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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

A minor point to feed back: for me, https://www.buttondown.com/ fails to load, while https://buttondown.com/ works.

Good call and I agree, I personally don't like using the www subdomain but I would definitely redirect it to the main one, especially on important money-making domains!

There is a lot of discussion about it online, like [0]. But whatever arguments there are, there is a whole generation that thinks that urls should start with www.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/486621/when-should-one-u...

The generation that thinks that remembers when WWW was a new service next to stuff like SMTP and FTP and NNTP. Why wouldn't you put www to distinguish it? It's the new crowd that forgot or never knew about all the other stuff going on behind a domain and wants to hide away all the useful signals.

I was more talking about people that just start typing www when entering a URL. I see it a lot, perhaps more in older people indeed, but certainly mostly in non-techies. Recently I set up some websites for pensionados with a startup, they found it weird their website didn't start with www and asked me to add it.

Edit: If I ddg for NewYork Times, first hit is "https://www.nytimes.com", and https://nytimes.com redirects to that URL.

I came here to say this. Yes I know https://no-www.org/ is a thing, but browsers have a ctrl+enter shortcut that'll top and tail the domain with https://www. and .com - having that go to an error page is not great particularly given the reason to do it was partially ease of access by customers.

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