The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)
42 points by phantom_oracle 3 years ago | 66 comments- mrweasel 3 years agoThe real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.
You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.
No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning. They lack context.
- fivea 3 years ago> The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.
I disagree. No one was born recognizing .com domains, and outside of the US non-.com domains are already quite mundane. In fact, FANGs like Amazon employ cc TLDs quite extensively to segregate marketplaces, and they do just fine.
> No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning.
This assertion has no bearing in reality, specially given domains like .io, .icu, .info, .site, and even .aws.
- dqv 3 years agoA remembering problem exists with the main TLDs though. Alice's Home Cleaning Service needs a website, but the one she wants is taken, so she starts doing weird things with the domain: alicehomecleaning.com alice-homecleaning.com alice-home-cleaning.com alicehc.com
These domains are also worthless. I can say I would find something like alicehome.services a lot more memorable.
And with advertising, it's more about continuous exposure. So I see the alicehome.services car around town for the third time and say, "oh there's that weird domain again".
- qbasic_forever 3 years agoPaint a QR code on the side of the van instead, I bet it would get more engagement even with a .com address.
- mrweasel 3 years agoSadly I have no way of tracking that, because I would make the opposite bet. My guess is that 90+% of QR codes, that people aren't forced to scan somehow, are never used.
- zbrozek 3 years agoLots of restaurants are forcing this. I stop going to them. I don't go to a coffee shop to spend 3-10 minutes futzing with phones instead of talking to the person I'm meeting.
- zbrozek 3 years ago
- andreareina 3 years agoQR code requires you to scan it in that moment. A human-readable (and -recognizable) URL stands a chance at being remembered at a later date.
- will4274 3 years ago> QR code requires you to scan it in that moment
Not really, anymore. Android permits you to take a picture of a QR code and use it's URI later by going to the saved picture and clicking "Lens" (which activates Google's ML to identify QR codes).
- will4274 3 years ago
- mrweasel 3 years ago
- s_dev 3 years agoYou could write www.joehardware.builders to make it clearer.
- mrweasel 3 years agoI suggested that, but as I wrote, that's actually more confusing if you don't know that there's a .builders TLD (in fact there's also a .builder).
- mrweasel 3 years ago
- fivea 3 years ago
- hirsin 3 years agoThere's a legitimate engineering issue here too that bears mentioning.
Your marketing team will charge ahead with migrating all your product.business.com sites to just product.business
You'll get half a year into that migration before someone asks about shared domain cookies. Oh, login.business.com dropped an SSO cookie on business.com?
After that you'll get the lovely request - you work with the browser people, can't we just edit the standard to drop a cookie on a TLD?
- mjevans 3 years agoDiscussion on stack overflow... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3342140/cross-domain-coo...
I would really like a better solution; but that appears to live solidly within a successor to current HTML pages, something designed from inception with security contexts in mind. Maybe they can fix login / logout / credential management too; I really hope they just use kerberos.
- mjevans 3 years ago
- Croftengea 3 years ago> It creates a three-tier world. The big boys who have TLDs, the cheaper boys who have .com
The prophecy didn't come true. Granted the big boys got their .googles and .amazons, but good old .coms are still a thing and not considered "cheaper".
- lolinder 3 years ago
- gnabgib 3 years agoIt might even be older according to the main page ("mostly written in 2001")[0]. Sure would be helpful if the author included a publish date. Many blog entries (and stack overflow type solutions) need time context (it may have been the solution/a reasonable position at the time)
- Croftengea 3 years agoYou can tell the writing is very old because it mentions .ibm as an example of super well-known and wealthy corporation. No mention of Google nor Amazon.
- lolinder 3 years agoYou're right, it could be much older. I thought 2011 seemed likely because that's the earliest the web archive has and that's the year that the new gTLD program really got rolling. However, it looks from some of his other content that he might have been referring to discussions that were started in 2000 and 2001:
- dredmorbius 3 years agoGiven the reference "I wrote a satire of issues around this some years ago" for a piece posted in 2005, I suspect the 2010 / 2011 year is reasonably accurate.
- Croftengea 3 years ago
- gnabgib 3 years ago
- quicksilver03 3 years agoI would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.
- dqv 3 years agoI have to disagree. I mean, yes, the money-grabbing scheme is probably true, but I don't agree with the part about them being bad taste or too long. I will probably lose at most one hour of my total life having to spend extra time typing > 3 characters. And that's a purposeful overestimation. We have browser history and bookmarks. As far as bad taste, I don't know, I'm not really comfortable with creating this "legitimacy" for .com domains or any 3-letter domain over any of the others.
- bobbob1921 3 years agoI agree with this. I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains. Also it does feel like a bait and switch- where for so many years three character tlds (and then 2 char tlds) were so valuable and sought after, only to have these >3 char tlds come along and change the landscape/market.
Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA), even after they were so popular and valueable in the pre-sale auctions icann and others conducted b4 their introduction/release several years ago.
- fivea 3 years ago> I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains.
One of the original TLDs is .arpa, and I don't see any of that uniformity in a world where second-level domains like .co.uk domains are pervasive.
> Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA)
The usecase driving .xxx was not from site operators but from third-parties seeking an easier way to censor porn sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx
The concept was flawed from the start given the same site can be served through multiple domains, and it relied on site operators located in any jurisdiction from any corner of the world to voluntarily serve their sites thorough that TLD.
- fivea 3 years ago
- collegeburner 3 years agoNo there just shouldn't be a thing as a "TLD". I should be able to register abc.ou8hurbaskjdbflubsaduf if I want to. Or just 8huasidvbsd with no domain. Only way to fight domain squatting and the stupidly overpriced domain hacks.
- IshKebab 3 years agoI think they're needed so your DNS resolver knows who to talk to. But I agree they're kind of useless from a user point of view.
- IshKebab 3 years ago
- pm90 3 years agoWhat’s the problem with longer length tlds?
- paulryanrogers 3 years agoIn practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens. For many use cases these are irreverent, but they do matter to some.
- fivea 3 years ago> In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens.
The longest vanity TLD I could find was .travelersinsurance. Two dozen characters are nothing more than a rounding error in the 2k character limit. You routinely pass 10 times more characters in path and query parameters than you do in the domain name.
Also, how often do people type in URLs instead of clicking links?
Also, keep in mind that some browsers are starting to hide path and query parameters in the address bar and instead only show the domain name. I presume that makes domain names and TLDs more relevant in terms of name recognition.
- jefftk 3 years agoWhere is 2K a limit these days?
- fivea 3 years ago
- gray_-_wolf 3 years agoAs non-native speaker, I always have to google how to spell `engineering`. And you can't really auto-correct domain name.
- paulryanrogers 3 years ago
- mindslight 3 years agoICANN has clearly strayed from its charter of nonprofit root trustee, and is acting like any other for profit entity and arbitraging away their assets. I'd love to see a root-restandardization effort that aims to take anything that isn't (com/net/org, the country code tlds, and whatever other traditional ones I'm forgetting) and sticks it under a new .icann or whatever. So ICANN can "sell .google", but most everyone would end up referring to it as ".google.icann". The sooner this is done the better, to make it clear that attempting to use the root pollution will end up being a painful experience.
Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell off of any name imaginable.
- duskwuff 3 years agoAnd invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an absolute nonstarter of an idea.
- mindslight 3 years agoIf you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. Trustees of traditional TLDs would still continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable. Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption of better technologies (eg .onion).
And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized) names for loading subresources. For example, going to a bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for human readable names.
- mindslight 3 years ago
- duskwuff 3 years ago
- spcebar 3 years agoI think that as more and more companies and individuals get online there's absolutely a use for more TLDs, and having more descriptive ones doesn't hurt anyone. I do think TLDs like .sucks are a flagrant display of ICANN's greed and corruption.
- acheron 3 years agoI’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld. I don’t necessarily think badly of the company when I see a link to one (I mostly think “fuck you ICANN”) but it is anti-memorable.
- sofixa 3 years agoOh please. A Cloud Guru's acloud.guru is awesome and easy to remember, and there are probably tons of other examples.
- dqv 3 years agoAnd a lot of the .com domain space is polluted either with people sitting on domains and wanting to sell them for thousands or just leaving it unregisterable. So you have this choice of either creating a really long .com, or a shorter .other
Granted, the domain name system is not ideal, but adding new TLDs, however long, is a better solution than dealing with having to name your company so you can get a .com that matches it.
- marc_io 3 years agoNotion.so is another example. The gTLD in this case could even be considered part or the brand, as notion.com points to it.
- dqv 3 years ago
- fivea 3 years ago> I’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld.
I doubt this assertion is grounded in reality. Sites that resort to puns from cc TLDs like lobste.rs don't suffer from name recognition problems, and no one ever had any problem remembering twitch.tv.
- sofixa 3 years ago
- unbanned 3 years ago
- dqv 3 years ago
- paulcole 3 years agoWho’s the joker who bought http://bad.coffee?
- Traster 3 years agoI don't understand why people are interested in keeping the implementation details of the internet exposed. There was a reason we came up with TLDs and such, and you had to type in http vs ftp vs https etc. But there's no reason to be constrained by these detalis. If the computer can figure it out? good.
- mavhc 3 years agoWhoever invented selling 1 row in a database for massive amounts of money per year was a genius
- meesterdude 3 years agoit's better than that: they're RENTING database rows.
- dredmorbius 3 years agoModern Papal indulgences.
- meesterdude 3 years ago
- togaen 3 years agoI mean, all domains are really vanity domains. This just gives people more ways to be vain, which is all anyone really wants.
- niedzielski 3 years agoThere is already http://microsoft.bing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom....
- kijin 3 years agoWhich redirects to bing.com, proving that they really have no use for the .bing TLD other than to prevent someone else from grabbing it.
- mavhc 3 years agoImagine the clamour of people who want to be associated with Bing
The real problem is can I still type weirdfilename.exe into the browser bar and get to a search engine?
- dredmorbius 3 years agoThe Crosby estate?
- dredmorbius 3 years ago
- firekvz 3 years ago.bing tld is theirs, is not available for the public
and even if it was available to register, they can reserve words for their own usage before launching it
and if you mean, someone else actually doing the paperwork to get the .bing tld for them, it wouldnt ever be approved.
- mavhc 3 years ago
- kijin 3 years ago
- xstefen 3 years agoI am reminded that Alphabet's Google's Charleston Road Registry acquired .foo with the promise of sharing it with the community, only to pull a 180 post-grant and keep it to themselves. FeelsBadMan
- 3 years ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3 years ago
- dqv 3 years agoSorry, but *looks at my nails* .com is a boomer TLD, it's passé. Do you really want a domain from last century? Or do you want an exotic .asia? A cool .club? A forward looking .future? Or even joining the ranks of the celebrity media with a stylish... .xn--45q11c?
The answer is clear, if you want to stay in the past, then go with .com, but the .future is in vanity TLDs. For more information, check out my website https://ok.boomer and considering buying a .boomer domain today!
- mixedbizness 3 years agoI bought a LOT of .biz domains, turns out carriers often block people from receiving SMS messages containing email addresses at these TLDs, without notifying me or them.
Probably because they're often used for spam? (I bought em because they were cheap.)
- kijin 3 years agoIf they're cheap for you, they're cheap for spammers, too.
- kijin 3 years ago
- 3 years ago
- digitaLandscape 3 years ago
- mikotodomo 3 years agoOMG what if someone buys .thinkdifferent!!!