Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

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I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".

One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).

I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.

The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)

I'm still mildly annoyed every time usps.gov redirects me to usps.com

Once you stop thinking of domain as an addressing tool and start thinking of them as branding, the complaints will make sense. "Dot k12 dot oh dot us" is a terrible brand name.

I have a hard time with public dollars going to "branding" but I do recognize it's a concern for some people and I'm a vastly minority opinion.

Public dollars or not, it IS branding.

Having a strong, consistent, easy to use name IS a positive.

It’s easy to remember, which means more “engagement”. For a local government organization, that means more support, more feedback, and the constituents are “getting their moneys worth” more than a government organization that they can’t ever interact with.

It’s a clear win for using your dollars BETTER

Everything needs branding. "United States of America" and "USA" is branding. Good branding makes people's lives easier and (on average) a tiny bit happier. That has some impact on quality of life. Spending a few tax dollars on improving people's QOL is a good thing if you ask me.

As a specific example, imagine how many less people would enroll in Medicare if instead it was called Lifelong Assistance in Meeting Medical Needs of Aging Able-Bodied Population. Just finding eligibility criteria and the correct forms to submit would be 10 times harder.

(I think it would be even better if Medicare and Medicaid weren't so similar and easy to confuse with one another. Recently I had to explain both concepts to an immigrant who knew about neither but found contradictory information online about both.)

Why would you have a problem with public dollars being used for effective communication?

.gov should never have been expanded to outside the US federal government.

(.com should never have been expanded to outside US-headquartered companies, either.)

Agreed on both.

The second is hard to justify unless you are willing to say .com should have been replaced with .com.us

I'm actually in favor of it, because it makes it much more clear what is a government address, versus what is a private address in the US. But .gov should have been broken up into .state.gov address so you could very easily guess the address of your local governments website. Like why is the site for Los Angeles lacity.gov and not losangeles.ca.gov? Why is the Ohio secretary of state not sos.oh.gov? These should all be well known address, so if I move to a new state, I can just go to the web site, and do whatever registration I need to without having to hunt for these addresses.

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