Google employees are called “Google employees.” Amazon workers are known as the Amazons. Yahoo employees were Yahoo.

So it was a mystery to employees at Facebook, known as Facebookers, when the company She renamed herself dead late last year.

The terminology is now no longer in question. At a meeting on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO of Meta, announced a new name for his company’s employees: Metamates.

Mr. Zuckerberg introduced the term as part of an overhaul of Meta’s values, which he said needed updating due to the company’s new direction. In October, he surprised many by turning Facebook towards The so-called metaverse, where different computing platforms are connected to each other over the Internet. The move de-emphasized the company’s social networking apps, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which had been under scrutiny for privacy challenges, data, hateful content and misinformation.

So, past Facebook values ​​like “Be bold” and “Focus on impact”? They have gone. Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that their place is to “live in the future,” “create great things,” “focus on long-term impact,” and “meta, metamats, me.”

He wrote, “I have always believed that, for values ​​to be useful, they must be ideas with which good companies can reasonably disagree or assert differently.” Mail to his Facebook page. “I believe these values ​​reflect how we must act as a company to bring our vision to life,” he added.

Silicon Valley companies have always had their own terminology and culture. Corporate slogans like “Don’t be evil,” “Innovation leads to innovation,” and “Move fast and break things” are a lot. Palantire, a big data software company, has put the slogan “Save the Shire,” the reference to “The Lord of the Rings,” on employees’ shirts. All of this has given rise to groups from the tech world like HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

For Mr. Zuckerberg, the latter values ​​represent a kind of fresh start for his company, even though the metaverse is far from being formed. But Meta employees greeted Tuesday’s reassignment with mixed reactions.

On some internal forums, hundreds of employees have welcomed the changes with heart emoji. But in private chat messages, far from the managers’ eyes, some workers expressed even greater doubts.

“How is this going to change the company? We keep changing the name of everything, and it’s baffling,” one engineer wrote in a private conversation seen by The New York Times.

Another employee said that being orphaned reminded him of sailing. “Does this mean we are on a sinking ship?” Worker books.

Others said the new logos carried “military inspiration” or gave the feel of being “a cog in a machine,” according to staff posts reviewed by The Times. And on Twitter, a Meta employee mocked the new values, replacing them with “comply” and “comply”. The message was quickly deleted.

Meta did not immediately have a comment on the employees’ posts.

The title of Metamates was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive sciences at Indiana University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” in a tweet, Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta, said an employee had emailed Hofstadter to get ideas for rebranding.

In an email, Mr. Hofstadter said he originally suggested a “teammate” to describe Meta’s staff, since each half of the word is an anagram for Meta. In the appendix, Metamate is recommended as an alternative. He added that he did not know that the company had taken that name.

“By the way, I don’t and have never used Facebook,” he wrote. In fact, I avoid all social media. This is not my style at all. But I don’t use email! “

Zuckerberg, in his Facebook post, advised employees to be patient with all changes to the company. One of the new values ​​directs employees to “focus on long-term impact” as Facebook makes its transition into the metaverse.

“We must tackle challenges that will be most impactful, even if the full results are not seen for years,” he wrote.

Ryan Mac Contribute to the preparation of reports.