Ask HN: Why do you use paid domains for personal blogs?

The independence is real. What if substack or medium ends the free ride?

I would ask ‘what are you signaling if you don’t get your own domain?’

If it is signaling that you can’t afford $10 a year you are signaling cheapness which is not an appealing or desirable attribute.

Medium at first used the power of branding to insinuate it was a place that was a little better than other blogs. Gradually it became known as something that is a little worse.

I remember talking to some guy who was amazed that he’d gotten 78 views on an article and I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that it would take more like 250,000 views to impress me.

You know the ‘eternal september’? Like it or not some people work a lot harder than other people (how does Casanova bed so many women?) or are a lot smarter or have much more interesting insights.

Being on Medium or LinkedIn or other sites lowers people’s perception of you because you get linked to particular styles of discourse that come across as disingenous even when you are sincere.

Control and branding, mainly. In my own business I frequently need to stage sites for customers who either don’t control their DNS or have to go through corporate IT or some other process to set up a subdomain. I can add a subdomain to one of the domains I own in a few minutes because I own and control it. That keeps the project moving and shows the customer I can remove obstacles. Subdomains and DNS may not seem like major obstacles but with many companies just asking for a DNS change is a days or weeks long hassle.

i guess i would not have thought someone would have referred to such a service as 'free' -- at least, among the HN crowd.

but yeah, that makes sense.

p.s. i used HN Replies to see this comment. https://www.hnreplies.com/