Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

templetons.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 71 posts

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#61

Post by will4274 »

andreareina wrote: post #45
qbasic_forever wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paint a QR code on the side of the van instead, I bet it would get more engagement even with a .com address.

QR code requires you to scan it in that moment. A human-readable (and -recognizable) URL stands a chance at being remembered at a later date.

> QR code requires you to scan it in that moment

Not really, anymore. Android permits you to take a picture of a QR code and use it's URI later by going to the saved picture and clicking "Lens" (which activates Google's ML to identify QR codes).

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#63

Post by duskwuff »

mindslight wrote: post #60
duskwuff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an absolute nonstarter of an idea.

If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. Trustees of traditional TLDs would still continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable. Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption of better technologies (e…

> If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged.

And why should that distinction be made? "New gTLDs" have been active since 2013. That's nearly 10 years of usage you're still arguing should be invalidated.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#64

Post by mindslight »

duskwuff wrote: post #63
mindslight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. Trustees of traditional TLDs would still continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable. Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption of better technologies (e…

> If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. And why should that distinction be made? "New gTLDs" have been active since 2013. That's nearly 10 years of usage you're still arguing should be invalidated.

Because it was clear at the time the trustee had gone crazy, and combined with being ugly as hell, they never really got used for anything serious. Rather why should ICANN be able to convert a public resource that had been held in trust, and we just have to accept it?

To be clear I'm not picking on things like .biz etc. Even though those were obvious cash grabs, they're at least widely applicable and thus widely adopted. But things like .christmastrees .business .companyname .morebiglongwords etc. Over "nearly 10 years of usage" I can still count on my fingers the number of times I've seen things like this used.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#65

Post by fivea »

mrweasel wrote: post #38

The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless. You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write www.joehardware.builders, that s…

> The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.

I disagree. No one was born recognizing .com domains, and outside of the US non-.com domains are already quite mundane. In fact, FANGs like Amazon employ cc TLDs quite extensively to segregate marketplaces, and they do just fine.

> No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning.

This assertion has no bearing in reality, specially given domains like .io, .icu, .info, .site, and even .aws.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#66

Post by fivea »

bobbob1921 wrote: post #16
quicksilver03 wrote: post #3

I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.

I agree with this. I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains. Also it does feel like a bait and switch- where for so many years three character tlds (and then 2 char tlds) were so valuable and sought after, only to have these >3 char tlds come along and change the landscape/market. Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was ess…

> I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains.

One of the original TLDs is .arpa, and I don't see any of that uniformity in a world where second-level domains like .co.uk domains are pervasive.

> Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA)

The usecase driving .xxx was not from site operators but from third-parties seeking an easier way to censor porn sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx

The concept was flawed from the start given the same site can be served through multiple domains, and it relied on site operators located in any jurisdiction from any corner of the world to voluntarily serve their sites thorough that TLD.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#67

Post by fivea »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #9
pm90 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the problem with longer length tlds?

In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens. For many use cases these are irreverent, but they do matter to some.

> In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens.

The longest vanity TLD I could find was .travelersinsurance. Two dozen characters are nothing more than a rounding error in the 2k character limit. You routinely pass 10 times more characters in path and query parameters than you do in the domain name.

Also, how often do people type in URLs instead of clicking links?

Also, keep in mind that some browsers are starting to hide path and query parameters in the address bar and instead only show the domain name. I presume that makes domain names and TLDs more relevant in terms of name recognition.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#68

Post by fivea »

acheron wrote: post #17
quicksilver03 wrote: post #3

I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.

I’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld. I don’t necessarily think badly of the company when I see a link to one (I mostly think “fuck you ICANN”) but it is anti-memorable.

> I’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld.

I doubt this assertion is grounded in reality. Sites that resort to puns from cc TLDs like lobste.rs don't suffer from name recognition problems, and no one ever had any problem remembering twitch.tv.

Re: The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

#69

Post by tylerrobinson »

zbrozek wrote: post #59
mrweasel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I have no way of tracking that, because I would make the opposite bet. My guess is that 90+% of QR codes, that people aren't forced to scan somehow, are never used.

Lots of restaurants are forcing this. I stop going to them. I don't go to a coffee shop to spend 3-10 minutes futzing with phones instead of talking to the person I'm meeting.

Right? I went up to a cashier the other day and she said, “You know you can order from your table using your phone, right?”

But why would I want to learn some god awful system when I could tell her what I want in a sentence and let her do the data entry for me?

Post reply on HN