Ask HN: Has anyone followed Paul Graham's “Change your name” advice with success
I'm referring to the advice in this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html. Article from 2015. Hardly relevant now, when one of the biggest companies in the world is happily using an `.xyz` domain. Which one would that be?? In a sense, they literally changed the company name to make this domain name work. Nobody accesses that. Everybody goes to their .com domain name, everybody still refers to them as Google instead of Alphabet. I had to switch from textgenerator.app.nz to https://text-generator.io it's because facebook randomly blocked my entire app.nz + subdomains from being shared on facebook. I have no idea why app.nz is blocked, its a shame because there's some free products i've been building there to help kids read (readingtime.app.nz) and their creativity (joydrop.app.nz). Maybe the app.nz domain was used for bad things before i bought it, that's my only stab in the dark at why they might have blocked it. Moving domains could help in these situations where you have been false positive flagged then obliterated by some internet police style company e.g. FAANG or stripe etc. This is probably a story to that point though: http://www.mycreative.com.my/news_events/malaysian-startup-f... "First, whenever there were writeups about them, their linkback would wrongly be published as FashionValet.com instead of .net, leading to some confusion. After this happened too many times, and the team got tired of explaining the reasoning behind choice, they decided to acquire the .com address." It was also around the time PG wrote that article, so maybe it was just a thing of the era. This is the era where people go to Facebook by searching Facebook on Bing or Google. I'm not sure that advice is relevant now (if it ever was) no-one bothers with .com domains anymore. I've heard a few anecdotes of sites getting significantly better google rankings after switching to a .com. And you can register short (expired) .coms providing they’re not parked or up for auction.