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Comment by ClosedPistachio | Hacker News Reader

Funny, Meta just went through the same trouble with the name 'Meta'.

I still just call them Facebook, just like most people still just call Google Google (instead of Alphabet)

Well technically Google still exists; it’s a subsidiary of Alphabet, and people who work at Google are employed by “Google LLC” (and not Alphabet). (In fact I think I remember there was some training that explicitly told us to NOT say that we were employees of Alphabet.)

The company “Facebook” no longer exists, though.

Yup they rebranded for different reasons.

Therefore to frustrate the marketing efforts of both you should call them Facebook and Alphabet (even when actually referring to the current Google).

Who or what is a meta. Everyone knows what facebook is though.

As a former employee with a decade in the shop and as much inside baseball as anyone could expect:

I have no fucking idea what the Meta name change was about.

Same thing as Google -> Alphabet

Lack of regulation leads to a giant megacorp buying up corporations to grow even bigger.

They used to call it trust busting.

> I have no fucking idea what the Meta name change was about.

Forget about the metaverse, it seems like it was a good change to me, just to not be named Facebook.

I can tell Meta has a much more positive association in my mind than Facebook (the company). Probably because I associate it with Instagram as strongly as I do with Facebook, and "insta" is still considered kinda cool.

People are having fun on Threads, and somehow zuck seems to be considered cool there. I never would have expected it. I see Instagram mentioned there, I see zuck mentioned there, sometimes I see Meta mentioned there, and I don't know if I've ever seen Facebook mentioned there.

The branding seems to have allowed Threads to have mostly its own branding with strong association with Instagram given the slick onboarding and graph copying, and no real association with Facebook.

Lets them sell the Meta Oculus instead of the Facebook Oculus, and so on.

Just like everyone knows Google but never heard of Alphabet

That's the goal. This way headlines will read "meta/alphabet fined $X million for selling user data to cartels/illuminati" and nobody will know WTF this is about because they'd need to read the article to learn it's the parent company of Facebook/Google.

I thought this was the idea. The public stopped trusting Facebook so they needed to obfuscate.

It's scary when you open Instagram and it says "from Facebook" but meh when it says "from Meta."

Same as reading "business X acquired by Facebook" versus "acquired by Meta."

It's a form of reputation separation. Same thing Google did with Alphabet.

Honestly why have the “From whatever” at all?

I thought it's to transmit good reputation to Meta

E.g. when people trust WhatsApp, and then see it's from Meta, they may trust Meta more too

Who or what is an alphabet. Everyone knows what google is though.

It's a master class in obfuscation:

"What even is Meta?"

"It's... meta"

It tickles my dad funny bone, but not sure it will throw anti-trust regulators off the scent.

Meta is a nameless holding company that stands for nothing. Facebook is a dieing platform that GenX & boomers may still use. At least they seem to have the clue that hitching your company name to a dead platform is a bad business strategy.

It's not growing but I would not say it's dying. People are definitely sti using it and they are making profits. Many young people at least have an account, and many are caught up in the web of Messenger.

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