Hacker News Reader

Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

I get the idea that remote.com is trying to trademark the term "remote". F that. The best way to stop that is to prevent remote.com from getting a lot of brand recognition. I don't care how much they want to contribute to the remote worker community - there's no way it will make up for stealing the identity that we have for ourselves.

View on HN

I dunno, it's just clever company naming, like Meetup. I don't think it's stealing an identity. It's also a risk for the company, because the trademark isn't defensible. Google's legal team doesn't like the fact that people use to google as a verb. The extreme form of that would be Microsoft being able to say, "Now you can google better with Bing!"

Being remote is a lifestyle, where as a meetup is an event, so I think it's worse than Meetup. The brand Meetup is problematic though. It makes it harder to talk about events without accidentally dropping the name of a company. Meetup may have gotten a pass because they've done pretty good, but they are now driving away their customer base (https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20893343/meetup-users-fu...). There are also other companies like https://remote.co/ that are already using the name remote, but remote.co is respectfully calling themselves remote.co instead of just remote. Having a .com shouldn't be a ticket to appropriate a common word and turn it into a brand.

> Having a .com shouldn't be a ticket to appropriate a common word and turn it into a brand

It isn't. You've got to have a great marketing team, too. Remember when UPS tried to make "Brown" synonymous with UPS? Having the domain name isn't a prerequisite for that kind of effort.

Nah it's just a lucky domain name, nothing more.

Do you feel the same about testingjavascript.com? It's just a lucky domain or they spent a lot of cash on it. Relax.

It's not the domain name I have an issue with, it's the brand. Other domains about an abstract concept such as care.com and art.com have .com in their logo. Some, unfortunately, don't. I've seen tech companies take over other terms and I don't want it to happen to the term "remote".

As for testingjavascript.com, it isn't comparable. It's two words and a lot more specific than "remote".

Love that you feel so passionate about it! We are part of that community, and we're doing this so that more people can enjoy working remotely as well. It changed my life in many positive ways and there's nothing we want to take away from it, quite the opposite. We own the domain, we don't own something that is a way of life for which we have tremendous respect.

You own a domain. That domain doesn't give you ownership of the term remote. You seem to be trying to appropriate it and I hope that doesn't happen.

Remote to my grandmother is what she uses to change channel. To us is a way of life. It means different things to different people. There's no appropriation being done here, nor do we plan to do so. We fundamentally respect what it means to be remote and we're only a way to improve it and make it more mainstream, nothing more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com