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Comment by vlucas | Hacker News Reader

> YC startups are abandoning .com

They are not "abandoning" .com domains. They are just really hard to find available or cheap enough to buy, so they launch with something else instead!

.com will always be king

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Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.

A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.

Oh god my company just switched to .io and that was a huge PITA. I hope we don't go .ai...

You just switched to .io knowing that it might be decommissioned in the not-too-distant future?

Perhaps they finally finished their migration off .su

It would shock me if that domain were actually allowed to be killed off by pure bureaucracy. I would like to believe that at some point bureaucracy must give way to concerns for the humans it serves, and if nothing else there is enough money involved with the industry that uses it that they'll probably be able to lobby effectively, one way or another.

wait what? I know nothing about this.

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2024/10/10/the-io-domai... is a reasonable summary.

Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain

it's not that they can't afford to buy one. it's that they're not available. and now a lot of other tlds have gained traction so it's now reasonable to consider others.

I would assume that for most foo.ai domains, foo-ai.com would also be available. So it’s more about naming preferences, and sometimes lack of imagination for coming up with an available name.

foo-ai.com looks like a phishing domain targeting foo.ai

A hyphen in a URL is a non-starter.

"non-starter"? In a URL? You mean URLs and not domain names? Why are these "non-starters"? What is special or wrong about hyphens? Do you avoid clicking these for moral reasons? You do understand that they are perfectly legal anywhere, and acceptable in the character set by all RFCs? What makes them so odious to you?

The squatters really jack up the prices. Yet somehow they pay pennies to squat on domains for decades. It's really a scandal.

Agreed, this is just a way to save cash until it makes sense to buy the actual desired tld .com from the current owner

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