If you use a domain for something popular, it will get squatted if you don't renew it

I've bought too many domain names in my time. I think that now, more than, ever, that's a mistake.

Established domains are heavily favored by search engines - Google says that they aren't, but Google was lying about that. The result is that, if you use a domain for a while and it gets linked from other websites, it will be a target for domain squatters, who will grab it instantly if you ever stop using that domain name and put some scam or gambling content on it. You'll feel bad, people who link to your site will feel bad, etc. This happened to me today: I had been using a full domain for the Simple Statistics documentation site, but moved it to GitHub Pages to simplify the wide array of domains I have to keep track of. And immediately that domain was squatted.

I don't have a solution to this problem. It's how the web works. But if I were to do it again, I'd use subdomains of macwright.com more often, rather than having a lot of individual domains.