[gkoberger]

I'm happy to say that the reports of my death here are greatly exaggerated :)

I'm the owner of both #4 and #140 on the Top-scoring Show HN Stories that Didn’t Survive... but both are very much alive!

#4 StackSort was a Github.com page, but on 2021 they made it so only Github.io wroks. If dang sees this, I'd really appreciate if you could change the URL for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395463 to use github.io!

#140 ReadMe has the same io/com issue, in the opposite direction! we redirect readme.io to readme.com now, which seems to be why it's flagged.

[12907835202]

How on earth did you get readme.com?

I'm assuming someone else owned it, whenever I see that and all the "make an offer" links I move on and ignore it. Was the process easy?

[gkoberger]

It wasn't called ReadMe originally... I happened to be browsing HN, and came across a post with someone offering readme.io for free, and I was like "oh that's a great name!" (I ultimately paid $3k as a thank you)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526

For the first few years, we used readme.io as our domain. When we did our Series A, I finally bought the .com for $170k. By that point I knew we were successful, and I figured the longer I waited the more it'd cost.

[12907835202]

Wow I can't fathom the .com being worth that much. Did you manage to do any sort of math on whether the .com has helped bring in $170k of sales? Or how many years it would take to break even.

[vnchr]

It’s an asset they can resell, and he validated the $170k price himself by paying that much.

[Thorrez]

It's only worth that much to a company named Readme. If no such company exists, and no company is willing to rename itself to that, then it's not worth that much. It's worth $170k times the probability that there is or will be a company that wants to buy it for that much.

[onion2k]

It's only worth that much to a company named Readme

It's worth that much to any business that wants readme.com and believes it to be worth 170k. You don't need to be called Readme to want that domain. There are plenty of tech companies that want vanity domains to point to parts of their offering. I can easily imagine Microsoft, Jetbrains, Atlassian, or Replit making an offer for it.

That said, by far the most likely way any company would acquire it would be as part of acquiring Readme as a whole. If you want to exit by selling (rather than IPOing) the value of your assets still plays a small part.

[gkoberger]

It’s certainly been worth it. For better or for worse, the .com projects a level of professionalism the .io does not. We work with many large companies, and I’m absolutely confident we’ve made our money back on it.

[Lerc]

Someone has to be the first one.

I once registered web.site. I had it for a week or two before I tried pointing it at a server at which time someone noticed and took it off me.

[nl]

> at which time someone noticed and took it off me.

This... isn't how domain registration works.

[girvo]

I mean it absolutely could be. For a lot of these weird TLDs, it's a single company that makes its own rules as to who owns a domain. Not saying the person you're replying to is right or wrong, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

[Lerc]

It was taken off me by the same people that I registered it with. They may have broken rules to do so. I just know they said I shouldn't have been given it.

[nl]

.site is run by radix. They run quite a few reasonably popular domain names (.tech, .space. .online etc). AFAIK their rules are entirely standard.

[bottled_poe]

“Someone”…?

[codetrotter]

The main page https://gkoberger.github.io/ that the https://gkoberger.github.com/ link suggests going to gives a 404 as well. Could be a good idea to add a main page for https://gkoberger.github.io/ that links the StackSort page and anything else

[gkoberger]

Good call! I'll fix that up today.

[echelon]

If we're going by vote count, my "show HN" should be #30, but it's not on the list at all.

[mkl]

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965787, that still survives, right? Which is why it's not in the list of "Top-scoring Show HN Stories that Didn’t Survive" (where it would be #31).