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Domains for the Rest of Us

domainsfortherestofus.com

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Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#43

If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).

Typing a domain or having a preference for a browser, perhaps more IT in background, is a huge generational gap. EDIT as I seem to be a computer! Let me explain a recent conversation, one of several, that illustrated this. /EDIT

Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, around 60% of his client base) comment "Why no app." Most would have never have much recall of RSS.

He's 35, I'm around the same generation "Why do they need this? It's a front page and contact form, all communication then goes by email or Facebook." He said all about discovery and stickiness. Smart guy, certainly has a plan to increase stickiness with push notifications of articles/promoting his business. An interesting conversation.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#44

If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).

huge downside: you have to say the hyphen explicitly out loud, and if a site exists without the hyphen, you'll get lots of mistakes.

Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super neat but also sorta defeats the whole purpose of domain names, which is to have memorable names that point to hard to remember IP addresses. This creates impossible to remember hashes that point to difficult to remember IP addresses. This is essentially content addressing + location addressing. If you're not familiar, IPFS does content addressing in a really cool way. https://ipfs.io/

To be fair, I've never had a problem remembering IP(v4) addresses, much like with phone numbers and (physical) addresses. The real advantages of using domain names is that it associates a word or phrase with the site, can remain the same while the IP changes, and also allows for virtual hosting. Imagine a world in which the Internet grew and commercialised before DNS ever appeared --- we may have ended up with IPs be…

Ya, it would be a world where everyone uses a "phone book" because most people would only memorize their most often used numbers.

In other words, google would be even more dominant.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#46
post #26

Very curious to hear about the training set for these. If I had to guess, someone scraped GoDaddy/Google Domains/Namecheap for the "premium domains" that are being squatted on and then trained a language model on that corpus. Hopefully the OP can provide details!

It looks to me like it is finding nonsense words that are pronounceable to English speakers and then checking if that nonsense word is available. I assume a linguist programmer could create an algorithm to come up with pronounceable words.

Is there a word for a nonsense word that is pronounceable? A potential word?

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#47
post #43

If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).

Typing a domain or having a preference for a browser, perhaps more IT in background, is a huge generational gap. EDIT as I seem to be a computer! Let me explain a recent conversation, one of several, that illustrated this. /EDIT Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, aro…

That's an interesting writing style.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#48
post #47
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing a domain or having a preference for a browser, perhaps more IT in background, is a huge generational gap. EDIT as I seem to be a computer! Let me explain a recent conversation, one of several, that illustrated this. /EDIT Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, aro…

That's an interesting writing style.

I'd have sworn this was written by a machine, and not a human.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#49

If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).

huge downside: you have to say the hyphen explicitly out loud, and if a site exists without the hyphen, you'll get lots of mistakes. Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?

The two words around my hyphen are pretty simple, so word-hyphen-word is not that hard to remember.
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