Why do techie's use .io instead of .NET for domains?

(1) perceived status (coolness), (2) maybe the .com is already taken.

It was and is still trendy. I personally do not use those domains as ccTLD's can get pulled for a myriad of reasons and with a recent ruling [1] some will likely vanish when their corresponding country [2] ceases to exist as in sovereign legal status. I can not think of a technical upside to using .io

I should add that being too affordable can also be a problem. Examples would be .info, .me and .xyz among many others were nearly given away for almost free which led to them being abused for spam/malware and thusly getting blocked by many mail providers and some firewall applications. I agree with PaulHoule that the gTLD may not have been available being one reason people use them.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33091007

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain

.net, I have it, It will probably outlive me as I have it on auto-renew.

.io, ain't that what it's all about? Never forget a project manager getting all excited about a little drawing I made showing things going in and out of a box. To him it was a revelation. To me it was just how things work.

The .net versions are often taken. I work for a .io, and the .net version belongs to another company.

How significant are those downsides, really? A price difference of ~50 USD doesn't really matter to many people (in the techie demographic). It definitely doesn't and shouldn't matter to a tech company.

The risk of a country changing sovereignty also doesn't strike me as huge. The TLD itself would be unlikely to stop existing -- .su for the Soviet Union still exists. If I've understood correctly, the administration of those country-based vanity TLDs is generally not in the hands of the country's administration anymore; they've sold the rights to someone.

If the national or territorial administration still does have control over domain registrations, I suppose they might change their minds and stop allowing them. But it'd take quite an unstable administration to just pull the plug on a well-known TLD.

The only reasons for registering a .io domain instead of using a more generic TLD might be the trendiness or coolness factor, or a geeky attraction to it. But I'm not really sure the downsides seem that huge to me either.

I integrated a registrar with many registries a few years ago. It amused me greatly that .io had by far the clunkiest api of all the many registries…with quite a few special cases against the standard. They’ve since been bought so they likely have a better api, but it always amused me that the “hacker” cred types would choose the registry with the wonkiest api.

Additional downside I experienced with .io in the past was the non existent support or urgency when it comes to technical issues.

Some of you might remember the incident with .io back in September, 2017.

Since then, ownership for .io passed hands and landed at Donuts who is also managing .org so I assume it's in a better shape now, but lesson was learned.

If it would be up to me again, I would push to use .io or any other vanity domain for marketing only.

I use .io because other tech folks do. Sometimes my email confuses non-tech people so I just tell them it stands for input/output.

If I could have had .com I would have taken it. .net has always felt cheap (as in, it looks second rate) to me, just personal preference.

nowadays it is .io and .sh, i just bought an sh one earlier this morning lol

its just trendy and 'looks cooler'

I am not sure if it's just so obvious that no one mentions it... This ccTLD attracted me many ears ago first of all because it reads as I/O (Input/Output), which adds a nice sounding and a meaningful ending to many project names. In addition, .net sounds too old school (I own a .net domain for personal email for over 20 years now).

The techie cool factor. I have a few .ly domains for similar reasons. .dev is some new hotness as well.