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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 t
by ramraj07 6y ago
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).
- zhte415 6y agoTyping 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.
- atomi 6y agoThat's an interesting writing style.
- overcast 6y agoI'd have sworn this was written by a machine, and not a human.
- Diesel555 6y agoThis has to be a machine.
- bxparks 6y agoYeah... I can't understand what the writer is trying to say. I read it 3-4 times.
- klipt 6y agoOlder people prefer browsing to a website. Younger people, too young to remember RSS, prefer apps.
- zhte415 6y agoThis is weird. I've had this comment here before, not a lot, but once every few months. What is it in particular? Punctuation? Adjective clauses? No, I am not a computer.
- klipt 6y agoIs English your second language? I guess everyone is more suspicious since GPT-3 came out and a bunch of people made ML generated blog posts etc. FWIW I found your comment understandable.
- zhte415 6y agoNot a second language. But spent the last decade largely speaking a second (or third) language and/or with ESL speakers. Perhaps that's starting to rub-off! Oh dear.. Not sleeping right for the past few days may also be a factor. GPT-3 paranoia may also be a thing.
- eythian 6y agoI mostly work and socialise with people who have English as a second language. I have noticed myself simplifying sentences a fair bit too, reducing idiom use, and so on. But perhaps not to the same extreme :)
- bxparks 6y agoI think my problem is that many of your sentence fragments are not complete sentences. You keep dropping the Subject and/or Verb of the sentence. In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I". In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom. You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what. Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness." Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much. Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
- quadrangle 6y agohuge 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?
- Aeolun 6y agoThe two words around my hyphen are pretty simple, so word-hyphen-word is not that hard to remember.
- albertshin 6y agobut does this really matter in a world where people basically Google every business anyways to get to the homepage? I feel like everyone around me will Google whenever they hear about a cool app, website, store, product etc. or we're charting online or talking on Zoom and they'll just send me the link directly I'm not sure what the purpose of a URL is anymore... unless you're this guy [1] [1]: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/
- elcomet 6y agoExcept that this is not true. The people you know use google, but there are many people that don't, and just type the full url or use bookmarks, and are not particularely knowledgeable about the web. If they belong to your target group, then you'll miss some visits to your website.
- rovr138 6y ago>I feel like everyone around me It’s called confirmation bias. Once you start exploring outside your circle, it might not hold true.
- quadrangle 6y agothe argument of "everyone will Google" might as well suggest there's no reason for .com even. You could just assume the address is completely irrelevant. As long as Google knows that "Flameswipe" should go to flame-swi.pe it's fine. As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.
- rlayton2 6y agoI consult for a business with a hyphen in the name. Not recommended, as its a constant source of confusion for customers. It might be fine for a personal site etc, but be mindful that lots of people still don't understand that websites other than .com exist (i.e. don't get a .io domain if you want to sell to the general public).
- pidg 6y agoI work for one, and would also not recommend it, unless you like saying the word "hyphen" a lot.
- jiofih 6y ago“dash” is not any longer than “dot” which we already use all the time.
- rosseloh 6y agoOur business has a dash/hyphen in the name. I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?"). My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoI agree. I’ve seen multiple startups achieve seven figures in revenue with hyphens before moving to buy the name without the hyphen.
- miguelmota 6y agoCurious, are there any sites that you use that have a hyphen in domain? Seems like about ~1% of the top 500 websites use a hyphen in domain.
- dan1234 6y agoExperts Exchange has a hyphen because the words can read differently when run together.
- tempestn 6y agoPenny-arcade comes to mind. Also brings to mind my first email address, which used an underscore! In my defense, it was a hotmail address created circa 1998, before there were strong norms for such things...
- mattl 6y agoI’ve seen hyphenated .biz domains.
- undebuggable 6y ago> If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. You mean the minus sign? Few know how to type the actual unicode hyphen with the keyboard. Not to be confused with dash, but short or long one?... and here start your problems.
- 867-5309 6y agothere is only one symbol on a standard keyboard
- trengorilla 6y agoHyphenated domain names are awful.