As an anecdotal counterpoint, at our family Christmas, I mentioned a few different urls, spelling out "www" each time; one of my nieces said "why do you keep saying 'www'", and one of the other kids said "that's how old people find websites." After some discussion, it turned out that nearly everyone over 30 habitually wrote urls with "www" at the front, and everyone under 18 always omitted it.
http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]
Browsers may differ on whether they auto-fix schemaless URIs, but they're all required to fix path-less URIs. So it's much "safer" to use them.
to be clear, this is not something incidental. you hear it in radio and tv commercials. there might be a relation with age, with older people forgetting the "." after "www" more often.
I think the younger generation, in particular, is more accustomed to the lack of www.
This doesn't make any sense to me. There's literally no correlation between "made by kids" and "doesn't have www", and no reason why anyone would ever make that association. You've provided what appears to be a bullshit justification for a completely unsubstantiated and fairly outlandish claim.
Performing your own little user study is the best way to take a stance, I believe.
I think if you have a tech target audience this doesn't matter but for general consumers, it's still an issue.
It also depends on your site's target audience. For a programming site or other I.T technical site it properly wouldn't matter.
For others, as recent as 2014 i still witness the following. A: What was the site address ? B: something.com A: OK. [Start typing www.something.com ]
For the majority, i.e those who dont know HN, and dont know jack about computers, WWW means website. While in recent years this is much less of a problem because Google has become our gateway to Internet and Apps taking over, WWW is still ingrained into their mindset.
And agree on the .com.
If the site did not have www, most people assumed it is probably made by kids, who do not have www yet. See, most people do not understand that www is not a domain like .com which you have to buy. So for average joe consumer, it signals strength. For an enterprise customer, it probably does too. So unless your product is for savvy users or zen-like designers, I'd stick with www.
A lot of people think that naked domain is cleaner. It is actually not, since the average mind is conditioned to read www.x.com, and you have https://x.com. It's cleaner in the sense that a face is cleaner without a nose.