Music - Mosh, JuJu

So far others commenting on this blog seem to like Mosh ^{_{(could the sexy purple logo image be influencing them?)}} and it might be more brandable unlike Juju which could be confused with Hulu— a video streaming site.

Blog - Lucid

I was leaning towards Candid for the blogging because I had my anti-censorship hat on (i.e. that you can be candid and frank without fear of censorship). But that’s more of niche market. The most significant censorship complaints seem to be leveled against Youtube, so it would presumably be best to focus the anti-censorship naming on the video system. On further reflection and study, I think you’re correct that we should emphasize clarity and uncluttered for blogging because that is one (but not the only) of the key attributes that the public-at-large is clamoring for.

The founder of Hackernoon David Smooke wrote:

_{From the first story I read on Medium — back when it was in invite only beta stage for writers — I made the assumption, this is going to be the next blogging platform. The design, the backing, the leadership — and the simply put, the cutting out of the bullshit. So much of the internet is designed to mislead the reader away from the desired story — and that does not have to be the future of digital publishing. No pop-ups, check. No right navigation CTA taking up half the screen, check. Frankly, any ad that gets in the way of the story is stupid — and that’s how this platform treated readers.}

The name Medium emphasizes a high quality medium for long-form blogging without all the bullshit. And the Medium system is also a platform for curators to brand their own online magazines (as a collection of high quality blogs) such as Hackernoon. I learned in the linked interview ^{_{(starting around the 7 minute mark)}} that they believe the future of online publishing is diversifying/transitioning from the brand of the magazine to the reputation (aka CREDibility) of the expert authors, i.e. readers want to get their information directly “from the horse’s mouth” and show their appreciation to the experts rather than having information filtered and covered with second hand mayonnaise by generalist staff writers.

Yet one very important takeaway from that interview with the founder of Hackernoon is that they’re getting their revenue from sponsorship and both the interviewer and interviewee admit this creates conflicts-of-interest. They can’t take advertising revenue because that undermines the key uncluttered advantage Medium is espousing. Although I don’t know how much they’re earning, I expect they could earn much more from the reward system I have in mind. C.f. the 22 minute mark in the aforementioned interview where the founder of Hackernoon admits they’re not earning enough. Also the 59 minute mark is interesting because he mentioned their cross-publishing deal with Quora.

_{IMPORTANT tangential point: IMO subscriptions for textual content paid to large, centralized aggregators won’t work out long-term. As users realize a better alternative, they’ll refuse to encourage and fund more Facebooks which abuse us by selling our data to the highest bidder, tracking us on behalf of the burgeoning PC police states, selling out to powers-that-be eventually (c.f. also Why Decentralization Matters — Explained For Dummies), and operating “walled garden” closed ecosystems which stifle innovation and for example mishandle our privacy. The “Will Not Do Evil” always eventually becomes “Do Evil” because a corporation exists to maximize profit. I refuse to pay $5 to Medium to read pay walled content, because there’s already more content out there than I have time to read, so there’s less incentive for me to succumb to extortion. The pay wall forces authors and readers to be funneled through a rent seeking parasite middleman who isn’t permissionless and trustless. I’m inundated with content so I want to sample the content to decide if I want to read it. So if it is behind a paywall such that I can’t skip around in the blog and sample it, then fuhgeddaboudit.}

_{Medium may give the impression to many subscribers that they’re adding value by curating premium content, as a beckon for ad-free, uncluttered blogging. Because of this many people may view Medium as unique and worth paying a measly $5 monthly:}

_{But there’s something (← click that link!) that the Ev Williams the CEO of Medium and co-founder of Twitter is not telling us. [EDIT: The economics of bundling thesis is inapplicable when the user isn’t going to pay more for a bundle because they couldn’t consume incrementally more content due to already consuming as much content as they have unallocated time to allot to content consumption. That fundamentally flawed thesis presumes that the consumer’s time is not a scarce (i.e. rival) good.] At $5 monthly, this is a completely irrelevant slice of the pie of a subscriber’s monthly economic life. Thus this means it’s not a priority need or focus. The real money from blogging is being made not from inorganic attempts to drive eCommerce but rather on organic upsells, developing working relationships, building brands, community outreach, etc.. The $5 is a silly slap in the face in which most writers (just like on Spotify or SoundCloud) will earn a pittance and readers have to hassle with more nonsense subscriptions which can accumulate into subscription fatigue. The solution isn’t to aggregate all content under a few subscription behemoths. The future is more like Patreon so that individuals can show love and appreciation directly to individuals.}

_{Competition will rise from decentralized ledgers and people will come to realize the advantages. The choice of curators should not be limited to those which are chosen by Medium! As I explained when I was perma-banned from bitcointalk.org, I want to choose my own curators! Permissionless ledgers level the playing field by disintermediating the top-down control over the formation of bottom-up circles of trust. I do agree with buying some expert’s time, and they could employ free blogs to promote. But selling individual blog articles or aggregating large-scale subscriptions controlled by a centralized entity doesn’t scale well (because it has no value!). It sells some now because many people are enamored with and uninformed, but this will change. I might pay a curator though to find, prioritize, and collate good content for me. Another example of paying for an expert’s time. But I won’t give Medium a blank check. I want to select my curator(s). And I don’t want to fund another centralized overlord. And I would prefer that my “subscriptions” all cancel automatically at the end of 30 days, and I don’t pay again (renew it) until I want to read more paid curation content from that same curator. So then I don’t have to manage dozens or more subscriptions that I forgot that I’m paying indefinitely.}

And all of this means WordPress is antiquated.

So a name emphasizing uncluttered and high quality clarity-focused formatting is spot on. Steemit made their site look unprofessional with the lime green links. Busy.org has a more attractive formatting although I have noticed some of my complex markdown doesn’t format correctly on Busy. Didn’t bother to dig to find out where to file a bug report.

Note although they rave about Medium, I think we can do much better. For example, I hate Medium’s editor (so much so that I am loathe to publish a copy of my blogs there) and the formatting limitations are severe. And Medium’s (sometimes flattened, sometimes reordered, sometimes paginated without any control from the reader) comment system is horrendously bad. I do like that Medium names upvotes “claps” and there is no downvote (although I believe there is reporting feature since Medium is centralized). Mostly I’m demotivated about Medium because it is centralized and the database is not open source. Once again we-the-people get screwed for providing all our effort for a corporation that doesn’t share the revenue with us. Medium is trying to monetize by selling $5 monthly subscriptions so again I think we can overcome the centralization of Medium with a high quality presentation and the superior monetization of an overhauled rewards and onboarding paradigm. In short, Medium is correctly identifying a need in the market, but they can’t monetize well and their software isn’t that awesome.

And the realization by the public-at-large that they really want everything they use to run on decentralized ledgers will be forthcoming. They just have to see the advantages. If the mainstream Silicon Valley vultures think that decentralization is going to remain on the fringe, then I think they’re incorrect. (note I will be blogging about this last point next and will come back and edit this comment to insert a link)

Video - Candid

Candid both fulfills the anti-censorship meme without scaring away the mainstream public because it also has the positive meanings of open/uninhibited sharing and expression. Candid Camera was a popular TV program when I was younger. Although the avant garde Unglued satiates my eclectic, rebellious taste (“unglue from the idiot box and discover new adventure”), it doesn’t really mean anything that would cause someone to first think of video or cameras. I hope I can still think of a use for Unglued in the future.

Microblog - Gush, Yak

Twitter doesn’t work well as an interactive discussion site (c.f. also the 44 minute mark in the interview of Hackernews founder linked above), although that could be improved somewhat by being able to toggle between a flattened feed and Reddit-style hierarchical discussion format for comments. The main use of Twitter appears to be for broadcasting announcements, news, events, and promotion. Thus Gush seems to be a more appropriate name than Yak.

Yak seems more appropriate for casual interactive, live chat, akin to a Skype/Wechat/Kik clone. But it seems too silly of a name to use for the serious messaging hub. For the message hub integrating all messaging (e.g. email, chat, mobile), I would prefer the names Links or Junction. Do you have an opinion?

"Hubbub" for chat?

I don’t entirely dislike it, but it doesn’t stand out for me. Emphasizing a noisy place is a negative. Also many people don’t know what it means. It can morph to Hubbug in viral word-of-mouth and the double-B can be easily misspelled. I think I had contemplated that name in the past when I was thinking about variants of Hub. Chat is about something positive such as meeting new people, interactivity, keeping in touch, video conferencing, etc. That is why Kik is a good name, because it’s so easy to say and spell, plus kick has an alternative meaning: “something enjoyable”.

Credom (sorry, it just doesn't work for me)

I had already decided against it in my reply to @pele23’s comments.

Dislikes: […] Grok, Crux

Why are these bad names for a Q & A site resembling Quora? I think those are concise and apropos names. Each answer should distill to the crux of the question so the reader can readily grok the concept. Maybe they’re not as sexy as Quora, but they’re easier to spell and say. I see your other comment, you suggested the name Solva.

For me, I rather see "Cred" as the name of the decentralised ledger than the token.

Disagree. Please c.f. my reply to @heavyd. We’re emphasizing earning and investing in CREDibility.

Users of the applications do not care about the name of the ledger.

_{<rant>Only speculators care about hype of the ledger name for the 100s of ICO-issued shitcoins when there’s no real adoption ever going to happen and they need a geek-cool website to get the FOMO greater fools pump going. But I think that ICO-issued shit is going to die perhaps within a year or so as the regulators clamp down hard. Or whenever it ends, it’s going to be massive mess of “poof it’s gone” and hordes of pissed off n00bs demanding that regulators to put in jail the issuers of that hyped FOMO shit.</rant>}

Users of applications care about the token and the apps. We don’t need a separate name for the ledger because that will create more confusion.

"Sprinkles" came to mind as a token.

Sprinkles is very creative, cute, and it does capture the concept of sprinkling the money around in small pieces. Kudos! Would be good for cute project with a name similar to CryptoKitties. It’s also very catchy and memorable. Users might say or write, “sprinkle some sprinkles on me” or “sprinkle 10 sprinkles to me”.

However, I think CRED has too much going for it, such as easier to say, spell, one syllable, more concise to write, and coincides with the serious concept of CREDibility and reputation. Users might say or write, “cred me 10 cred”. Also sprinkles.com is taken.