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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

I guess you've settled on a name, pretty completely, but tox evokes all sorts of bad feelings like "Toxin", "Detox" - generally feelings associated with the idea of poison or of poisoning yourself. From a marketing perspective this might not be the least sinister name you could have chosen. I realize this comes out of 4chan and we make a point of not giving a shit about marketing but...

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I disagree, it sounds like "talks" to me.

Pretty cool name actually.

Whether "tox" sounds like "talks" will depend on whether or not your dialect exhibits the cot/caught merger. To those of us without, it sounds very different!

They intended "Talks" but most people will just associate it with toxicity or toxins. They really need to come up with a better name if they want to succeed.

Also disagree, to me it sounds like Torx the screwdriver bit. It makes me think of a very utilitarian program.

I like the name, sounds like something that would give certain government agencies heartburn.

It seems to be intentional, or at least acknowledged...the name of one of the Mac clients is 'Poison'.

Detox would actually be a pretty good choice: cleanse yourself of the poison of mass surveillance.

Also, Tox is taken as the name of an established test runner in the Python world.

It's marketed to people, not corporations. If the name bothers you, it's not for you. Enjoy being tracked by everybody because you were too much of a baby to run something called "tox" out of fear of being poisoned.

The first thing I thought of was toxic.

Toxic is the name of the CLI client. https://github.com/tox/toxic

I take the opposite perspective though. In nature toxins and poisons are used as protection against predators.

That's for you personally. There's a reason companies spend millions of dollars on branding (for the masses) though... any marketing 101 person can tell you you don't want your company associated with negative images like toxins :p

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