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Comment by jasongill | Hacker News Reader

strange

Same as with the tmux.app website. I looked around and I don't understand who's making these vibecoded websites.

Mostly, the ones I see are from SEO scammers and domain parkers trying to pump the value of their domains to resell them, or straight up scamming others to download or even buy a re-packaged malware version of their open source software.

This is likely the reason why they do this and now vibecoding makes it easy for anyone to do this.

I believe doomemacs.com has nothing to do with the developers either. Just more SEO spam or something.

This is something I’ve seen before. Someone is registering domain names related to open source projects and then ‘creating’ slop websites about the projects. Not sure what the play is, or whether this falls into that category, but it’s really weird and takes control away from open source maintainers in a scary way. Maybe it’s extortion or maybe it’s an malware thing. I highly doubt it’s out of the goodness of someone’s heart.

Open source maintainers shouldn’t have to register their projects as trademarks/proactively register domains to avoid this, but that seems like the only strategy?

Best case scenario they’ll try to monetize the site. Worse case it’s a malware distribution play (can eventually change legit repo link to malicious repo)

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