[mrweasel]

The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.

You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.

No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning. They lack context.

[fivea]

> The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.

I disagree. No one was born recognizing .com domains, and outside of the US non-.com domains are already quite mundane. In fact, FANGs like Amazon employ cc TLDs quite extensively to segregate marketplaces, and they do just fine.

> No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning.

This assertion has no bearing in reality, specially given domains like .io, .icu, .info, .site, and even .aws.

[dqv]

A remembering problem exists with the main TLDs though. Alice's Home Cleaning Service needs a website, but the one she wants is taken, so she starts doing weird things with the domain: alicehomecleaning.com alice-homecleaning.com alice-home-cleaning.com alicehc.com

These domains are also worthless. I can say I would find something like alicehome.services a lot more memorable.

And with advertising, it's more about continuous exposure. So I see the alicehome.services car around town for the third time and say, "oh there's that weird domain again".

[qbasic_forever]

Paint a QR code on the side of the van instead, I bet it would get more engagement even with a .com address.

[mrweasel]

Sadly I have no way of tracking that, because I would make the opposite bet. My guess is that 90+% of QR codes, that people aren't forced to scan somehow, are never used.

[zbrozek]

Lots of restaurants are forcing this. I stop going to them. I don't go to a coffee shop to spend 3-10 minutes futzing with phones instead of talking to the person I'm meeting.

[tylerrobinson]

Right? I went up to a cashier the other day and she said, “You know you can order from your table using your phone, right?”

But why would I want to learn some god awful system when I could tell her what I want in a sentence and let her do the data entry for me?

[andreareina]

QR code requires you to scan it in that moment. A human-readable (and -recognizable) URL stands a chance at being remembered at a later date.

[will4274]

> QR code requires you to scan it in that moment

Not really, anymore. Android permits you to take a picture of a QR code and use it's URI later by going to the saved picture and clicking "Lens" (which activates Google's ML to identify QR codes).

[s_dev]

You could write www.joehardware.builders to make it clearer.

[mrweasel]

I suggested that, but as I wrote, that's actually more confusing if you don't know that there's a .builders TLD (in fact there's also a .builder).