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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Why not switch to a .nyt TLD? Or .times?

Because it costs $185k, involves a bunch of work and infrastructure, and wouldn't really benefit them?

This. Also, most people just plainly do not understand the new TLDs yet; and sadly I don't think they will ever become mainstream anytime soon.

Deviate from .com .net .ca .org and most people become clueless. Especially when users are sending an email, try explaining name@newyork.times is simply the address when a user insists there's a typo and it's missing .com or equivalent. Unfortunately adding a www. before, say on a business card, to denote it's a web address is counter-intuitive in most cases as that just lengthens the domain when typically the reason why one would get/migrate to a new TLD is to shorten it/make it easy to remember.

Made worse by the fact that non-technical people DO make such errors with some frequency. I don't know how many times I've seen someone's email address as "www.joe@example.com" or "joe@example," even on printed material that you'd hope people would carefully proof-read.

My personal email is me at james aust.in, and its constantly a pain to read to people, especially over the phone. I started saying it as me at "me at james austin with a dot before the in", but eventually settled on "me at james aust dot in". Only way to get it on the first try.

IMO the latter sounds clearer to me. I think I'm pretty savvy but if I listened to the former on the phone I would have to take a second to parse it and then I would read back something like the latter to you to confirm I got it right.

Why would you, though? Especially when you only have one site.

(as an aside, there is a The Times newspaper in the UK and I'm sure many other places. I suspect ownership of .times would become a lot more bother than it was worth, very quickly)

I really wish that it had been times.ny.ny.us instead, but I guess it's all water under the bridge at this point.

If you're going to wish for that, then maybe it should have been:

   us.ny.ny.times

In other words, the entire domain name system should read left to right as top of hierarchy to bottom of hierarchy.

The destination is what people care about. Not where it sits in a hierarchy. Janet was rightfully killed off.

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