I used to maintain a set of bookmarks where people just complained about the name of a thing on HN. It seems like a really consistent theme for people who don't have much substance to contribute to threads. Any chance you could make it one of the disallowed/off-topic things?
I have never seen a developer respond to the comments with "Oh gee, you're right, I totally forgot about that, time to rethink the name!"
We could try, but I doubt it would have much effect—humans are always going to react to names. Also, we're leery of making too long a list of disallowed things, since making it longer dilutes it. Better to argue from first principles.
I think there's nothing wrong with a moderator trying to stop too many threads being created with the same criticism (thanks dang!), but names of things can be very important from a branding/marketing perspective. If people can feel free to criticize other business/design decisions, I see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to criticize names.
People are free to do mostly as they please. It’s been my observation that comments about names have been consistently non-substantive, and virtually never provide any insight into the content of the post. Most complaints are simply “X has this name already” - the author almost certainly knows this and/or it never came up because it doesn’t affect them.
I think complaining about aesthetics is pretty useless unless it’s constructive or about UX, but this isn’t my hill to die on :)
I have never seen a developer respond to the comments with "Oh gee, you're right, I totally forgot about that, time to rethink the name!"