Discord. What's in a name?
May 4, 2021•270 words
I was looking for antonyms of conflict. As is in, '...habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad'. (Atomic Habits - James Clear).
Concordant was one. The opposite of that would be discord, to be out of harmony or agreement usually noticeably. That prompted me to think of Discord. Why would the founders choose such a word to call the service which seems out of line with what many might instead hope for - understanding and harmony? It did not take long to find out.
2015.05.21 AMA Transcript (from the Discord blog)
Q (uppfinnarn): How about that name?
A (Jason): We picked the name because at the end of the day it just sounds cool and has to do with talking. We had a bunch of names that we bounced around, but picking a name for a product is a complicated process. You want a name that is easy to say, spell, remember, related to the function of the product, available for ™, and has a website you can get. There are a lot of things to consider and we had a number of different candidates. Discord met all the criteria that we had and we fell in love with the name.
A (Socrates): And Discord in the gaming community is the problem we are trying to solve with this product.
That the word discord 'met all the criteria' totally ignores the words definition. I get Socrates point about it being the problem they were trying to solve but all the same. There is irony in my take on it. It doesn't meta anyway. Moving on...