If you could choose freely for no cost between, perhaps, the first subdomain appearing versus not, would you really opt for not? Mousing over the link seems li

If you could choose freely for no cost between, perhaps, the first subdomain appearing versus not, would you really opt for not? Mousing over the link seems like unnecessary work when subdomains could be added without sacrificing the readability of HN at all. Whether it's worth the time investment, I'm not sure. I can't imagine it would be too hard to grab the first subdomain from the link, but perhaps I'm ignoring some significant edge case.