No to .io, Yes to .xyz | Hacker News Reader

No to .io, Yes to .xyz

yarmo.eu

44 pointstodsacerdoti54 comments

Site seems to be down but xyz gave a domain away to my company if we did some promotional things I really didn't care about (using their domain essentially everywhere, including the code base so it'd be api.[domain...], they actually did check this).

My boss wanted it but I mostly ignored it, too many actual things to do. Xyz was pretty aggressive, multiple emails a week, we never satisfied 100% of their needs. We used it on business cards, wrote a blog entry, advertised them for free, made it the primary domain, it was never enough. It was one of those high maintenance b2b partnerships where you're thinking "ug, screw these people"

So we let the domain lapse after I finally convinced him it was a complete non-priority and then they followed up to with renewal offers in the thousands of dollars that we had no intention of spending, almost as if they were trying to play hardball on something I didn't actual want.

I have their emails on a filter, I'll go find the last one they sent. Ah, may 1 2019. This one person always used a smiley face in her subject line even when writing some thinly veiled threatening email telling us to do stuff, it was fun.

They appear to be yet another snake in the game which is fine but it taints every pro-xyz thing I see since I know they have account managers that dictate and follow-up on astroturfed PR campaigns.

I'm also violating their NDA by disclosing this but that was my (now ex) boss who signed that paper, I'm in the clear.

Having had an xyz domain name I have to warn people that many mail servers will automatically think you're a spammer if you send email with it. No idea why.

1$/1€ per Domain per year.

I've heard of this, but I use my @snazz.xyz email address for most everything and have never had deliverability issues (using G Suite with SPF, DMARC, and DKIM configured). Maybe this is true if you run your own mail server and your IP reputation is too low.

I've had similar results, using Fastmail with my .xyz domain.

Here's why: they sold for cheap / gave away registrations for next to nothing with no vetting process, so .xyz was the go-to domain for spam and phishing for quite a long time after it was introduced.

Some of us (email administrators) have only recently started allowing .xyz email. It really was that bad.

If you're serious about a "vetting process" for domain registration, you haven't had anything to do with email admin for last 20 years.

I don't normally chime in on comments like this, but I just have to say: what are you talking about? If 99.9999% of traffic from a domain is spam,it makes complete sense to block it as spam.

Yes, but that is in no way limited to .xyz It was the the same with .info in 2001/2002 and .biz and whatever else.

The point was that there never was any "vetting" ever. Bulk-buy, spam, abandon. That's what spam was and is.

I have a .science domain name, and I only found out after purchasing it and building out a website that it is on many blocklists because there was a time when it was one of the cheapest TLDs, and scammers took advantage.

Which is a darn shame, because unlike .io or .xyz where the TLD doesn't necessarily signify what type of content you'll find, .science is clearly a subject-matter specific TLD, and it bugs me that because of these scammers, the association between science and scams is being perpetuated.

The entire .xyz domain is blacklisted[1] on Wikipedia. You can't even link to a .xyz domain on Wikipedia (at least English Wikipedia) without requesting specific exemptions.

They have an exemption for abc.xyz by putting it on a whitelist for example.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist#...

It's cheap. Same reason a .tk might cause problems.

We launched fronted using .xyz but a few suppliers (equifax and others) couldn't send or receive email to us, or view our website. Be warned.

Sounds like a problem for their IT.

Clearly; but that doesn't fix the situation, only makes it worse. Now you have two problems: your client cant receive your emails and they're the ones who have to fix it.

The problem with all these new TLDs is that spammers have poisoned the well. The overwhelming majority of the spam I get comes from .club, .xyz, and other "gold rush" TLDs, so I can't be surprised if some organizations just reject them outright.

Makes a good case for expensive TLDs

Word of warning, the .xyz I once had and let drop is now listed as a "premium" domain they want 2 grand for

Considering the word is my name (Cohan) I really doubt they realised it was a super valuable word out of the blue.

Edit: Sorry it looks like Namecheap are now in on the secondary market game, it looks like a squatter's got it and somehow listed their price in Namecheap

I first encountered .xyz in case of Alphabet[0]. And so I bought it for my own website[1] since I found it refreshing as you said.

[0]https://abc.xyz/

[1]https://flashblaze.xyz

> The .xyz TLD is fun, small, refreshing, funky, a whole lot cheaper and you don't support colonialism.

You will be surprised by how many people will confuse it with .xxx

which can be part of the "fun"

If you want to come across as a fadtech startup with shitly named products, then go with .io and .ly.

.xyz is awful. It takes 4 syllables to pronounce it and means nothing. .com only takes 2 syllables.

It's also not i18n friendly - I speak multiple languages and in each of them I'd have to think how to pronounce it, and it sounds awkward

...as opposed to most other TLDs, which are English words or short versions thereof?

I went with `.co` for Ritza[0], but I still think `.com` helps you rank better, and is still 'assumed' by many people, and at this stage I would probably move a .com domain soon.

I noticed that places like Karat[1] moved from .io to .com, so I assume that they had issues running on the .io domain.

I've also written a lot on CodeMentor (.io) and it "feels" harder to get artices to rank well than on other places (e.g. DigitalOcean.com) that I have written for. Obviously there's a lot more to ranking than choice of TLD, and I do not have hard data, but I am fairly convinced that it remains an important aspect.

The `.dev` TLD also seems to be gaining in popularity (e.g. CodeMentor partially moved to arc.dev). And then places like `dev.to` are I think helping get people used to non-com domains, but to me it's pretty interesting how much the '.com' TLD has maintained reputation and how the newer TLDs have not taken off as much as I expected.

[0] https://ritza.co [1] https://karat.io https://karat.com

> I noticed that places like Karat[1] moved from .io to .com,

I would say, that once you've got past your initial incubator phase, and now have investor money, you can finally drop some cash on the overpriced .com that's been sitting on a domain resellers[1] list for years.

---

[1] You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

> But it doesn't mean "input/output". It stands for British Indian Ocean Territory

I'm going to disagree on this. It's prescriptive. IO definitely means "input/output" in the context of tech startups. I don't think anyone sees github.io and thinks Indian Ocean, nor brew.sh and thinks Saint Helena, nor Apple.com and is frustrated that they sell computers.

It’s what the TLD stands for; nothing prescriptive nor to agree with. It’s a fact.

Still doesn't mean that people actually know or care about the original intended meaning.

Lots of words have a different meaning now than they had originally. Not even talking about the meaning of acronyms.

The point of the article is to teach people about the original meaning, to encourage them to care, and to point out that by paying .io domain fees you are directly supporting this ongoing human rights disaster.

This is a time when BLM protests have led to various aspects of structural racism in society being reexamined. For tech, it's a good time to reexamine use of .io too.

If you entirely remove human nature from the equation then perhaps. But that would be pointlessly futile.

A completely irrelevant one

Io is the daughter of the greek river god Inachos. :P

If you aren’t convinced by the moral issues or ownership disputes, consider also that as recently as 2017 .io has had significant DNS outages affecting domain resolution. It seems the current operators have moved the root zones to more reliable providers since but if ownership of the domain is transferred in the future then that is subject to change.

My firm blocked .xyz at the DNS level for malware frequency.

So, probably not.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200618161818/https://yarmo.eu/...

These gTLDs always have baggage. No one takes them seriously. If you spell it out IRL, people will append a .COM no matter what. There are also no price limits like there are for the traditional TLDs. The registrar of .SOFTWARE or whatever can squeeze you for $100k if they wanted and you were stupid enough to build a brand around the TLD. There are exceptions like .DEV and .APP which resolve fast and are owned by an entity not desperate for cash. But the random person will still append a .COM in their minds.

And the problem with ccTLDs is you never know when people might start randomly hating that country or the West goes to war with that country.

Just pay up for the dotcom.

I agree that .xyz is not necessarily professional and that .com is still the most reputable choice. I own both snazz.xyz (because it’s fun, short, and fits well with the theme of my username) and a more professional website with my CV and academic information at [firstname][lastname].com. I think that owning both serves me well at a lower annual cost than a single .io.

Good luck finding my domain francisco.io with some other half-decent TLDN

Also open source is made for many different reasons, particularly there's a split between Open vs Free software. It seems like this article is referring to FOSS only, which is a minority of the ones used in these domains. The majority of .io I've seen is Open Source and not Free Software.

I don’t know, but in times where search engines are kings, do TLDs really matter?

Some people in the past said shorter TLDs ranked better in terms of SEO, but that doesn’t seem to be true either.

TLDs do still matter. Part of the indieweb movement is focused around not relying on search engines. The TLD is half of your domain so some consideration is needed.

Personally, I could have gotten yarmo.nl, given that I'm Dutch. I chose yarmo.eu because I'm fairly certain my future is not in the Netherlands, but elsewhere in the EU.

I also wouldn't want a TLD that support Britain's continuing colonial rule and defense of acts against human rights.

I'm not saying all should boycott .io, just the (open source) developers who wish their products (and domains) to reflect their core principles.

Yes. In most of the services I have one, organic users are converted to free customers, and _then_ turn into paying customers. You need a memorable and easy to type domain for that.

> do TLDs really matter?

When you have to enunciate them down a phone line or in person then yes, they do. Especially when they're not .com or .co.uk

Several times I've responded to someone's request for my email address with "I'll send you a WhatsApp to click " instead of trying to spell it out.

I heard that using irrevalent ccTLD is harmful for SEO but I don't know is it really.

Weird ccTLD extensions always comes with "issues".

Another example is .ly

this one has a lot of issues https://True.ly

a little bit over 12000 issues actually.

The only choice there is is what registry you cede the control of your traffic to.

It does not matter if it's ccTLD like .io or something else like .xyz, or some kind of second-level domain like github, gitlab, facebook or whatever.

Would it matter if news.ycombinator.com got shorted to news.yc? I seriously doubt it. Still it is already shortened -- try putting into the "address bar".

One can argue that TLDs lost their meaning already, because it's easier to google the brand than to guess what funky suffix they choose to have.

.xyz is far too difficult to type to be a good tld, no matter how memorable it is.

The only .xyz domains i see are from malvertising redirects that ive won amazon/Walmart gift cards for the 50 billionth search or whatever.

Tainted spam domain that is not for legitimate businesses as far as i have experienced.

If i was a network admin i would block the entire TLD.

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