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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

I'm pro decentralizing the internet, but these movements really need some marketing chops. ".onion" TLD? (Yes I know it has been around for awhile) Think of how a normal person will view a ".onion" domain name. It's nonsensical to the uninitiated.

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What about http, ://, www and other TLDs like .co.nz or .ac.uk? All of these were pretty meaningless to initiates of the internet. In this new age of ".pizza" and suchlike, ".onion" doesn't seem much different or weird tbh. (To be clear: I don't think these new tlds are especially good either, but it's the world we live in now.)

To me, .onion reminds me too much of The Onion.

Exactly what I thought the title of the article meant.

I thought it was going to be some random "AI" project that could rewrite your prose in The Onion humour ala:

https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla...

The Onion really needs an .onion site.

They really should, the.onion would almost be perfect.

Names under the .onion TLD are random (they're derived from a public key, and you should generate your key pair randomly or else your private key isn't private). You can of course just keep picking random names until you get one that you like, but "the" isn't a possibility even if you kept trying forever.

A common theme with country code tld's is that you get one country using someone else tld if and when there is a match in the local language and the two letters. For example, Sweden has a lot of swedish websites under the .nu (island state of Niue), to the point where the Swedish registrar actually bought and took over the operation of the tld. "nu" is the word for "now" in swedish.

For me who don't live in the states and have very little exposure of that satirical newspaper, .onion brings no connection to it. If I did not know about The Tor Project I would had guess it was a cooking related domain name. I would also have guessed that google was a company trying to sell glasses.

Increasingly there are full word TLDs (see here: [0]), so I don't think people will find it that weird, especially since most people don't really spend a lot of time looking at the address bar.

The .onion TLD is named for onion routing[1] and has been around for quite a while as you pointed out. If it caught on, I imagine most people would accept the name without much thought. I think the bigger barrier to .onion catching on is getting people to install Tor at all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

Last century "network" and "web" were metaphors that meant nothing to the uninitiated -- I feel that ".onion" has a shot.

Just realized network is a metaphor.

And network is a synonym for web, distinguished only by usage, not intrinsics.

"Web" definitely meant something to people as a metaphore, for long before the internet (ex. "web of lies").

"The 'internet' is like a spider's web, but each point in the web is a different computer."

"Tor is like an onion, where each layer of the onion represents a computer acting like a relay, in a giant network of computers, which your traffic is routed through....."

There is a scene in Shrek where he compares himself to an onion because he was emotional layers.

Shrek is an old meme and onions are stinky. Do you think that's a recipe for this to catch on by the next generation? It's a miracle .com worked at all, and I wouldn't hold my breath for a second miracle.

> Shrek is an old meme and onions are stinky. Do you think that's a recipe for this to catch on by the next generation?

Yes, older members of Gen Z have already been enjoying Shrek "post-ironically" for years. Younger members of the generation are editing together clips of teenagers from the 00s as though it were some bygone halcyon era. Whether we like it or not the trends of reference and farce seem to be accelerating.

Spiders are sinister and scary, so I don't think this "web" thing will ever find traction.

A normal person won’t be able to access an onion site, let alone care about the pop up they’re getting about its availability. I’ve watched people navigate web pages with the half screen cookie banner still open.

Tor is not targeting a “normal” person, as the media has already told the “normal” people that the only things available on the “dark”/“deep” web are illegal.

I'm one of those people that leave it open. I think I instinctively just avoid clicking on any pop up/over on a page.

That being said, I am curious what happens if you don't click "accept" on those ones. I'm assuming you're implicitly accepting by not leaving?

You can train uBlockOrigin to block them. A bit fiddly, and for every site, but that is my habit so I do not have to click 'accept'.

Or you can just use EasyList Cookie list.

Which isn't 100% perfect - I had it partially fail on several of the sites I visit leaving me with no way to view the sites, so disabled it.

If you're in GDPR territory, not clicking "accept" can not legally be taken as implicitly accepting.

Reality is all over the place.

Tor doesn't work unless normal people usage it. Users need the camouflage normal users provide.

> Users need the camouflage normal users provide.

That's an interesting statement - what are the "users" doing there that "normal users" are not?

Journalism, if we're being optimistic.

I think "it's like onions because onions have layers" is probably something that a normal person can come to accept pretty readily.

"Ogres are like onions..."

.tor would seem like it might make sense?

Are there other non-Tor onion routing programs? If so, .onion seems more generic and thus better. (I know that tor is the abbreviation of The Onion Router)

There are (I2P being the main competitor), but .onion is entirely Tor-specific. I2P's equivalent of onion services use the .i2p "TLD".

I'm bothered much more by the length than the semantics.

Maybe they will remember Shrek's famous speech.

Keeping out the riff-raff is a time-honoured marketing strategy on the internet. Gmail/Facebook invites, You do not talk about /B etc.

The design of .onion is that it only works if the riffraff are in.

Same with Facebook, but exclusivity was still a major selling point in the startup days.

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