Posted by bryanbraun 10/25/2024
It’s like when cars took over the streets, and instead of blaming cars for being dangerous for regular people using the streets for walking, the concept of “jaywalking” was invented by car companies to place the blame on people for daring to obstruct cars. Or the concept of “personal carbon footprint”, commonly used to move blame from companies to individuals, when in reality whatever individuals, even in aggregate, could do is utterly insignificant compared to what companies and legislation could accomplish.
These kinds of blacklists exist because these domains have been used to host scams or distribute spam (or some other malicious activity) in the past. They're there to protect people (e.g. so that Firefox can disply a "warning: this site is a scam") and reduce abuse. They're not just there so people at Google can get a good kick out of blacklisting random domains.
With tricks like this, it's not a surprise to see why the companies operating blocklists are hesitant to make this process easy; after all, what's to prevent the phishers from temporarily stating that the issue has been resolved to get out of the denylist, and then restarting their campaign again?
Still, an improvement over what they were previously using I guess?
The issue is with the issue: people/systems (big and small) blacklisting an ownable identifier pointing to some ownable content without any care for the lifecycle of either.
Painting this with a social brush is extremely unhelpful and is guaranteed to derail conversations for no benefit whatsoever.
Does the lifecycle matter much, though?
Kind of like a carfax report. Tells you whether a vehicle you’re buying has been in an accident before (if it has, the value goes down because maybe there’s some latent issue that isn’t obvious at the time of purchase)
It would be nice if ICANN had some equivalent of a carfax for domains, perhaps even with a requirement that registrars expose at time of purchase whether a domain has been misused in the past (and who the prior owners were, or at the very minimum what the historical DNS records were).
Basically you want to avoid buying a “lemon” domain by accident.
I place zero fault/blame on “powerful entities” maintaining lists of domains used for spam/scams. How else will we protect grandma?
"Heads up, this is a pre-owned domain. Do you want to get the Namefax for $0.99 before you buy?"
On the other hand, a domain reputation at Google et al. is more like Carfax reporting “This car was once parked at the same street where a horrific mass murder took place.” If this was a problem since, let’s assume for the sake of argument, the police would pull you over all the time if you drove it, it would still not be a problem with the actual car; the problem would be the police, and fixing police behavior would be the only workable solution. Using Carfax as an analogy still places the blame on the domain owner, not on Google et al.
This kind of issue is inherent to any system where identifiers are recycled, particularly when that recycling happens on demand. It's not "fixable", at best it's combatable. And trying to language police away the symptom and blaming it all on the pivotal participants supports and achieves neither.
If it was a reputation problem where, say, end clients with web browsers would each have a separate and uniquely derived negative opinion about domain names, this would indeed be a “bad reputation” problem and not a Google problem, since the problem could not be fixed at the Google side. But with domain reputation being so centralized, the problem is at the center.
How could it not? It's essentially the same issue as an unmaintained phonebook or a map. What's at a given address or phone number changes, and if your solution is not equipped to handle that change, your solution is bad.
But that’s not a fixable problem in my eyes. At least not without extreme and sweeping changes driven by some kind of government regulation or ICANN mandates which, if enacted, would probably be highly criticized on HN.
There are just too many block lists for domains (literally thousands if you include open source ad blockers).
The lifecycle “should” matter in a perfect world, I agree.
As you say there are plenty of volunteer maintained blocklists as well, and there are also the countless privately deployed filters using those lists, which may or may not get updated properly. That's the "little man" part, and is why I think the characterization the thread starter was trying to push is ill-fitting.
In a perfect world, when your legitimately good content isn’t being surfaced by Google, it’s a failure on their part, and their problem to solve, not yours. In practice, it is your problem and you have to do a bunch of work to help them see that their current assessment of your domain name is no longer accurate.
You're right, the fault lies with the search engines, but in practice it sure feels like the domain itself is tainted somehow.
Something terrible happened here in the past.
The intangible spirts from this terrible event remain.
The new owner discovers his pictures scream at him and his closet constantly fills up with blood.
The fault, ultimately, belongs with the one who did the terrible deed.
With some domains, you merely will find a higher % of your emails land in spam, or your content ranks a bit worse, etc.
There's a somewhat random continuum. Haunting is a funny word that does sort of include some variability.
Haunted implies a supernatural condition that just isn't helpful in system administration.
If something isn't working with a service there is always a method to troubleshoot and isolate the issue. Contact the appropriate people when needed. This is how NeoTokyo restored his "listed" domain.
It's not getting SEO blessings, true, but it's not disappeared.
So, haunted then?