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What the heck does age have to do with anything? Do you think that Google and Facebook don't know how to redirect from www to the root domain because they're to

What the heck does age have to do with anything? Do you think that Google and Facebook don't know how to redirect from www to the root domain because they're too old to figure it out or something? This is just further shows how it's a weird cultural issue for some people.

adventured 8y ago
> What the heck does age have to do with anything? A lot. If your site is 15 or 20 years old, you're from an era where consumers universally expected www to preface a domain. 20 years ago consumer ignorance was extremely high as it pertained to how the Web worked and how addresses worked, any variations from what was normal would be a poor choice. It was also technically more annoying 20 years ago to try to get by without www, companies like Cloudflare have helped make that far more trivial as an issue. Once you've become very successful such that tens or hundreds of millions of people are using your service and you've firmly established your address (eg as www.facebook.com), the downside risk is greater than the upside potential to bother switching from www to non-www at that point. If you're Facebook and you've acquired a sweet 2 billion person social monopoly, there's zero potential value in messing with switching from www.fb.com to fb.com. Further, if you've built up an elaborate service over many years using www and attaching cookies and subdomains to countless services, there can be a plethora of super annoying problems (and or very serious security risks) to deal with in switching to non-www for your core. So once again, for someone like Facebook or Google, the value proposition to switching a gigantic service over, is more of a nightmare. If you're just starting out with none of that legacy, such things are not a problem, you build from the ground up for non-www. If you're Twitter, Imgur, Github or Stripe and you want the identity benefit of having no www in the front - it produces a better url for advertising, a shorter url for function (valuable historically for eg Twitter and Imgur), and stronger visual branding (less cruft around your name) - then you avoid www from the early days.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  More recent companies that redirect from the root to www: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, WeWork, SpaceX, DiDi, Coinbase, Blue Apron, Stitch Fix, The Information, Flexport. Gitlab goes one better and redirects the root domain to about.gitlab.com. How about Bird scooters, founded 2017? Yup, redirects to www. Lets look at some recent Ycombinator grads [1]. It's about half and half whether they redirect to www. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/the-top-10-startups-from-y-combinators-demo-day-s18-day-2/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/the-top-10-startups-from-y... Whatever factor you think age plays in the www subdomain decision, it doesn't seem to be reflected by real companies.

adventured 8y ago

> What the heck does age have to do with anything? A lot. If your site is 15 or 20 years old, you're from an era where consumers universally expected www to preface a domain. 20 years ago consumer ignorance was extremely high as it pertained to how the Web worked and how addresses worked, any variations from what was normal would be a poor choice. It was also technically more annoying 20 years ago to try to get by without www, companies like Cloudflare have helped make that far more trivial as an issue. Once you've become very successful such that tens or hundreds of millions of people are using your service and you've firmly established your address (eg as www.facebook.com), the downside risk is greater than the upside potential to bother switching from www to non-www at that point. If you're Facebook and you've acquired a sweet 2 billion person social monopoly, there's zero potential value in messing with switching from www.fb.com to fb.com. Further, if you've built up an elaborate service over many years using www and attaching cookies and subdomains to countless services, there can be a plethora of super annoying problems (and or very serious security risks) to deal with in switching to non-www for your core. So once again, for someone like Facebook or Google, the value proposition to switching a gigantic service over, is more of a nightmare. If you're just starting out with none of that legacy, such things are not a problem, you build from the ground up for non-www. If you're Twitter, Imgur, Github or Stripe and you want the identity benefit of having no www in the front - it produces a better url for advertising, a shorter url for function (valuable historically for eg Twitter and Imgur), and stronger visual branding (less cruft around your name) - then you avoid www from the early days.

snowwrestler 8y ago
More recent companies that redirect from the root to www: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, WeWork, SpaceX, DiDi, Coinbase, Blue Apron, Stitch Fix, The Information, Flexport. Gitlab goes one better and redirects the root domain to about.gitlab.com. How about Bird scooters, founded 2017? Yup, redirects to www. Lets look at some recent Ycombinator grads [1]. It's about half and half whether they redirect to www. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/the-top-10-startups-from-y-combinators-demo-day-s18-day-2/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/the-top-10-startups-from-y... Whatever factor you think age plays in the www subdomain decision, it doesn't seem to be reflected by real companies.