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.

17 points | by GaryBluto 19 hours ago

29 comments

  • chrismeller 19 hours ago
    I 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.

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    • GaryBluto 18 hours 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.

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      • donatj 17 hours 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.
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        • rkomorn 17 hours ago
          The "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.

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          • saaaaaam 16 hours ago
            This 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.
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            • rkomorn 16 hours ago
              Yes, the quotes around conspiracy theory were very intentional. :)
    • bakql 17 hours ago
      Of 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.
    • fragmede 18 hours ago
      Get 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!
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      • abcd_f 18 hours ago
        .300 would seem more appropriate
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        • 4ndrewl 17 hours ago
          Bit niche though. Might be quite a Spartan TLD.
  • jama_ 18 hours ago
    I 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) - 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/), I'd be fine with almost whatever, too. I personally use a ccTLD, but things like Jeff Gerstmann's site (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.

  • cfn 18 hours ago
    For me the oddest thing are the prices they go for.
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    • al_borland 18 hours ago
      This 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 16 hours ago
      Registrars getting to decide that words suddenly are “premium” is so fucking bullshit.
  • anonymous908213 18 hours ago
    Not 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.
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    • 4ndrewl 17 hours ago
      Doesn't that lead to the opposite conclusion? I'm much more likely to believe nike.com is genuine compared to nike.sportsgear
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      • anonymous908213 17 hours ago
        I 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?
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        • 4ndrewl 16 hours 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.

  • chrysoprace 17 hours ago
    As 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.
  • stop50 19 hours ago
    The only tld i have an aversion is .su
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  • epakai 18 hours ago
    I 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.

  • JohnFen 12 hours ago
    I 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.
  • card_zero 15 hours ago
    I 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.

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    • GaryBluto 6 minutes ago
      > omg.lol

      I wouldn't say that counts.

  • 000ooo000 18 hours ago
    Yep, 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.
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  • opengrass 8 hours ago
    .zip only exists for phishing and malware.
  • easwee 18 hours ago
    I don't - .com is boring.
  • CSSer 18 hours ago
    gTLDs 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!
  • BrandoElFollito 13 hours ago
    For 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 12 hours ago
    My 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.
  • steanne 17 hours ago
    most of my exposure to them is from cleaning up spammers, so yes.
  • popularonion 18 hours ago
    I 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

  • Miladyshady 16 hours ago
    I 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.
  • drivingmenuts 15 hours ago
    The website might be perfectly legit, but the address looks like a vanity or a joke URL and that's a turnoff.
  • add-sub-mul-div 18 hours ago
    I 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.
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