Submitted 11 months ago by kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
People use it like everyone fucking has the innate knowledge of every acronym out there
As others have said Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
It entered tech lingo way back in the 90s when Microsoft was fighting an early wave of Linux on desktop. They would troll and present themselves as a reliable alternative.
They weren’t the first to do it. IBM’s unofficial motto in the 70s was “nobody gets fired for going with IBM”.
Guess you’re one of today’s lucky 10000
Others have answered it pretty well, but here’s a more specific example:
In the long, long ago, IBM was the biggest seller of computer equipment, and by a wide margin. They alone decided the majority of standards in use, as well as what was coming soon. Anticompetitive monopoly tactics were standard there. For the vast majority of customers, you absolutely HAD to be compatible with whatever IBM was selling.
When one of IBM’s competitors would introduce a new and desirable product, IBM would often issue a press release. They would say that they have something similar in the works, and it won’t be compatible with the other brand. The safe option would be to wait for IBM to release theirs rather than take a risk on a whole new ecosystem. This was all despite the fact that IBM never actually had said product in development.
As a result, the customers would be afraid of being stuck on something incompatible, with an uncertain future. They wouldn’t buy it, but they would continue to buy their existing IBM options. Eventually the other product would fold (proving their fears correct), and they’d forget what IBM promised.
People use it like everyone fucking has the innate knowledge of every acronym out there
Or, you know, people use it like everyone fucking has the ability to use google.
Sometimes acronyms have more than one meaning, for example FPS are we talking about frames per second or first person shooter.
And sometimes bicycles are painted red.
“fear uncertainty and doubt” is a phrase I may have encountered once per year. Makes zero sense I have to Google shit all the time for a single use per year. I’m not going to remember something so utterly pointless and useless
So would you post once a year to the fediverse to find out instead?
It may help if you think of it like any old-timey slang. You don’t use it more than once a year, but when IBM/MS/ORACLE/CISCO were using those tactics against open source in the earlier days of the public internet - It was used a lot.
With lemmy being somewhat skewed towards the technically-minded, and older crowd, it is something we used as a general word often enough that to a lot of us it is just another word, and not an obscure abbreviation/initialism.
It means "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt".
It's a modern kind of shit talking employed by large corporations in conjunction with astro turfing to dissuade people from going to a competitor.
Because saying stuff like "I dunno dude, there's been reports of a lot of problems with Product X" is a lot more persuasive than "Product X sux!!!", especially when you don't know the poster was paid by Company Y, a competitor, to say it.
Fud means cunt, just like every other word.
Are you calling every word cunt? I can probably think of 5 words that aren’t cunt.
I get that web searches make finding knowledge easy but it kind of disturbs me that we shame people for not doing so and basically tell them “just Google it and shut up!”
Are we supposed to just never communicate with other humans aside from chit chat and personal opinions?
Never speaking to others about any info that we could glean from Google seems… weird, doesn’t it?
Who initially began the campaign of “just Google it” anyway? It sounds like an ad campaign for google
Multiple people already gave the correct answer. I did not tell him to shut up. I gave OP the tools to solve the problem himself in the future.
What are you upset about?
Would have been a lot cooler if you just didn’t reply
Was it quicker to make a post asking random people on the internet, and waiting for a factual response, than to type the same question into a search engine?
It was quicker and i had more fun.
Privacy - devouring leach of society?
In what context is this? I have never heard of FUD before in my life. Why the heck does Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt need to be arranged into an acronym?
It’s common in communities where rigid adherence to a set of beliefs is necessary to enforce cohesion. It’s commonly used to avoid engagement with “Facts U Dislike” (haha) by terminating all meaningful discussion.
Part of a flat earth forum and you’re posting an experiment you performed that suggests the earth is round? You’re spreading FUD that should be ignored.
Posting on a crypto shitcoins discord about how this kinda looks like a scam and maybe it’s not a good investment? That’s also FUD. You’re just mad that everyone else is going to be rich.
Because posters on crypto/investing forums needed to refer to it frequently
Pretty much, right there with HODL.
I had to look this up the other day and found it annoying. Absolutely feels like something not common enough to abbreviate to me
It depends on when you were around and reading geeky news sites. FUD came up often on Slashdot in relation to Microsoft:
Bullshit people push to agree with their viewpoints that make other things look bad/scary/insecure/etc
We don’t feel Duff here, we sell Fudd!
“I don’t want Dapper Dan, I want Fud!”
Elmer Fud ?
I keep thinking it’s FOD (foreign object damage) which is why you don’t want small, hard objects on a runway or something. Stuff like bullet casings can get sucked into a jet engine, and cause FOD that takes a plane out of service.
Then I notice that FOD doesn’t make any sense in context, reread the sentence, and realize it’s FUD. Whoops.
The best thing about abbreviations is that they are entirely contextual, which means that if it isn’t obvious what’s meant, you can make up your own meaning and wonder/ask why the other person is using it so very wrong.
There’s even an abbreviation for it: TLB, which in this context means Three Letter Bullshit.
Flowers Ultimately Die.
oh we fucking
we fucking alright
Slang for idiot
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.