Considering how little is actually interesting about the app aside from it using an old domain, my impression is that the entire post is just pseudo-marketing, attempting to encourage people to get back into domain name squatting.
I don’t know about immoral, but it is at the very least a bit sleazy. When I look for domains for side projects, I very rarely have to abandon a name because it’s been taken by an actual operational service; it’s almost always because someone is squatting it with a “parking” page filled with sketchy ads that they’re paying almost nothing for. That isn’t doing any good for anyone besides the squatter.
yeah just like laying claim to the most fertile land in your region, doing nothing with it, and waiting until your neighbors are sufficiently desperate to sell it to them for gigantic markup
hugely value-added activity, and a well-earned increment.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
The one takeaway I got from my engineering ethics class in college was that everyone has different morals. Debating if something is “moral” or not is useless. Education on a subject is useful, but once someone understands your point of view and still thinks it’s within/outside their morals, there’s nothing more to discuss.
Agreed. The main problem with domain squatting and sniping is scammers either trying to impersonate another organization, or extort trademark owners into paying insane amount of money to obtain a domain which has no legitimate use to the current holder. Neither are happening here. Friendster intentionally let the domain and trademark go, and there isn't any entity that holds a legitimate claim to that name anymore.
I don't think that old business names should be "retired" and forever banned from use. After a certain amount of time the name should be free for someone to use again, and 10 years of non-use seems reasonable to me. The main concern with reuse is confusing consumers into thinking they are dealing with the old friendster, but I think consumers are savvy enough to realize that an old trademark rising from the dead often has nothing to do with the original, regardless of whether the current trademark holders purchased rights from the original, or claimed abandoned ones, as in this case.
His other business dealings aside, I don't have a problem with how he obtained/revived the friendster domain and trademark.
A little over reaction here, they were very open about the process. Lets not take down the horse before the carriage. The article mentions they started "park.io" which was backordering domains, so at minimum expertise and some relevancy exists (was acquired).
Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
ICANN's main process for handling trademark-based complaints is the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This policy is used for instances where someone claims you registered a domain in bad faith that matches their trademark, and they have a panel that looks at whether you have "rights or legitimate interests" in the name. Bad faith evaluations by this policy often involves intent to sell the domain to the trademark owner, disrupt their business, or attract users by confusion.
So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one.
Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, and whether the effort or investment put into the site is proportional to a ballpark of the value of a domain name. With exceptions, perhaps, for situations like domains that are also your name.
I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
I don't necessarily support any of these, but it's essentially a solved problem when discussing the supply side - especially for artificial scarcity:
* lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate
* taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment
* going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities
* qualitative usage can define treatment
* lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served
You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
IIUC it's not the model of buying domains from registrars which stinks of crap, it's the buying from registrars by domain squatters who then flip them for a profit having provided zero value that bears a whiff of shite. These ticket scalpers of the internet who contribute nothing can well and truly fuck straight off.
Speculators provide time-allocation of resources. They're pretty critical part of market dynamics to help resources get sold and developed when they are valued most. That is, they prevent domains from being captured prematurely for lower value use. Society profits immensely from their contribution.
Hey I get it, we all gotta sleep at night. Tell yourself whatever you like to get them zzz's. As far as ticket scalpers and domain resellers go, my assessment stands: they are bottom feeding zeros providing nothing of value and they can fuck off into the sun.
Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics.
While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.
Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.
What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
there sort of is; you don't own a domain but lease it. The problem is all domains for a given TLD cost the same. What about the registration fee being a % of the value, where value is set to the current cost, but then assessed on the sales price? Or do we just end up with the scenario we're currently escaping with TM resale tickets?
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread by posting much too aggressively and crossing into personal attack. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it on HN.
I don't see where exactly I broke the site guidelines. Was I too negative? That is a ridiculous guideline. So I'm supposed to talk positive about antisocial behavior or be quiet about it? What kind of a platform is that?
Also, I'm not sure about the personal attack and aggression. I only described search engine optimized ad spam pages with strong words. It was OP's decision to build this crap. Nobody, not even he himself argued against that these spam-pages have any value besides making him money.
I'm genuinely surprised that OP seems to not realize his past success story might be nothing to be proud of. I am also genuinely surprised that we, as a society tolerate this kind of behavior, and I actually wanted to have a discussion about this. The second post, I answered his question how I think we should deal with that and unfortunately mobbing is the only way I can think of. Again, I was open for discussion and put in alot of "I'm not sure, this is how it looks from my view" words. In the third post I tried to clarify that it's the seo ad - fueled, and that I consider that similar to littering with profit, which I guess is illegal in most countries.
A day later it still looks to me like I made a few very reasonable arguments. But sadly very little debate has been going on besides the typical low effort partisan comments. On that note, I'd like to point out that the karma system very much encourages these partisan comments, cause unfortunately solid argument are usually received much worse than snarky remarks.
"I know that you are the problem" is obviously a personal attack. Ditto "Your [...] bullshit adds zero value to society". Ditto "Your greed to the detriment of everybody else". We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.
If you'd like a heuristic to assess whether you're doing that or not, I'd say it's the combination of denunciatory language with second-person voicing (i.e. explicitly or implicitly addressing "you").
None of that has to do with making an argument - it's just directing aggression toward the other person. If you'd like to make your argument in a principled, neutral way, that of course is fine.
an article about a new app is an article about a new app, even if self promotional.
an article that spends most of its time talking about the sunshine and roses of purchasing domains from a domain squatter, even if you are a domain squatter, is an article about domain squatting.
it WAS being used for what I hope we can all agree is a very low value use that generated significant revenues by essentially tricking people to visit. That's the morality question here. Maybe it speaks to the bigger, general question of "do the ends justify the means?"
This is a terrible take, he actually helped me get a domain back that I'd accidentally let expire. He's a genuine person just making a business with domains, everything everyone does has some kind of compromise to it if you look closely enough.
This is such a dumb response. The people playing the squat & resale game are the ones that built and maintain the system. This is like saying spam & phishing is the fault of the people who built email, not the jerks who exploit it. It's wrong because it extracts money from the commons without adding any value; i.e. this is why we can't have nice things.