5 ms·
Ask HN: Do you have an aversion to recent TLDs?
I noticed recently that I tend to subconsciously avoid websites visiting websites using more recent TLDs, like .space, .app, etc.
After some introspection I realized that they feel dodgy and "fake" to me. I was wondering if this was a personal eccentricity or something other people experience.
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- chrismeller 1y agoI admit that I still subconsciously treat com/net/org as somehow more legitimate, though there's no logical reason. I do like that there are more options now, but some of the gTLDs are quite ridiculous. And I really don't like that companies like Google/MS can buy their own TLD now. I don't think allowing a trademarked term to be used should have been allowed.
- GaryBluto 1y ago> but some of the gTLDs are quite ridiculous. Case in point: .sucks, .wtf, .zip, .ninja The fact .zip was created by Google of all companies is hilarious to me.
- donatj 1y ago.sucks was a pure genius money making scheme where every major company has to squat (company).sucks - we own ours and used to use it to test our frame rules.
- rkomorn 1y agoThe "conspiracy theory" I buy into the most is that all these new TLDs are primarily motivated by the revenue of forcing every corp to register their equivalent domain. Love that your company leaned into it for that purpose.
- saaaaaam 1y agoThis isn’t a conspiracy theory. I accidentally ended up in a senior role at one of the new gTLD domain registries for a couple of years. “Name protection” - and partnering with the companies who offer corporate domain services to large corporations - was a core part of the commercial strategy.
- rkomorn 1y agoYes, the quotes around conspiracy theory were very intentional. :)
- fragmede 1y agoGet 300 friends to each give you $1,000, and you too, can be the administrator of your very own TLD. What're you going to choose? something lucrative, like .dev, or something fun, like .fun? The world is your .oyster!
- bakql 1y agoOf course there’s a legitimate reason: when you want to buy a domain for your product using one of the old TLDs, it’s likely to be taken already, which means you’ll have to pay a significant sum for it, which means your project is serious.
- stop50 1y agoThe only tld i have an aversion is .su
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoI associate .ai with garbage. I recognize something like .space as newer but wouldn't discount it, there's no reason the good .com names should win by default forever just because they were earlier.
- cfn 1y agoFor me the oddest thing are the prices they go for.
- al_borland 1y agoThis is the worst part. You’d think with a dramatic increase in supply that we’d see prices fall to almost nothing. Domains are priced as if anyone buying them is planning to start a billion dollar business, and the URL is instrumental in its success. This discourages me from wanting to buy domains for a hobby project, or even for my own email. This whole industry seems like a big scam. Domain squatters don’t help the situation.
- kotaKat 1y agoRegistrars getting to decide that words suddenly are “premium” is so fucking bullshit.
- anonymous908213 1y agoNot at all. It's irrational to judge how legitimate something is by its ability to get a slice of a finite namespace. That heuristic may have been slightly useful 30 years ago, but since then internet usage has exploded and the desirable .coms have generally all been nabbed already.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoDoesn't that lead to the opposite conclusion? I'm much more likely to believe nike.com is genuine compared to nike.sportsgear
- anonymous908213 1y agoI would trust ".com" or ".sportsgear" equally, which is to say, I put zero trust into the domain name because it's not a useful heuristic. For 30+ year old businesses that had a better opportunity to secure their .com, maybe the heuristic could be helpful, but it could be actively harmful for anything newer which had its .com squatted. Will you give your credit card info to any .com on the basis of .com being trustworthy? Or would you rather consider using the abundant information available on the internet to more reliably identify the trustworthiness of a site?
- 4ndrewl 1y ago> Will you give your credit card info to any .com on the basis of .com being trustworthy Of course not, and that's why I didn't say that. I said I'm more _likely_ to trust nike.com, and would give more scrutiny to nike.randomtld.
- 000ooo000 1y agoYep, they remind me of the free 'domains' you used to be able to get back in 2000-2005 that were crap like mydomain.ko.cc. By far the least legitimate one I see is .ai - I seem to immediately write those off as some half-baked chatgpt wrapper, or worse a landing page for a product that doesn't exist that would also just be a chatgpt wrapper if enough fools handover their email address. That said, I do like .io for tech sites. I think domains by area/industry are mostly sensible.
- CSSer 1y agogTLDs have no registration/renewal price cap. This probably doesn't mean much to you now, and statistically, it probably never will, but if it ever does... Yikes!
- epakai 1y agoI recently noticed the mom and dad TLDs. One has a lot of potential for phishing so all the big sites seem to have MarkMonitor registering their names there. You can visit ebay.mom though, and amazon.mom redirects to an inactive URL for the family program. Curiously, dead.mom was redirecting to www.nro.gov, an org with a rather interesting secret history.
- popularonion 1y agoI used to feel that way but I’m completely over it, especially going through the experience of registering a few domains for side projects recently. There are just too many already squatted. The only other market based solution I can think of is just charging like $10,000/yr minimum per domain name and forcing the plebs to use randomly generated strings like Tor onion sites
- easwee 1y agoI don't - .com is boring.
- jama_ 1y agoI don't see myself as that averse. To me, if they found a clever domain hack, or if the name is such that the TLD is part of it (like https://teenage.engineering https://teenage.engineering) - sure, go for it. Happy to see it actually! Gives it character and shows that a modicum of thought was put into the choice. For the website of my gamedev team (called secret industries) I was happy to see .industries being a TLD. Quite long, but easy to remember if you remember the name. For personal use, as long as the TLD has a decent enough reputation to use with email (https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/ https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/), I'd be fine with almost whatever, too. I personally use a ccTLD, but things like Jeff Gerstmann's site (https://jeff.zone https://jeff.zone) are fun. There are tons of other examples, this one just came to mind first. What does feel dodgy and fake to me is when I see a known name with the new gTLDs. Sometimes SaaS have their landing/marketing site on a different TLD than the app itself. If you find both via web search, that looks weird to me. The city TLDs and highly specialized or non-English ones (like .kaufen, .whoswho, .abogado) and the tons and tons of paid subdomains are so rare that they always seem out of place.
- chrysoprace 1y agoAs with anything, people tend to get excited about something new (new-er, anyway) and go a bit overboard. At some point we'll find the ones that actually stick around. I quite like .app and .dev now that the future of .io is dubious, but I do not like the price. A YouTuber, CodingGarden, nabbed null.computer which I personally think is excellent.
- steanne 1y agomost of my exposure to them is from cleaning up spammers, so yes.
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- cairin7777 1y ago[flagged]
- Miladyshady 1y agoI felt the same for TLDs like .ai. They might not be fake websites, but they seemed -to me at least- like cheap vibe-coded websites offering lousy products.
- card_zero 1y agoI kind of like omg.lol, and I'm intrigued by .ooo but haven't seen it in use yet. I'd probably avoid something like games.fun or music.biz, those just sound unpersuasive.
- drivingmenuts 1y agoThe website might be perfectly legit, but the address looks like a vanity or a joke URL and that's a turnoff.
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoFor me there should be no restrictions on TLDs. Everyone should be able to get what they want, why a given TLD would be special?
- Bender 1y agoMy self hosted mail server is averse to anything with a low bar to entry. When a registrar rents thousands of domains to a group for nearly free they get added to a file that will just REJECT them with a URL or snarky message. There are a handful of TLD's that my DNS will NXDOMAIN as well. I have done this for decades and have zero regrets while acknowledging it is hard for people to get a decent short name on .com net org. IRL and internet scammers are why we can't have nice things.
- JohnFen 1y agoI don't strictly avoid them, but they do have a scammy undertone to me and I associate them with sketchiness. I wouldn't use them for my own things.
- theturtle 1y ago[dead]
- opengrass 1y ago.zip only exists for phishing and malware.
- gethly 1y agoI have no problem with them. Though whenever I see one, all I think is that someone overpaid for a domain name because .com was taken. By the way, about 95% of .com domains are squatters, which pisses me off to no end.
- imartin2k 1y agoI publish lots of newsletters containing links to startups, and these TLDs do tend to lead to occasional deliverability issues, with a higher risk of spam classification. So the anti-spam lists and algorithms share your perception of such TLDs being potentially dodgy. Objectively they aren’t though.