a trademark issue, it seems like a clever branding hack to me. Anyone who grew up in the 80s & early 90s or earlier might be subtly influenced by it.

I think /e/ cute and that plenty of brands have succeeded despite being unrecognizable and unsearchable.

The meaningful symbol seems related to AirBnb and their bélo [1], which I think was largely successful.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMITXMrrVQU

IIRC It was stylized IIe and //c

I thought the ASCII art version was ][e

The 2 and 2+ were ][

http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp-content/uplo...

and the 2e was //

https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/173244543923_/APPLE-...

"slash e slash"

"slashy slash"

"Slashy McSlash Face"

> /e/ is not obviously pronounceable

On the contrary, it's a scientific notation for a specific pronunciation of the letter e.

/e/ represents in linguistics an unrounded closed-mid front vowel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_front_unrounded_vo...

Keyword is obviously

A naming that encodes its own pronunciation is genius.

'Linux' was non obvious to the point that Linus issued his own voice recording. 'gif' vs 'jif' for the image format, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com