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Comment by BudVVeezer | Hacker News Reader

I was walking alone in the woods one day, and I thought they were pretty. I thought, "I'd like a house here some day." So I bought the woods. Sadly, I never had time to build my house there. So now I'd like to sell my woods to someone else who may get enjoyment out of them.

While asking real estate agents the best way to go about selling my land, a developer overhears my conversation and says, "You should just give your land away. You've already prevented people who could have done something better with it for the past few years while you did nothing with it. Why should you profit too?"

I don't condone domain squatting for the sake of making quick and easy cash. But I bought the domains with good intentions of how to use them, and just never found the time to do what I had hoped. Now I'm looking to see who else wants them. I've not prevented anyone from implementing their own good ideas somewhere else.

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Analogies have no place in a discussion. I'd consider your names "frontier land claimed for the price of a few poles", not "real estate" - and I wouldn't consider myself a developer, as I have zero interest in doing anything with (your) domain names. See how analogies just make us talk past each other?

Look, I understand that you had no ill intentions, and I understand that the things I said are not nice things. But: the fact is that nobody could use those names for a couple of years and anyone who wants to use it in the future will most likely have to pay you quite a bit more than the name would have cost when claimed directly from the registrar. Those are bad things, and I think steering you and others away from this course of action is appropriate.

Disagree, analogies do have a place in this discussion in placing similar situation out of context for comparative reasoning. I highly doubt you'd be giving away any land you purchased. Judging someone aggressively for doing something that had good intentions, probably has less of a place in a discussion--especially when its belaboring.

I'd much rather see a domain in the hands of a potential developer than an explicit domainer.

Now I'll probably lose karma over this one, but its worth it.

I would be telling you the same thing if you'd laid a claim on some "frontier" "unused" "common-good" land, not used it for years and then tried to sell it. See how an analogy can be used to support any point of view?

I completely agree that handing the domain to a domainer would make things worse, not better, though. I was under the impression that you just wanted to sell to the highest bidder, though.

I fail to draw the same comparison, but that's not unique my friend. :)

On the road, "frontier" "unused" "common-good" land delivers benefit to the general public by way of open spaces, natural resources, scenery, production of oxygen. On the internet, unused domain name provides very little in terms of benefit and/or detriment to the general public. To the professional domainer, an unused domain represents a potential market derived from a commodity who is waiting for the cost of production to be less than the inherent market value.

As domainers branch out from type-in-traffic, product category, lead gen asset purchases into generic/future brands, new TLDs, etc less and less of the commodity will be available for the general public.

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