Please note I added to the blog the name choices: Illume, Gist, and Knugget.

The name Illume may be appropriate for blogging, photos, and/or videography. The names Gist and Knugget may be appropriate for blogging or Q & A knowledge repositories.

For me, Medium also has a connotation of non-radical; the middle way, possibly safe. ^{_{I read a fair number of free articles on there but, like you, already have more than enough other stuff to read out there and am not prepared to pay $5 for the unknown. I can sometimes find the same article elsewhere by the writers that interest me anyway.}}

Agree Medium caters to the mainstream, i.e. center of bell curve of preferences and even internationally with some success. Yet a non-English blogger has noted the aesthetics limitations that I mentioned:

Fonts, fonts and fonts

^{Having a beautifully designed blog is a part of a blogging experience. But constantly building on the template is very time consuming, hence Medium is such a convenient platform for whoever wants to share their story without all CSSs and HTMLs. Though even Medium can’t get behind the barriers of font selection. The current font that is used for English text does not look good once it’s changed to cyrillic. In result, the blog turns out to be something that is so unappealing to the eye, that you don’t really want to read it.}

More specifically I surmise Medium is leaning demographically more for the Millennial yuppies (i.e. the upcoming young professionals) and I presume that would be the most lucrative market for selling $5 subscriptions. Young people are on average more careless, profligate in their spending. As we get older, we’re already overloaded and become more discerning and resist additional commitments.

Medium mimics a magazine quality experience without the annoyance and clutter of banner ads and sidebars. The meanings of the word ‘medium’ straddle both publishing and the technology of the Internet.

Our proposed name Lucid connotes that high quality experience but lacks the technology meme. Lucid also seems to lack the ‘media’ connection to blogging. Perhaps this is one of the other reasons I was originally leaning towards Candid for the name of the blog site, but I still agree with you that Candid would be better for video and/or photo sharing.

I tried to think of a name that captures inspiration and enlightenment, and found Illume. I tried to think of a name that captures the conciseness and nuggets of digestible knowledge in blogs, and remembered Gist and Knugget. Gist is even more crisp than Lucid and appears to yuppie crowd (because for one reason Github has gists as the name of their blogs). Knugget seems to capture both the notion of “valuable morsels of knowledge” as well as the notion of a token of knowledge. The knugget is a viable alternative to the CRED token name. Although it lacks some of the advantages of CRED, it has the advantage of being more stylish (as suggested by you), representing unit of knowledge instead of credibility, and enabling the blogging site name to have the same token name. Although Knugget may be more cartoonish and less professional? Yet knowledge+nugget is a serious concept.

I think I prefer Gist or Knugget instead of Lucid. The former seem to have wider appeal, standout, and thus more memorable and brandable. I mean a lot of people blog for fun and they may not always be lucid. They are getting to the gist of the matter usually and providing (hopefully) some worthwhile nuggets of information sharing.

Someone stated that kdnuggets is some popular machine learning thing and I responded that I don’t care about that obscure thing. Perhaps 99.99% of the people on earth have never heard of kdnuggets.

What is your opinion now?

EDIT: after sleeping on it, Knugget might work as an overarching name, because it works as a token name and every form of social media sharing (blogs, Q&A, photos, videos, tweets, discussion) are or contain nuggets of value and information. So the advantage would be that we could brand a single name for the entire project. So then per my reply to @‍heavyd, we could have subdomains on the main domain name for various genres of social sharing, e.g. blog.knugget.com, video.knugget.com, answers.knugget.com, games.knugget.com. Each of those pages could still be wikis which link to 3rd party apps in each of those genres. So for example, the page for blog.knugget.com could contain a link to the blog site/app named Gist and any others. Clicking the Gist link would zoom into the app 100%, and change the url in the address bar to gist.knugget.com or gist.com (toggleable by the user). In a mobile app there wouldn’t be an address bar. However, Knugget is more difficult to spell and say than CRED.

Per what I wrote in my prior reply to you, Knugget (more so than CRED) conveys the decentralization of anyone being able to formulate and find nuggets (out in the field) without a top-down overlord:

^{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.}

Yeah, I hope you find the right setting for Unglued.Don't know if it's a cultural thing, but in the UK we might associate the term with losing your cool or getting flustered.

We do also have association in the U.S.A. but it’s more on losing control of your mind and that’s sort of the point. Come unglued from the normal and experience life. Lose the anal retention and take some risks! Fits my zany, risk taking personality. I still remember the day in my early 20s where I was glancing at some sitcom my gf was watching, realizing it was monotonous/indoctrination, and swore I would never watch TV again.

On this theme, Grok has no associations for me. I wasn't aware of it.

I suggest you google it. It has a unique etymology.

As too with Hubbug. Maybe I should get out more!

It’s not an established word. My point is that since many people may not be familiar with hubbub (especially in other countries), they may easily mispronounce and mispell it as hubbug or hubub or hubob, etc...

but as to a dislike for Crux, this is not an intellectual rejection but a personal aesthetic one

I had a similar reaction. I like the concise word and its meaning, but it somehow reminds me of cross and death or the skull and bones:

The harsh x sound and visualization of crucifixion as a form of a X. Also it’s not that far from cucked, cock or crock-of-shit.

Yeah, I get your point over Gush over Yak, regarding any "serious messaging hub". I suppose the only negative connotation with Gush is the suggestion over being overwhelmed. But not a biggie.

I’m thinking of Gush for the Twitter clone, not for a generalized messaging hub. For the generalized message hub, I like Links or Junction. Yak for a chat or forum.

¹ _{When I was growing up a ‘yuppie’ was someone who also lived in the city because these people had better access to education. But I think times have changed and yuppies don’t necessary have to reside in major metro venues, although that’s still a diminishing factor.}