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Comment by ddek | Hacker News Reader

This is a well known problem in reddit. The self-aware joke is /r/suberbowl, which is commonly mistaken for a football game, when it's really a place for suberb owl pics.

I remember /r/crypto having predictable problems, given its a fairly small community going back long before cryptocurrency gained mainstream attention.

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Yeah, r/rust is about the language, not the game, which is at r/playrust, which is almost the reverse of this problem. There's usually a handful of such submissions each week, which is not much, but actual rust posts are probably in the 100-200 range.

It's most interesting when people post asking about hacks (cheats) for Rust (the game) and get sent articles about hacking (programming) using Rust (the language)

I once saw someone there posting asking what to do with actual, physical rust (i.e. asking for removal tips)

That's why r/wrongrust exists.

/r/rift has similar issues (for the MMO, not the VR)

Kinda prefer names for technical things like Fortran, COBOL, C++, Javascript, etc, instead of very common proper nouns. Kind of pollutes google results.

It also pollutes your mind space and people also expect you to laugh at the inevitable obvious puns.

I wonder what some people are thinking when they give their product or company a name that makes it hard to find in an internet search.

Do they not see it coming? Or do they not care?

People can be excused for that type of name in the early era of the internet, but if you do it today... I just don't understand.

The foremost in my mind is the Go programming language. Several people refer to it as Golang because of it's poor name.

When you're throwing something together as a hobby project, or a working name that never gets changed, or something that was only meant for internal use, or whatever, isn't it just too grandiose to have to think about whether your (far in the future, if at all ever) Reddit group is going to be ambiguous? I think you're attributing too much forethought to these things.

But how boring do you have to be to give your hobby project a name so generic as Rust or Go? Like who opens up the terminal and says "I want to spend the next 6 hours working on Stapler." Have some fun with it. The last internal project I named was called Dumpsterfire, which was well optimized for memorability while remaining an accurate description.

The search-unfriendliness of Go is particularly ironic given that it was created by Google.

It's common knowledge that you use the keyword "golang" when searching for something related to Go

And these days the keyword "baduk" (from Korean) is becoming increasingly common for the Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name "Go".

Common knowledge among experienced programmers.

It's extremely non-obvious for a beginning programmer (or an intermediate programmer who hasn't used go before (like me)), and just leads to more confusion and frustration.

I literally changed my last name from a very common one to a very uncommon one for this reason. Saw it coming from a mile away.

That and my URL purchase went from a potential $40k or more to $8.

Ibm is the worst for this.

I can't imagine a less searchable term than "I"

There is a music band named "A" (literally just one letter name). Good luck finding them.

There's also a musician called E. He apparently chose that name because he wanted his music in record stores to be directly next to that of his band Eels. He kinda forgot that the Eagles alphabetically sort in between him and his band.

This also happens for language keywords. Apple used to have the NS prefix and removed it in Swift. It was easier to search for NSString than it is for String.

should go with informal approach... golang, rustlang, etc

The group r/cocoa used to be about Apple's Cocoa framework, but eventually got taken over by chocolate lovers.

Hopefully folks will forgive the tangent, but my favorite-ever Onion video is about Prague's Kafka International Airport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

All problems are traveller's own! Properly follow proper protocols!

yup! for the longest time, the top post on /r/gunners (a subreddit for arsenal fc -- a soccer club from london -- supporters) was "How are long distance sniper shots taken"[0] because the user thought it was a gun subreddit.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Gunners/comments/2blrik/how_are_lon...

Thanks for that link, it was somehow nostalgic, from back in the day when Arsenal fans were still confident enough to make fun of Tottenham dropping out of CL spots (I guess that's what the chicken on the basketball and dropping out on 5th place means)

haha, exactly!

to be honest, i'm totally looking forward to arsenal's future -- young manager, absurdly young and talented team mixed with good veterans.

a front of Saka, ESR, Ødegaard and Martinelli looks so good!

A gunner is also someone who tries way too hard in law school.

/r/flash (for the obsolete plugin, not the superhero) and /r/valve (for the game company, not the plumbing fixture) have this issue too. I get spammers not caring but you'd think actual users would look around a bit before posting. Maybe they have a totally different post flow than what I'm used to (e.g. using subreddits like hashtags instead of communities).

The official apps, new site and old site all allow you to create a post from the front page into any subreddit simply by specifying the name. I assume that's what's happening here.

Yep, that's why there is /r/FlashTV ... on the flipside, there is /r/psych, for the TV show, where people sometimes come with psychology related questions.

Also r/trees: it's a euphemistic drug sub.

The sub for the woody perennials ("real trees") is resigned to r/sfwtrees.

It's not r/marijuanaenthusiasts ?

That's the original yes but the branding is obviously bad.

Weird someone made sfwtrees, it's supposed to be /r/marijuanaenthusiasts for non-cannabis trees.

The sub for the woody perennials is r/marijuanaenthusiasts in classic switcharoo style.

My favorite is the permalink reddit.com/trees (no r). So many confused high people in the comments.

"superbowl" was also featured in an episode of "What we do in the shadows": https://whatwedointheshadows.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Scramblie...

/r/potatosalad is about John Cena.

/r/johncena is about potato salads.

Except that unlike /r/kafka, they could have chosen /r/superb_owl. Someone obviously wanted to make a joke by grabbing "superbowl" before the football fans could.

> Except that unlike /r/kafka, they could have chosen /r/superb_owl.

That's hardly a justification for either side, though. The Kafkas could have went with "/r/franz_kafka" and "/r/apache_kafka" and there wouldn't be any problem.

Reddit needs a disambiguation option, like Wikipedia.

I think it was deliberately tongue-in-cheek since the nfl is notoriously litigious when it comes to the use of "super bowl".

This is what makes that subreddit so great.

Pretty sure all the cute owls is what makes it so great. That's just the cherry on top.

But, that wouldn’t be a joke though.

> This is a well known problem in reddit. The self-aware joke is /r/suberbowl, which is commonly mistaken for a football game, when it's really a place for suberb owl pics.

> I remember /r/crypto having predictable problems, given its a fairly small community going back long before cryptocurrency gained mainstream attention.

/r/peloton is about professional cycling, but many people think it's about Peloton trainers

> /r/peloton is about professional cycling, but many people think it's about Peloton trainers

I just learned Peloton is actually a word with a meaning for cyclists, not just a brand.

/r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties

The ol' Reddit switcharoo.

That one wasn't just a switcharoo -- r/worldnews got compromised and became a complete anarchy zone for a while. The other sprung up in response to replace it and just sorta stuck even after r/worldnews proper got cleaned up and restored to working order.

That's like the /r/firstaidkit (Band from Sweden) seeing posts of companies trying to advertise their newest first-aid kit or people on /r/puppet believing they could find the next Jim Henson there.

Sadly, as a moderator of /r/apachekafka, we have not yet had the pleasure of a lost Redditor wanting to discuss Franz Kafka's influence on Albert Camus.

But maybe someday someone wanting to translate Franz Kafka's works into the native American language Ndee (spoken by Apaches) will show up!

My favorite was a guy coming to /r/bbw to ask about barbecuing.

The coffee roasting sub /r/roasting occasionally has people come in to discuss how to insult their friends better. People seem pretty nice about it, though, which must be annoying.

My favorite variation is the ones like https://reddit.com/r/tightpussy (sfw). There are a lot of them.

I wont click on that click, the url will match some banned keyword and then I will get an email from HR :)

Right, sorry. It's basically a subreddit where people post cat pictures.

My understanding was that one was originally the expected NSFW thing, then got taken over and turned into what it is now. I can't find an easy way to confirm or refute this at the moment, though, so this may be mistaken.

There was a comment by the person who's doing it on purpose and taking over abandoned NSFW subs. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/6ruv62/_/dl8...

I see, thanks!

/r/Destiny is for the streamer, and /r/DestinyTheGame is for... the game.

The streamer was there for few years before the game was even announced though.

FTFY: https://www.reddit.com/r/Superbowl/

> The self-aware joke is /r/suberbowl, which is commonly mistaken for a football game, when it's really a place for suberb owl pics.

https://www.reddit.com//r/suberbowl

> This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.

Aww, it sounded funny. It's a shame reddit couldn't at least leave a read-only archive up. I tried archive.org but there's not much there.

That's a typo: it should be https://reddit.com/r/superbowl

Oops, thank you, I should have caught that!

Maybe only a bit related, but I love how since "trees" was taken, someone made "marijuanaenthusiasts"... for discussing trees.

Note that trees was, of course, taken by a community of marijuana enthusiasts.

/r/weed and /r/trees

/r/weed is about weed. I think you mean https://old.reddit.com/r/marijuanaenthusiasts/ .

A more high profile version is /r/Tesla and /r/teslamotors

Unsollicited Diks is cute, too : https://twitter.com/UnsolicitedDiks

I guess /r/flash could be repurposed for actual unsolicited diks since Adobe Flash is dead.

I remember seeing a post on /r/sml (low traffic sub about Standard ML) asking about Super Mario Land.

Minaj has a song called super bass, similar effect.

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