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by gruez 563 days ago
>There are lots of people called John Smith. They all want a domain name. There's only so many variations of jsmith, j-smith, etc you can squeeze into .com, .net, and a few others.

>Why shouldn't they be able to buy a domain name which contains their name?

I fail to see how johnsmith[insert number here].com is any worse than johnsmith.[insert TLD here]. If anything a number is less likely to get mixed up than tlds, which have confusing pairs like ".tech" and ".technology", or ".engineer" and ".engineering".
1 comments
edent 563 days ago
Surely the number 14 is likely to get misheard as 40. And 13135432 is easily typo'd to 13134532.
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gruez 562 days ago
It's not about typos or mishearing stuff, it's about words being jumbled in memory. Unlike a sequence of digits, people don't store words "engineering" in their head as a string (eg. "E-N-G-I-N-E-E-R-I-N-G"). It's stored as something like "[concept of engineer] + [present participle]". That's far more likely to get jumbled in people's head during recall.
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