I know people will think I'm trolling, but here it goes: why does it matter if they bump up the prices, when there are lots of TLDs to choose from, and the differences in price aren't that big?
Addressed in the article - you did read the article, didn't you? - but:
a) brand entrenchment - it's difficult to get organisations to rebrand
But much more importantly
b) the entire ethos goes against the sociological and ethical values of the .org TLD and those who chose it to represent their entities.
Also the deal appears to have been done immorally, in bad faith, with timed offers based upon insider knowledge by individuals who stepped out of one job into another of conflicting interest.
I would think that would be because there are a lot of existing non-profits with .org domain names, for whom it would be far from ideal to lose that, or to have to spend larger parts of their budgets on their domain name.
... and for those that choose not to renew based on cost or ideological protest, there's the opportunity for a scammer to slide their hand quietly into the glove of trust that was lovingly crafted by the previous long-term owners of the domain.
Undiplomatic, maybe, but not trolling. Outside a few crusty dusty grumpy old neckbeards, nobody on this planet gives a shit who gets to use which characters and dots. And frankly, I don’t think they’re wrong.
Sure, what we have here is a screamingly obvious instance of nepotistic grift, but it’s totally the wrong thing to fixate on. The hard truth is TLDs shed any semblance of semantic significance long ago; between SEO, squatters, and the great unwashed mass, what matters now is not meaning but visibility. A commercial (.com) domain nowadays could be a non-profit, personal homepage, hardcore prawns and illegal warez; sometimes even an actual business. Regional domains are just as meaningless: Indian Ocean (.io) the must-have address for pretentious nerd tech; India (.in) and US (.us) pure catnip for pathological punsters; and so on. TLDs nowadays are merely an ontological exercise in separating marks from their money. Embarrassing, but just not important; so forget that, and move on.
The real problem with domains is their ongoing inability to do the one job we do need done right: reliably persistently tying Real World entities to their online global presence, and vice-versa. Ask yourself: who owns your internet (domain-based) identity? You don’t; at best you rent one for a little while, but between spoofs, hijacks, simple homonyms, and the inevitable renewal expiry dates, your ability to vouchsafe your online representation for the rest of the world is a paper-thin joke; as trustworthy and dependable as a three-bob note.
..
TL;DR: .ORG sell-off is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is Lack of Trust endemic in the current system. Any why should the individuals and institutions behind it want to make it any more trustworthy, while it so easily facilitates their own petty bureaucratic irrelevant graft?
Ultimately, I don't see it being solved anytime soon unless we figure out how to decentralize DNS and the new solution becomes mainstream.
At the end of the day, the internet is just a bunch of machines with IP addresses. DNS is just a layer on top of it that makes it easier for humans to type in a name to get to a machine.
Why do we even have registrars at all? Why do we have the ICANN? There's no way in hell that my domain name (which is essentially just a line in a database somewhere pointed at an IP address) actually costs any entity $10 a year to maintain the infrastructure for. It's all a giant grift, and the people in control have been straight up printing money for years now.
Why do we let these organizations have so much control over us? We are hackers. Let's come up with a decentralized solution and paint these assholes out of the picture already.
(I am not GP) I agree that they are good points. And yet, somehow, the parent post is sitting there heavily downvoted. Does it mean that people like the current system?
I think Electron is popular because you can hire web devs to make a desktop product. With JS you can write code that runs on your server (NodeJS) desktop (Electron), browser and mobile app (Cordova). It's not a great experience but it is good for rapid development, easier hiring of skills (just need some web devs!) and the code reuse might be helpful for bug reduction.
Bloated, yes. Slow, no. You start at a not so low binary size and memory footprint, but that's it. VS Code is an awesome IDE built on electron and it's really snappy.
VS Code has not been snappy for me. Especially with large screen sizes and lots of widegets. For example, if I close the left-hand pane and shrink the window, performance improves considerably.
Sure, but I think our points are missing each other. Mine is that claims of HN's ideological bias are notoriously in the eye of the beholder. Once people run into a few things they dislike—which is inevitable—they imprint on the idea that the community is biased against them. There's nothing objective about it, and all sides do it. I wouldn't say all users do it, but I suspect the more ideologically committed you are, the more you are likely to. That is, it depends on the magnitude of one's ideological vector, but not the direction. I wrote about this yesterday if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21577584
