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Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea, but I'd rename after something that isn't evil - subconscious suggestions of maliciousness might inadvertently repel some users. I'd suggest finding a design person who can lighten it up, pretty it up, and clean it up - the design has possibilities, but it's way too dark. Finally, many of the sample photos have really, really cold color temps (that cupcake photo's color temp is way too cold - it looks like a corpse is holding it). I'd suggest editing them to be have a warmer color temp., or finding other media that are more compelling. The initial experience of a cold, dark, kind of confusing goblin dungeon doesn't call up a great feel.

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Heya! So, we sometimes get comments about the branding choice of "goblins"... our goblins are actually not evil, though I agree that a lot of $STANDARD_FANTASY they're used as evil characters. Our goblins are more "build spaceships, be cute, and be awesome" goblins like http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.2-goblinverse.ht...

Curiously we've gotten a number of concerns about maybe the branding will push people away by thinking that the goblins are evil or scary or will frighten children, but we've never actually had anyone tell us that it actually invoked that reaction in them, just that they're concerned about it. And a lot of people seem to really like the goblins.

We do have a light theme called "airy"; there's some debate about whether that theme should be default. The choice of a dark theme isn't to invoke something dungeon'y, it's to put spotlight on the media, making the media the "light" of the scene. But anyway, maybe at some point we will switch over to airy by default... we'll see what the future brings.

Thanks for your comment!

I wasn't suggesting that there'd be anything conscious about the branding, but that it'd be subconscious, so you wouldn't be likely to hear feedback. It's a minor nit, really.

Glad to hear about theming. Flickr/500px/other sites chose to let users opt-in to black backgrounds, I think that is a nice approach - some media is better highlighted by a dark background, but not all. All the best to your project.

Thanks!

n/p

Also I beg of you to fix the color temp on that cupcake photo. People who are interested in sharing media will notice.

aren't goblins somewhat gnomes enemy?

I guess under maybe certain $STANDARD_FANTASY systems, maybe! But "goblins" are actually a very amorphous "creature"... there's a lot of various designs of them throughout folklore, and even in recent fantasy, a lot of variations on what they actually are. We have a very different set of branding around what goblins are, and our own little goblin universe, at least as sketched out through the character art over release art and etc.

I'll fork and call it MediaDungeon.

Please do run a MediaDungeon instance, and make it a dungeon crawler theme. I do like roguelikes. ;)

I couldn't find any public deployments, so I was also wondering about this. On a personal deployment is the MediaGoblin branding visible? Because frankly it's not as appealing to me as, say, the Go gopher, or the Linux penguin. Because of the negative connotations of the word "goblin", I would be more hesitant to recommend MediaGoblin than I would Linux. After all, goblins are evil creatures [1]. Does that correlate in any way with the mission of MediaGoblin? Of course not, so why keep up the association?

I realize that the FreeBSD mascot is a devil, but FreeBSD is a far less consumer-facing product than MediaGoblin aims to be. Moreover, the FreeBSD team has struggled with questions about the appropriateness of such a mascot for corporate and marketing purposes [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon#Use_in_operating_sy...

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