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Comment by whoibrar | Hacker News Reader

I also occassionally mourn the death of the word Meta, It was such a beautiful and succinct word.

    Meta means about the thing itself. It's seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.

Not to forget the words like Metadata, Meta-physics, Meta-analysis, Metameme.

Long live Meta[adjective].

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I just realized now if I put meta-programming on my resume the HR drones are going to think I worked for Zuckerberg.

Doubtful

Yeah, I don't think these holding companies mean much to people inside or outside the company. No random person on the street knows what Alphabet or Meta is, they know Google and Facebook. I certainly don't put "Alphabet" on my resume. I worked there and I don't even know what it meant exactly.

There's a difference, though.

Meta is a renaming. There is no "Facebook" company anymore. It's all Meta. Meta has a product named "Facebook", not a company named "Facebook".

Alphabet is a holding company. "Google" still exists as a standalone company, it's just owned by Alphabet.

I'm not sure about that. Whenever our public TV or radio station, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, makes reference to Google or Facebook in a corporate sense they always clearly mention the parent company.

This usage in modern words traces its way back to an analogy to metaphysics transcending physics. In Greek, meta meant with or after and the book metaphysics was named because it came after physics. The Greek word has related etymology to the Old English mið (or mid) which was subsumed into the meaning of with (an original usage of the word with can be found in the word withstanding).

One may notice words that come from the original Greek meaning if they start with meth or met + some vowel except a (although words with this original sense) and modern words (eg in zoology) also exist based on the old Greek meaning, as well as other irregular constructions (in geology words beginning with meta relate to metamorphosis).

Notwithstanding the broken origins of the sense you describe, it is indeed a good word/prefix.

Also a nice fact: "Mit" is still the German word for "with". So is "met", but that's in dutch. The Danes use the word: "med".

The word Alphabet didn't go away when Google renamed their parent company, and I'm confident that the word meta will also prove stronger than its SV appropriation.

'Meta' is being used for their branding 'Meta Quest 2' Alphabet isn't really used in that fashion

either way they should go with 'Metaspace' or 'Fluppy pups International' since everyone loves puppies

Extremely stupid decision to rename it. Out of all their products only Oculus has overwhelmingly positive brand name, I don't know why they will want to change that. Would make more sense to build stuff around the Oculus name.

Whatsapp is overwhelmingly popular, no? I'd guess much more so than Oculus.

And anecdotally, IG users seem to feel very positively about it in a way that isn't true for fb or Twitter users. Most of the handwringing about IG that I've seen comes from commentators

IG is popular among its users and doesn't have the same image as FB has but it also has been in news for reports on body dysmorphia, depression etc

You are right about WhatsApp though, it aslo largely has a very positive image till now

Yea, but the IG complaints are more of a moral panic than anything else, and don't come from any of the actual users. Though you're right that that feeds into the overall brand.

I think a more apt example is Oracle, which is used in a lot of their branding.

In think in the case of Alphabet, they wanted to insulate the Google brand and company from their other ventures, and they’ve successfully done that. Facebook was doing somewhat the opposite. They wanted to insulate their other brands from the Facebook brand. There’s also some suggestion that Mark Zuckerberg sees VR as the whole future of the company, and wanted that reflected in the name.

  I hereby offer
  Without any rhyme nor reason
  This short meta verse.

“Please delete all my meta data” will become ambiguous. ;)

Weird how name/brand recognition works. Facebook the company rebranding had zero impact/change on me. I think of their properties first and the name of the parent company never. It doesn't really matter.

don't forget about Meta-Metadata: https://ecologylab.net/research/publications/metaMetadataCIK...

It's perfect name for Facebook because now when we hear stories of "FBI Data collection was just the Meta Data" it will mean everything about you, your friends, your call voice data, pictures of your genitals and everything else!

Too much information.

I cry a little bit every time people use "meta" or "metagame" as a synonym for "strategy"

In the sense that people are gaming the game (min-maxing and optimising) then it makes perfect sense to me.

Some people seem to spend more time in the meta-game of coming up with the ideal strategy than they do actually playing the game. People who just copy the latest strategy aren’t really playing the meta-game, but English is ambiguous and playing the meta is obvious from context.

It’s not as bad as the people who use IP as a synonym for documentation.

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