Submitted 2 days ago by IndigoGollum@lemmy.world to [deleted]
I see this trend all over the place. I just found out Sony has something called “MySony”. My bank has “MySpending Cards”. My company uses Paycom and it has something called “MyCom”, and i think i remember it also having more things with the MyNoun name format.
What and why is this?
Same reason everything was XTREAM in the 90s, or O-Matic in the 50s. Or “i” in the 2000s.
Give the user a sense of control
While covering up the fact that you more than likely don’t even own the product, you simply paid full price for license to use it that they can revoke at any time.
Yay modern corporate garbage!
I find that the harder they work to brand something is “mine”, the more they are stealing with their other hand while I’m distracted.
I don’t know but it’s out of control, it’s spread to my fucking hearing aids
MyFucking Hearing Aids™
Yup, myPhonak. They’d better be mine, given the cost!
Yeah I just ordered new ones and the features look awesome, definitely an upgrade over my 5 year old ones, but holy crap they’re starting to creep into used car prices. Thank fuck my insurance is helping
It's better that prefixing everything with "i."
It started with making office computers personable for home use in Windows 95 e.g. “My Computer”, “My Documents”.
This carried on into web services like My Yahoo, or terms like My Account.
Smashing it into one word was also a thing back in the late 90s / early 00s because it (a) was easy for searching in older search engines and (b) sounded like Apple’s iPod, iMac etc (MyPod, MyMac).
Continued use today is usually because of either (a) it’s been called that for a couple of decades already or (b) the product manager is themselves old and has forgotten how old the trend of trying to make those new fangled computerybobs sound welcoming and friendly.
I’ve been using Linux for so long i’d almost forgotten Windows does that. Just calling it “Documents” and not having to worry about a space in the file path breaking things is so much easier.
It doesn’t anymore. I think they dropped the My with Vista? Certainly it was gone by Windows 7.
There’s no place like /home
I noticed that at some point the “My…”. Switched to a “You” branding. YouTube, yougov, youpic, YouNow, …
This has always annoyed the piss out of me
for me it’s “iCrap” or “pro” what’s so fucking pro about your device?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Intentional dumbing-down of the entire market.
Microsoft was pioneer in doing that, decades ago.
( the whole instinct to dumb-down everything is culturally-ingrained, & helps prevent critical-thinking, so it automatically gets backing by incorporated DarkTriad “persons”.
John Taylor Gatto’s perspective on education is pertinent,
hell, a bit in a book I read decades ago is pertinent: 2 psychologists who had a daughter herd her talking to herself, while in bed..
so, being psychologists, they stuck a tape-recorder in her bed, to discover what she was saying.
They discovered that she was telling herself the story-of-her-day.
They ALSO discovered that she was complying with their pressure to dumb herself down, to meet their expectations: she was significantly un-dumbed-down in that recording.
That was one of the most-depressing things I’ve ever read.
Mere toddlers are already programmed by our culture into dumbing themselves down, & we’re blind to that, by default??
Makes our whole population significantly less-viable, in this century, that’s for sure.
Dumbing-down & ideological oversimplification are related, & form a positive-feedback-loop, unfortunately )
Wait, do you mean their parents wanted her to behave like dumb? Or is it they had low expectations of what she could achieve at that age and it lowered her self esteem?
The worst thing about this is that I can never find my apps. I need to check on Verizon, so I scroll down to the Vs. Nope, it’s in with the Ms.
Oh I hate when companies name their app something generic like Account or MyChart. I always just go in my launcher and rename them to something that makes sense.
“I use a messenger”
“Which one?”
“You know, Messenger, the Facebook one”
This trend started with what’s now called “Web 2.0” around 2000. Before that (“Web 1.0”) websites were largely used only for information dissemination: here’s who we are, what we do, how to contact us. As interactive technologies became more powerful and companies started hiring Web development teams, we started to see personal “portals” that allowed users to see or do something specific to their account or relationship with the company running the site. It was novel enough at the time that developers differentiated these features with the “My” prefix.
Nowadays we all expect the websites for our bank, utility company, phone provider etc. to have individual account management features so it just sounds lame.
I thought “Web2.0” was roughly a synonym for 'Sites with AJAX" (XMLHttpRequestObject) which I thought was ~2006.
First time I remember it was windows 95 with 'my computer' and 'my documents'.
So I'm blaming them. Hated it immediately, more for the spaces in dir names for how it screwed up dos syntax.
"C:\Progra~1"
Then again I didn't use internet until after I had win 95 (win98 maybe) so maybe they did steal it from internet.
Is MyPoop taken?
I’m not touching your poop, it’s all yours
Didn’t Microsoft start this with the “My Computer” icon on Windows 95?
I think you’re probably right, though I feel like there’s something nagging me in the back of my mind that I’d seen that somewhere in software pre-Windows 95 but I can’t think of it. They were using it a lot in the 90s definitely.
Remember a few years back when all new companies were just normal words with (all/most of) the vowels removed?
It’s all fads. Creativity requires more risk than the current environment is willing to accept. So you just do whatever everyone else is doing and call it revolutionary anyway.
What pisses me off the most about this is when I search for your app. It doesn’t start with your actual company name, I have to check alphabetical, see it’s not there. Go to install your app only to find I already had it, it’s just listed as MyInsertnamehere. Infuriating.
Fad. Someone started doing it, and it caught on so no everyone does. The iPod started the iEverything phase. A local car dealer near me uses NameTube.com because they decided they needed a website about the time youtube got a lot press. There are many more things over the years that became a fad for a while, and there will be more.
can’t wait for that sporting goods store to make one.
At least Sony has some historical reason for this…
Clears throat
I like pizza pie and I like pepperoni! But what I love is My First Sony!
voidsignal@lemmy.world 2 days ago
martekers are dumb sheeps.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think it’s more “marketers know that people are dumb sheeps”
voidsignal@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Nah… They think they know.