Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?

  • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
    14·
    2 days ago

    remained part of marketing because it was what people expected.

    It sort of matches the cadence of;

    “CALL, 1-800… BLA BLA BLA… BLA-BLA BLA-BLA.”

    “Visit, www… DOT… BLA-BLA DOT-COM”

    giving the audience a familiar auditory signal to pay closer attention to the next bit.

    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 day ago

      Exactly. “Go to my house dot Com” would probably trip some people up because they weren’t expecting to be given a website name by audio, instead initially thinking they should go to my house, then being unsure if they missed prior info. Now, it’s the default. For a similar cue reason, I still say things like “Vin number” if I’m trying to be clear as possible, particularly by phone. “can you give me the Vin” is sometimes misunderstood or misheard because “Vin” is a very mumbly word. “Vin number” gives an obvious retroactive explanation.

      Humans use context in audio constantly and have to work backwards often to find the full meaning. It’s just natural and smoothpy accomplished. If you’ve ever said “what” and then answered the question when it was being asked the second time, you worked backwards and figured it out