Earlier quoted context omitted.
He founded a domain brokerage for squatters and seems to be squatting on other domains for ad revenue (read the section about the trade he made).
Doesn't strike me as particularly immoral.
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I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
551–560 of 648 posts
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#552[flagged]
Curious what you’d consider a better model for naming/ownership on the internet.
ICANN's main process for handling trademark-based complaints is the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This policy is used for instances where someone claims you registered a domain in bad faith that matches their trademark, and they have a panel that looks at whether you have "rights or legitimate interests" in the name. Bad faith evaluations by this policy often involves intent to sell the domain to the trademark owner, disrupt their business, or attract users by confusion.
So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one.
Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, and whether the effort or investment put into the site is proportional to a ballpark of the value of a domain name. With exceptions, perhaps, for situations like domains that are also your name.
I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#553[flagged]
This comment sounds like entitlement and anti-capitalist.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#554[flagged]
Curious what you’d consider a better model for naming/ownership on the internet.
I don't necessarily support any of these, but it's essentially a solved problem when discussing the supply side - especially for artificial scarcity:
* lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate
* taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment
* going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities
* qualitative usage can define treatment
* lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served
You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
Domain squatting is when you buy a domain purely for speculation with no intent of using it. This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
He founded a domain brokerage for squatters and seems to be squatting on other domains for ad revenue (read the section about the trade he made).
Domain registration for the purpose of resale is legit. Plenty of available names and extensions to choose from.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#556The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site If you want to differen…
> an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.
You could say the same thing about leaving the house.
Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't strike me as particularly immoral.
I don’t know about immoral, but it is at the very least a bit sleazy. When I look for domains for side projects, I very rarely have to abandon a name because it’s been taken by an actual operational service; it’s almost always because someone is squatting it with a “parking” page filled with sketchy ads that they’re paying almost nothing for. That isn’t doing any good for anyone besides the squatter.
Why does a practice have to do good for anyone other than the practioner?
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what you’d consider a better model for naming/ownership on the internet.
Wait people are upset, do the Friendster founders want their URL back?! Maybe I glossed over something
I think it was more about how the OP talks about the backstory, and likely how they got the resources to do this.
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
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We must have read a different article because I read a neat one about how someone bought a domain no one was using.
it WAS being used for what I hope we can all agree is a very low value use that generated significant revenues by essentially tricking people to visit. That's the morality question here. Maybe it speaks to the bigger, general question of "do the ends justify the means?"
Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
#560Some people clearly believe if you have money sitting in a bank, other people should be able to take it. They feel your money should help others. If you're not actively using it.