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by jona-f 6mo ago
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- codingdave 6mo agoConsidering how little is actually interesting about the app aside from it using an old domain, my impression is that the entire post is just pseudo-marketing, attempting to encourage people to get back into domain name squatting.
- camillomiller 6mo agoWell this vibecoded chatgpt crap is quite clearly an attempt at making Friendster more valuable than 30k
- ca98am79 6mo agoCurious what you’d consider a better model for naming/ownership on the internet.
- phrotoma 6mo agoIIUC it's not the model of buying domains from registrars which stinks of crap, it's the buying from registrars by domain squatters who then flip them for a profit having provided zero value that bears a whiff of shite. These ticket scalpers of the internet who contribute nothing can well and truly fuck straight off.
- mothballed 6mo agoSpeculators provide time-allocation of resources. They're pretty critical part of market dynamics to help resources get sold and developed when they are valued most. That is, they prevent domains from being captured prematurely for lower value use. Society profits immensely from their contribution.
- phrotoma 6mo agoHey I get it, we all gotta sleep at night. Tell yourself whatever you like to get them zzz's. As far as ticket scalpers and domain resellers go, my assessment stands: they are bottom feeding zeros providing nothing of value and they can fuck off into the sun.
- jyscao 6mo agoDespite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics. While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy. Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.
- jgeada 6mo agoWhat risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service. If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars. The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service. I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
- jyscao 6mo ago>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction. Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
- jgeada 6mo agoExcept in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain) Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
- jona-f 6mo ago[flagged]
- _vertigo 6mo agoIt’s just an externality of online advertising
- johnfn 6mo agoWe must have read a different article because I read a neat one about how someone bought a domain no one was using.
- fsckboy 6mo agoan article about a new app is an article about a new app, even if self promotional. an article that spends most of its time talking about the sunshine and roses of purchasing domains from a domain squatter, even if you are a domain squatter, is an article about domain squatting.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoit WAS being used for what I hope we can all agree is a very low value use that generated significant revenues by essentially tricking people to visit. That's the morality question here. Maybe it speaks to the bigger, general question of "do the ends justify the means?"
- dang 6mo agoYou broke the site guidelines badly in this thread by posting much too aggressively and crossing into personal attack. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it on HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- jona-f 6mo agoI don't see where exactly I broke the site guidelines. Was I too negative? That is a ridiculous guideline. So I'm supposed to talk positive about antisocial behavior or be quiet about it? What kind of a platform is that? Also, I'm not sure about the personal attack and aggression. I only described search engine optimized ad spam pages with strong words. It was OP's decision to build this crap. Nobody, not even he himself argued against that these spam-pages have any value besides making him money. I'm genuinely surprised that OP seems to not realize his past success story might be nothing to be proud of. I am also genuinely surprised that we, as a society tolerate this kind of behavior, and I actually wanted to have a discussion about this. The second post, I answered his question how I think we should deal with that and unfortunately mobbing is the only way I can think of. Again, I was open for discussion and put in alot of "I'm not sure, this is how it looks from my view" words. In the third post I tried to clarify that it's the seo ad - fueled, and that I consider that similar to littering with profit, which I guess is illegal in most countries. A day later it still looks to me like I made a few very reasonable arguments. But sadly very little debate has been going on besides the typical low effort partisan comments. On that note, I'd like to point out that the karma system very much encourages these partisan comments, cause unfortunately solid argument are usually received much worse than snarky remarks.
- hacker161 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- oefrha 6mo agoYou don’t need to propose a better model of the world to despise the dirtbags profiting from legal but icky shit in this world.
- wussboy 6mo agoI don't need to be able to cure cancer to tell you that cancer is terrible.
- Barbing 6mo agoWait people are upset, do the Friendster founders want their URL back?! Maybe I glossed over something
- skeeter2020 6mo agoI think it was more about how the OP talks about the backstory, and likely how they got the resources to do this.
- Barbing 6mo agoThank you, I just asked another commenter for some more details. I don’t want to be someone who misses big points like that.
- estearum 6mo agoThere should be a land value tax on domain names
- skeeter2020 6mo agothere sort of is; you don't own a domain but lease it. The problem is all domains for a given TLD cost the same. What about the registration fee being a % of the value, where value is set to the current cost, but then assessed on the sales price? Or do we just end up with the scenario we're currently escaping with TM resale tickets?
- brynnbee 6mo agoICANN's main process for handling trademark-based complaints is the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This policy is used for instances where someone claims you registered a domain in bad faith that matches their trademark, and they have a panel that looks at whether you have "rights or legitimate interests" in the name. Bad faith evaluations by this policy often involves intent to sell the domain to the trademark owner, disrupt their business, or attract users by confusion. So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one. Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, and whether the effort or investment put into the site is proportional to a ballpark of the value of a domain name. With exceptions, perhaps, for situations like domains that are also your name. I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoI don't necessarily support any of these, but it's essentially a solved problem when discussing the supply side - especially for artificial scarcity: * lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate * taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment * going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities * qualitative usage can define treatment * lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
- arthurgibson 6mo agoA little over reaction here, they were very open about the process. Lets not take down the horse before the carriage. The article mentions they started "park.io" which was backordering domains, so at minimum expertise and some relevancy exists (was acquired). Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
- hacker161 6mo agoTheir reaction is perfectly proportional
- i386 6mo agoI kinda fucking love it. He’s doing something. It’s interesting. There’s no scam. Let live!
- chneu 6mo agoThis is such a wild over reaction. There is nothing inherently wrong with domain squatting. Lol. Blame the system, not the people operating within it.
- timedude 6mo agoThe people operating in it are the system.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoThis is such a dumb response. The people playing the squat & resale game are the ones that built and maintain the system. This is like saying spam & phishing is the fault of the people who built email, not the jerks who exploit it. It's wrong because it extracts money from the commons without adding any value; i.e. this is why we can't have nice things.
- kube-system 6mo agoDomain squatting is when you buy a domain purely for speculation with no intent of using it. This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
- rafram 6mo agoHe founded a domain brokerage for squatters and seems to be squatting on other domains for ad revenue (read the section about the trade he made).
- aswegs8 6mo agoDoesn't strike me as particularly immoral.
- rafram 6mo agoI don’t know about immoral, but it is at the very least a bit sleazy. When I look for domains for side projects, I very rarely have to abandon a name because it’s been taken by an actual operational service; it’s almost always because someone is squatting it with a “parking” page filled with sketchy ads that they’re paying almost nothing for. That isn’t doing any good for anyone besides the squatter.
- Dave0X 6mo agoWhy does a practice have to do good for anyone other than the practioner?
- rafram 6mo agoWell, if we're discussing morality, it is generally considered immoral to enrich yourself at the expense of the public good.
- sillysaurusx 6mo ago
- Dave0X 6mo agoThis comment sounds like entitlement and anti-capitalist.
- andy_ppp 6mo agoThis is a terrible take, he actually helped me get a domain back that I'd accidentally let expire. He's a genuine person just making a business with domains, everything everyone does has some kind of compromise to it if you look closely enough.