[poink]

This is cute, but I absolutely do not care about buying a omg.lol URL for $20/yr, and I'm not trying to be a hater because the concept is fine, but anybody who falls into this same boat should know this is explicitly "not for them"

[trinix912]

While I'm usually one of those who complain about subscription services, $20 per year is not considerably more than registering a .com with the whois protection. Given that you get a registered, valid domain name that you have control over, it's not a bad deal. Also, it does help filter out low effort spam, especially if they decided to add a limit to allow only n registrations per a credit card should it become a problem.

We're always discussing something along "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" in the context of social media, yet now we're presented a solution and criticize that it's not free.

You can also roll your own webring/directory for free on your ISP's guest area (if they still offer that) and there's no significant network effect to url.town yet that would make you miss out if you don't pay.

[reddalo]

> ISP's guest area (if they still offer that)

What is (was) it? I can't find anything with a search (too many unrelated results).

[endemic]

Back in the day you could sometimes get hosting from your ISP. You might see URLs like `www.isp.com/~username` as examples of this.

[deadbabe]

Just to be clear, $20/year is roughly one Starbucks drink per fiscal quarter.

[poink]

Are you suggesting the market for omg.lol URLs intersects with the people who like to buy burnt coffee?

[deadbabe]

I only find it curious that there is just no limit to how cheap people on hackernews can be, despite being supposedly higher income earners.

Even if it was $10/year, people would still cry foul.

[poink]

I don't think pointing out "this is a web directory full of links submitted by people willing to spend $20/yr" is being cheap, per se, the same way I don't think paying to be "verified" on Twitter means your content is worth paying attention to

There was a time where "willing to pay for access" was a decent spam control mechanism, but that was long ago

[dmje]

Agree. Recently I’ve noticed the complaints with paying for Kagi search [0]. HN loves to moan about how bad Google is but paying $10 ($5 if you want a tiny plan) is apparently too much for something as critical as search?

As you say, those coffees seem to keep on selling…

[0] https://kagi.com/pricing

[nottorp]

Everyone wants a Starbucks coffee per month from you. Even if you're on FAANG compensation, there's a finite number of coffees you can afford to pay for.

[deadbabe]

If you’re on FANG compensation, and you earn roughly $200k after taxes in one year, and you spent it all of it on Starbucks coffee, you could buy roughly a century worth of coffee if you drink one a day.

If on the other hand, you spent the $200k on leasing an omg.lol domain in perpetuity, you could hold the domain for 10 millenniums.

If we were in the Dune universe, that means your omg.lol domain would expire roughly around the same time as the Butlerian Jihad starts and the thinking machines are overthrown.

[doublerabbit]

Better yet people will still buy coffee they can't afford and complain about how they can't afford coffee.

[poink]

FWIW I'm a happy paying customer of Kagi search for quite a while. I am very much not opposed to paying for things _if paying = value_

[crossroadsguy]

This :D

X is just one cappuccino, Y is just 3.5 bagels, Z costs not more than a pint, A costs almost as much as a nice meal … and so on. God's sake! :)

[benrutter]

I hadn't realised that this was tied to omg.lol until your comment but now I'm confused. If it's from the omg.lol community, how come the address isn't something like url.omg.lol? (ie. it's a community around a domain, why isn't that doimain used here?)

[endemic]

I think I pay around $100/year for my dirt cheap self-hosted stuff. So I mean you _can_ do it yourself, but $20 is pretty reasonable.