Comment by mbateman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbateman | Hacker News Reader

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1) I registered most of my domain names 5 or 6 ago and haven't bothered switching. I never had a problem with them personally and so I continued to use them. (I use them as a registrar, not as a host.)

2) I am not the most avid follower of HN and either never saw these stories or saw them and my eyes just glazed past them. I'm not interested in most stories here, not even about services that I use. Analogously, I use Gmail and don't read the horror stories about them anymore, but if Google were supporting SOPA I would probably switch from Gmail. I use AirBNB, didn't care about the silly meth head vandalism scandal that made every single top news story here, or various other criticisms, but would probably never use them again if they supported SOPA. etc.

3) Even if you don't buy the above, it still seems perfectly reasonable to be more offended by the support of SOPA than by the run-of-the-mill corporate incomptence that underlies most horror stories.

4) Complaining about downvotes is pretty lame, and I really can't tell if you're trolling or not, especially with a temporary account.

5) I can understand the sentiment that a self-fueling moralizing crowd is a distasteful thing to behold. But that's not an excuse to never agree with a boycott or take place in a collective action. Anyway, I don't think my original comment was particularly moralizing.

There, I took 200 seconds or so.

Thank you for taking the time. I would hope a second glance at my comments and account would indicate that I'm far from a "temporary" account.

That having been said, I understand your first two points, but I still find them to be irresponsible. I'm not saying that I've never done it, but to most people, their domain and availability are important parts of their brand and GoDaddy doesn't strike me as "competent" enough to be a risk I'd be willing to take with anything other than a site I really don't care about.

I know complaining about downvotes is in poor taste, I'm just shocked at the mob mentality that I expect at reddit taking over control of the discourse here. I think that your term "self-fueling moralizing crowd" is very apt, but I don't mean to imply that I'm against this boycott. I was really just speaking in defense of the OP of this trunk of the comments who was remarking that it's just a matter of perspective in reasons to avoid GoDaddy. Like I've said numerous times, I detest GoDaddy and SOPA and am in favor of any boycott that affects either.

The self aggrandizing morality stance in this thread is probably just getting to me more than I should be letting it.

I'd like to take the time and expand on what others have said. In particular, I was prompted by this bit: "to most people, their domain and availability are important parts of their brand..."

First, I think that's only true of competent web only companies. I really believe that most users are not really that concerned or interested in those technical details or the risks associated with using a less than competent registrar/hosting provider.

For many companies, availability is closely tied to cost, especially at smaller firms. And they are more than willing to sacrifice availability or not pay extra to be insured a certain level of availability. Additionally, for many companies their web presence is purely optional and not their primary means of generating profit. Availability is definitely not the most important thing.

In fact, I've seen more and more small companies shift to simply using Facebook instead of setting up their own page. They don't care about a custom domain the same way many technical users might care.

I guess my point is that the vast majority of people aren't really all that competent or interested on the workings of the internet. Nor are they interested in paying for high availability. This is GoDaddy's market.

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