First off, buying a domain takes about 30 minutes. You have to navigate through what another commenter very aptly called their 'Maze of offers'. It's ridiculous. Everything in godaddy's management panel is a maze and impossible to use. They spam you like no tomorrow, and they randomly change your products to auto-renew when you don't want them to. Their COM domains start at $12 where other companies sell them for $10 or even less. Their pricing for everything else is ridiculous-- i mean, come on, $50 for an SSL certificate? Even changing your nameservers is an error prone process where you press Submit and wait 10 minutes[1] for their servers to tell you if it was successful or not-- but that's after you navigate their ever-changing[2] interface and two or three unique[3] control panels, trying to find where to change your nameservers.
I'm not jumping on any bandwagon, i used them for years and they are a horrible company.
[1] This is a slight exaggeration. It's literally about 4 to 5 minutes.
[2] Their entire site layout and organization changed at least once a year while i was using them for registrations.
[3] Not an exaggeration. I've often had to use 2 or 3 different control panels, each with their own design and layout, to change some trivial settings for one of my domains.
Name.com 1. Search domain name. 2. Click to add the .com to my cart. 3. Click to continue to my cart. 4. Login. 5. Click to pay with saved information. Done.
GoDaddy 1. Search domain name. 2. Click to add the .com to my cart. 3. In page popup with "STOP! Don't miss your chance to SAVE 65!" (for the net, org, info). Spammy. Click "Don't show this again." I just want a domain. 4. Default registration length was listed as 5 years. This is unacceptable. Click to change to 1 year. Just give me the domain. 5. Click next to arrive at privacy options. No, I just want a domain. 6. Click next to arrive at activate your domain, with email and hosting options. I don't care, I just want a domain. 7. Click next to arrive at my cart.
At this point, GoDaddy has already lost. I can have a confirmation email from Name.com in my inbox by the time I arrive at GoDaddy's billing information. GoDaddy does have a huge market: people that are new to buying domains and would like to see all the available options. Another registrar is preferable once you know your way around and just want a domain.
Guess which market reads Hacker News.
That said, I'm afraid to touch GoDaddy due to the horror stories about their bait-and-switch tactics.
The UI/UX makes so much difference. When I login, I am taken to a list of my domains. Its one click to go to DNS records. I use Google Apps, it one click to setup the MX/A records for google apps. There is no random images making the page load take forever. The random upsell is gone. Its slightly costlier than godaddy, but I much prefer to pay that to save my time.
But I try to scope out the availability of the usual suspects before committing to a name. But I don;t recall seeing any Twitter reminders, and I bought a domain just the other day. Maybe I'm immune to the noise on the site.