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A rare occasion where Betteridge's law[0] apples in a non-cynical way. .com was part of the zeitgeist of the late 90s and its cultural ties to the web and tech

A rare occasion where Betteridge's law[0] apples in a non-cynical way. .com was part of the zeitgeist of the late 90s and its cultural ties to the web and technology in general haven't faded since. Even using a .net domain makes you look a little off; I don't see much utility in attempting to use any of the countless TLDs that have proliferated since then. I get the impression that ICANN is trying to undermine the ubiquity of .com. I think it's a noble goal, but it hasn't been successful so far and I don't see any reason to believe things will change. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

vidarh 10y ago
I was part of setting up .name - I'm named in the ICANN application - and I kinda agree with you. I've gone back to using my .com, because I had my <lastname>.com for years before we started .name and it's just simpler to get people to understand. But I think .com is being undermined quite effectively simply by it being "impossible" to find good names. I get .com's when I can find something reasonable, but otherwise look at other alternatives. It will just take a lot of time. I also think this is more apparent outside of the US, where we're used to using ccTLDs a lot more often, and where ".com" in many cases implies "foreign, like US" which may or may not be what a company would like. What's interesting to me is what "works" and doesn't as alternatives to .com. E.g. I hardly ever seem to visit ".info" or ".biz" (who launched at the same time as .name) sites, even though at the time (I have no idea what the relative counts are like today) they were vastly more successful than .name. I don't see that many ".name"'s either, but still far more than many of the other early new TLDs. While many of the ccTLDs have managed to build some level of popularity (e.g. ".io") and others seems to have faded into obscurity (".cx" used to be quite popular in tech circles, but I rarely see it any more).
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  I think one of my favorite things about Hacker News is that you can comment on a technology and have a nonzero chance of someone who actually had a hand in it piping in. Also, I realize now I forgot to mention domain hacks, which I think do give non-.com TLDs a lot more value than they'd otherwise have. > But I think .com is being undermined quite effectively simply by it being "impossible" to find good names. In my opinion, a "just okay" .com is better than a good domain with some other TLD. I suspect this is a pretty common opinion. > I also think this is more apparent outside of the US, where we're used to using ccTLDs a lot more often I thought about this when I wrote my comment, but as an American it's not something I'm especially familiar with. Our own ccTLD .us isn't commonly used. > I hardly ever seem to visit ".info" or ".biz" (who launched at the same time as .name) sites, even though at the time (I have no idea what the relative counts are like today) they were vastly more successful than .name. I think the only reason these were ever popular is because they were priced so cheaply. It seems like .info is/was mostly used for throwaway domains, and .biz is just a terrible name. It's supposed to be for businesses, but it sounds like it'd only be used by shady used car dealerships. Nevermind that .com is officially for commercial entities anyways. > While many of the ccTLDs have managed to build some level of popularity (e.g. ".io") and others seems to have faded into obscurity (".cx" used to be quite popular in tech circles, but I rarely see it any more). I think .io is a fad that's going to die along with infinite scrolling websites. The fantasy notion of a "startup" is trendy and sexy right now even outside the industry, just like a "dotcom" was two decades ago. It'll fade away just like .tv did after the novelty of TV services on the web went away. Side note: would .tv still be big if Netflix used netflix.tv instead of netflix.com?
  - vidarh 10y ago
    > In my opinion, a "just okay" .com is better than a good domain with some other TLD. I suspect this is a pretty common opinion. I agree with that, but finding even a "just okay" .com is getting pretty damn hard. I use .com for most of my projects, but I've also got some .io's and was looking at .ai (which looks like a massively missed opportunity right now - you need to pay $100 just to register to be able to buy the domain, and then $100 per domain; if they made it a bit easier/cheapr, it'd seem the perfect time to profit from lots of deep learning / AI tech projects...) > I thought about this when I wrote my comment, but as an American it's not something I'm especially familiar with. Our own ccTLD .us isn't commonly used. Yeah, .us had a very brief period of limited popularity, but was effectively stifled by the silly policy of geographic subdivision. > I think the only reason these were ever popular is because they were priced so cheaply. It seems like .info is/was mostly used for throwaway domains, and .biz is just a terrible name. It's supposed to be for businesses, but it sounds like it'd only be used by shady used car dealerships. Nevermind that .com is officially for commercial entities anyways. Yeah, it really got off on a bad start by effectively feeling like cheap knockoffs of .com, to the extent that at some point it was a clear signal that you were probably a small two-bit operation or a scammer if you had the .info/.biz and someone else had the corresponding .com. And if you had a name that somebody didn't have on .com you'd be an idiot not to buy the .com anyway. This is very different from e.g. the ccTLDs, where someone might very well choose to have the ".co.uk" (you can get ".uk" too now, but they're not common) and not bother with the ".com" if they're genuinely geographically limited to the UK (personally I'd snap up the .com anyway, and redirect it, just in case, but a lot of businesses don't). > I think .io is a fad that's going to die along with infinite scrolling websites. Maybe, maybe not. I think .io makes a lot of sense as a "easy way to get a decent name" for projects that are not necessarily intended to be directed at the general public. If you're aiming for a tech savvy audience, the .com isn't so important. So <some random project on github>.io might very well persist. I agree that most who use .io for public-facing projects will probably end up moving to .com's as/when they find/can afford to buy suitable alternatives, though. > Side note: would .tv still be big if Netflix used netflix.tv instead of netflix.com? That's an interesting question. I think a lot of these domains come and go largely based on how good the registry's are at marketing them. Part of the challenge is that the individual TLDs for the most part are not huge money-spinners, so don't have the budgets to try to turn it into valuable brands. For .name one of the challenges we faced was exactly that: We were contracted to sell at a relatively low price (the market wouldn't have been prepared to bear a higher price anyway for .name at that point, but for others, possibly), and we were dependent on registrars that in most cases had no clue, and the ones that had a clue had little incentive to invest hugely in it because to them we were just one of a bunch of other TLDs, and we couldn't give them anything extra of value (like exclusivity) compared to the other registries. So unless you make it big, or can show projections that you will, the revenue potential drastically limits the amounts you can spend building a brand around the TLD. Which again limits the growth. And around in circles we go. The painful irony is that we'd probably have done far better if we stuck to our original business (vanity hosted e-mail) - the e-mail service was bought by a company backed by Marc Cuban; I don't know if I can mention the sales price but it wasn't huge (we had ~2 million registered accounts; the sale happened after the .com crash) but as far I know they made the purchase sum back in 6 months by converting the accounts to paid accounts and ditching any user that wouldn't pay (a shame, but it was that or closing the service down entirely). Our original business plan was actually to stick with paid accounts like they did, and we identified them early on as our only realistic competitor, but then we got seduced by the potential of building up a huge free user base and sell, with the enthusiastic agreement of the VC's we spoke to (this was at a time where there had been crazily ludicrous transactions selling free users for amounts accounting to decades of actual revenue per user, in the expectation that you'd be able to sell to someone else who would find magical ways of monetising them better). Based on the .name registrations in early years I think it's safe to say that it took many years to get to the same revenue numbers as they did basically over-night. But we gambled on registration numbers for .name several magnitudes higher than that, and that's the price you pay sometimes.
danblick 10y ago
Thanks, I enjoyed this. Today on the HN frontpage is, "Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat?"

vidarh 10y ago

I was part of setting up .name - I'm named in the ICANN application - and I kinda agree with you. I've gone back to using my .com, because I had my <lastname>.com for years before we started .name and it's just simpler to get people to understand. But I think .com is being undermined quite effectively simply by it being "impossible" to find good names. I get .com's when I can find something reasonable, but otherwise look at other alternatives. It will just take a lot of time. I also think this is more apparent outside of the US, where we're used to using ccTLDs a lot more often, and where ".com" in many cases implies "foreign, like US" which may or may not be what a company would like. What's interesting to me is what "works" and doesn't as alternatives to .com. E.g. I hardly ever seem to visit ".info" or ".biz" (who launched at the same time as .name) sites, even though at the time (I have no idea what the relative counts are like today) they were vastly more successful than .name. I don't see that many ".name"'s either, but still far more than many of the other early new TLDs. While many of the ccTLDs have managed to build some level of popularity (e.g. ".io") and others seems to have faded into obscurity (".cx" used to be quite popular in tech circles, but I rarely see it any more).

justinlardinois 10y ago
I think one of my favorite things about Hacker News is that you can comment on a technology and have a nonzero chance of someone who actually had a hand in it piping in. Also, I realize now I forgot to mention domain hacks, which I think do give non-.com TLDs a lot more value than they'd otherwise have. > But I think .com is being undermined quite effectively simply by it being "impossible" to find good names. In my opinion, a "just okay" .com is better than a good domain with some other TLD. I suspect this is a pretty common opinion. > I also think this is more apparent outside of the US, where we're used to using ccTLDs a lot more often I thought about this when I wrote my comment, but as an American it's not something I'm especially familiar with. Our own ccTLD .us isn't commonly used. > I hardly ever seem to visit ".info" or ".biz" (who launched at the same time as .name) sites, even though at the time (I have no idea what the relative counts are like today) they were vastly more successful than .name. I think the only reason these were ever popular is because they were priced so cheaply. It seems like .info is/was mostly used for throwaway domains, and .biz is just a terrible name. It's supposed to be for businesses, but it sounds like it'd only be used by shady used car dealerships. Nevermind that .com is officially for commercial entities anyways. > While many of the ccTLDs have managed to build some level of popularity (e.g. ".io") and others seems to have faded into obscurity (".cx" used to be quite popular in tech circles, but I rarely see it any more). I think .io is a fad that's going to die along with infinite scrolling websites. The fantasy notion of a "startup" is trendy and sexy right now even outside the industry, just like a "dotcom" was two decades ago. It'll fade away just like .tv did after the novelty of TV services on the web went away. Side note: would .tv still be big if Netflix used netflix.tv instead of netflix.com?
- vidarh 10y ago
  > In my opinion, a "just okay" .com is better than a good domain with some other TLD. I suspect this is a pretty common opinion. I agree with that, but finding even a "just okay" .com is getting pretty damn hard. I use .com for most of my projects, but I've also got some .io's and was looking at .ai (which looks like a massively missed opportunity right now - you need to pay $100 just to register to be able to buy the domain, and then $100 per domain; if they made it a bit easier/cheapr, it'd seem the perfect time to profit from lots of deep learning / AI tech projects...) > I thought about this when I wrote my comment, but as an American it's not something I'm especially familiar with. Our own ccTLD .us isn't commonly used. Yeah, .us had a very brief period of limited popularity, but was effectively stifled by the silly policy of geographic subdivision. > I think the only reason these were ever popular is because they were priced so cheaply. It seems like .info is/was mostly used for throwaway domains, and .biz is just a terrible name. It's supposed to be for businesses, but it sounds like it'd only be used by shady used car dealerships. Nevermind that .com is officially for commercial entities anyways. Yeah, it really got off on a bad start by effectively feeling like cheap knockoffs of .com, to the extent that at some point it was a clear signal that you were probably a small two-bit operation or a scammer if you had the .info/.biz and someone else had the corresponding .com. And if you had a name that somebody didn't have on .com you'd be an idiot not to buy the .com anyway. This is very different from e.g. the ccTLDs, where someone might very well choose to have the ".co.uk" (you can get ".uk" too now, but they're not common) and not bother with the ".com" if they're genuinely geographically limited to the UK (personally I'd snap up the .com anyway, and redirect it, just in case, but a lot of businesses don't). > I think .io is a fad that's going to die along with infinite scrolling websites. Maybe, maybe not. I think .io makes a lot of sense as a "easy way to get a decent name" for projects that are not necessarily intended to be directed at the general public. If you're aiming for a tech savvy audience, the .com isn't so important. So <some random project on github>.io might very well persist. I agree that most who use .io for public-facing projects will probably end up moving to .com's as/when they find/can afford to buy suitable alternatives, though. > Side note: would .tv still be big if Netflix used netflix.tv instead of netflix.com? That's an interesting question. I think a lot of these domains come and go largely based on how good the registry's are at marketing them. Part of the challenge is that the individual TLDs for the most part are not huge money-spinners, so don't have the budgets to try to turn it into valuable brands. For .name one of the challenges we faced was exactly that: We were contracted to sell at a relatively low price (the market wouldn't have been prepared to bear a higher price anyway for .name at that point, but for others, possibly), and we were dependent on registrars that in most cases had no clue, and the ones that had a clue had little incentive to invest hugely in it because to them we were just one of a bunch of other TLDs, and we couldn't give them anything extra of value (like exclusivity) compared to the other registries. So unless you make it big, or can show projections that you will, the revenue potential drastically limits the amounts you can spend building a brand around the TLD. Which again limits the growth. And around in circles we go. The painful irony is that we'd probably have done far better if we stuck to our original business (vanity hosted e-mail) - the e-mail service was bought by a company backed by Marc Cuban; I don't know if I can mention the sales price but it wasn't huge (we had ~2 million registered accounts; the sale happened after the .com crash) but as far I know they made the purchase sum back in 6 months by converting the accounts to paid accounts and ditching any user that wouldn't pay (a shame, but it was that or closing the service down entirely). Our original business plan was actually to stick with paid accounts like they did, and we identified them early on as our only realistic competitor, but then we got seduced by the potential of building up a huge free user base and sell, with the enthusiastic agreement of the VC's we spoke to (this was at a time where there had been crazily ludicrous transactions selling free users for amounts accounting to decades of actual revenue per user, in the expectation that you'd be able to sell to someone else who would find magical ways of monetising them better). Based on the .name registrations in early years I think it's safe to say that it took many years to get to the same revenue numbers as they did basically over-night. But we gambled on registration numbers for .name several magnitudes higher than that, and that's the price you pay sometimes.

danblick 10y ago

Thanks, I enjoyed this. Today on the HN frontpage is, "Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat?"