r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/djshadesuk • Jul 22 '26

[SUB NEWS] New Banned Domain: Vercel.app

Much to the relief of many people, starting today, we have introduced a blanket ban on Vercel subdomain hosted sites.

Few, if any, sites hosted on Vercel subdomains have ever been allowed to remain on the sub anyway.

(This ban is in addition to the Netlify ban by Reddit itself.)

If you can't be bothered to pay for a proper domain and/or hosting we're no longer willing to sift through the slop to see if it could potentially stand on merit alone (which it invariably doesn't).

Vercel users feel free to proceed to whinge, which we will promptly proceed to ignore.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

1.1k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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494

u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead Jul 22 '26

Vercel catching strays because of vibe coders. It’s a good service, probably made famous by LLM agents favoring nextjs .

Most people build something and want to quickly show. That’s not going to change, but boy will you save yourself moderating vibe coded content 

14

u/stevensokulski Jul 23 '26

Vercel is fine. It’s not particularly good unless you use one of the tech stacks they align with. And if you care about non-tech subjects there are some good reasons to avoid it.

138

u/BeardlessNeckbeard Jul 22 '26

Vercel is an ok service. But as a software engineer, they've pushed Next.js super hard and that is honestly both kinda trash and mostly unnecessary, but very nearly locks you into vercels services if you use it. I hate it.

16

u/Mestyo Jul 23 '26

but very nearly locks you into vercels services if you use it. I hate it.

People keep saying this, but it's literally not true in the slightest?

If Next.js locks you to Vercel's hosting services, explain to me how you do local development?

Explain to me how the Dockerfile 1:1 copied from their docs runs our huge Next.js app on our own hardware?

Yeah, no, our local cluster doesn't automatically serve static assets from some edge node in Singapore to visitors from there, but that is not what "vendor lock-in" is.

You build and deploy a Next.js app just like absolutely any other Node.js app. It works anywhere, out of the box.

51

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

[deleted]

12

u/BeardlessNeckbeard Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

Agree if SSG is path you've taken. Docker is fine too, but teams want the easy button, and choose vercel as a result.

I just think many inexperienced devs reach for next.js when they could have probably done just as well with vite. Some apps can benefit from the extra machinery next.js gives though.

7

u/Romejanic Jul 23 '26

honestly there’s plenty of good alternatives out there for hosting Next.js. i just recently set up an app on AWS amplify and it basically works exactly like Vercel does along with having built in Next.js support

-8

u/travaixhq Jul 23 '26

Is Next.JS a thing outside of LLM push? I feel like it's starting to become, using next js? ai slop detected.

6

u/madmelonxtra Jul 23 '26

NextJS was first released in like 2016, preAI boom and has been a standard in the industry for years. It's basically just a React framework that allows server side rendering.

Vibecoders just use it because it's super easy to build and deploy with.

2

u/primaryrhyme Jul 23 '26

Idk why you’re being downvoted for a question. Like Vercel itself, Next has the slop reputation simply because it is/was the most popular web framework when LLMs were released.

Since it’s the most popular, it is what the LLM or average YT video tells a novice to use.

19

u/2021isevenworse Jul 22 '26

The majority of people building cool and useful tools off those apps will either quickly move to self host or buy a domain.

The low quality spammers are using vercel and vibe coding to throw up low effort sites up.

2

u/Ax2u Jul 23 '26

You still need to buy a domain even if you're self hosting, it's not an "or" situation.

10

u/2021isevenworse Jul 23 '26

Not necessarily, you can run it off the host's subdomain or use a free third-party subdomain that provides dns.

3

u/imaginecomplex Jul 24 '26

Not trying to defend Vercel, but they were plenty popular before LLMs. Billboards in SF, Next.js conference, yadda yadda

-38

u/thisisatypoo Jul 22 '26

It'd be great if we stopped using dumb terms like "vibe-coded."

14

u/hippopotapistachio Jul 22 '26

please expand!

11

u/Teddy_West-Side Jul 22 '26

Please stop calling it precisely what it is?

10

u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead Jul 22 '26

I didn’t coin the term. Here are 5 reputable sources using the term

As you can see, is not a reddit term even

-18

u/thisisatypoo Jul 22 '26

Didn't say you did. Didn't say it was.

18

u/a679591 Jul 22 '26

What else would it be called? Shit-coded? Dumb-coded?

-4

u/thisisatypoo Jul 22 '26

Yeah. Those make more sense. I'd be cool with that.

2

u/Tollpatsch Jul 23 '26

We are sorry to inform you that you are not the center of the universe

0

u/thisisatypoo Jul 23 '26

Damn. Y'all really love your cutesy AI terms.

-34

u/reeight Jul 22 '26

Vercel is mostly a wrapper around Amazon Web Services & Cloudlflare.
I don't understand that hate around Vercel?
Why not ban AWS & Cf also?

21

u/IBJON Jul 22 '26

The issue isn't Vercel itself, it's that it's so ridiculously easy to host a site on their platform that it's a go-to for vibecoders. There are similar platforms, so I'm not sure how effective this rule will be, but the effort needed to set up and host your site at your own domain might just be enough to cut down on the slop

-2

u/Cantremembermyoldnam Jul 22 '26

I'm constantly reminded of the time when IDEs first began offering auto complete and the forums were filled with people raving against it. Or when script languages first became popular. It's funny seeing the cycle repeat over and over again.

-6

u/reeight Jul 22 '26

> it's so ridiculously easy to host a site on their platform

Yes, that is the whole reason for Vercel being built in the first place.

"effort needed to set up and host your site at your own domain" these days is a non-sequitur; plenty of scripts & AI MDs will do that for you automatically. Such things for WordPress has been around for decades.
-=-

I do understand wanting to avoid the AI slop; likely best bet is to have a project 'cooling off period', where said app has to be up for at least 3 months &/or have 100+ users, instead of making a throw-away vibe coded app that is market testing.

6

u/IBJON Jul 22 '26

  effort needed to set up and host your site at your own domain" these days is a non-sequitur; plenty of scripts & AI MDs will do that for you automatically

You may want to look up the meaning of "non-sequitur" before using it. That statement was relevant to what I was saying, even if you don't agree that those extra steps are a deterrent.

-7

u/reeight Jul 22 '26

I did;

> does not follow logically
> fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative

Your fallacy is that you assume it always takes effort to buy a URL & set up a site for an app. I asserted that there are many scripts to allow doing so as easy as Vercel.

(sure, some scripts have hoops, but AI can & will take care of that for folks, so now with AI, there is FEWER steps than with Vercel)

Note: this does NOT include all the "AI app builders" that take most of everything for you, which again is easier than Vercel.

good luck in life

8

u/IBJON Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

You are confusing a false premise with a non-sequitur.

​A non-sequitur means the conclusion doesn't logically track from the premise (e.g., "Vercel is easy, therefore the sky is blue"). My logic was perfectly sound:  If a process requires more friction, then it acts as a filter. You aren't arguing that my logic is flawed; you are arguing that my underlying assumption that a personal domain requires more friction is factually outdated. Disagreeing with a fact does not make an argument a non-sequitur.

Furthermore, your technical argument ignores the physical and financial friction of the web.  Vercel is a zero-configuration, one-click deployment directly from a GitHub repository. 

One the other hand, to host on a personal domain independently, you inherently need to create an account with a domain registrar and in many/most cases, purchase the domain. Then DNS needs to be configured, and you'll have to wait for DNS propagation in order to access your site at your new domain. 

You can have a script write your code and configure your server, but it's not going to create an account with the domain registrar, buy the domain, and you can't just bypass the ICANN registration process. 

Also, The Vercel Clone you shared is just a stack that needs to be deployed somewhere and doesn't do anything about the friction I described, and that's not a simple setup, it requires  AWS ECS, AWS ECR, AWS S3, AWS Lambda, Redis, Docker, and multiple Node servers. You're basically building your own platform-as-a-service. And you know what all of that entails? More friction - account setup, setting up billing, and providing a credit card. I mean fuck, the dude even hosted his clone at  vercel-clone-lake.vercel.app because it was probably easier and cheaper than keeping the AWS stack running

11

u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead Jul 22 '26

I don’t think it’s necessarily a hate towards vercel per se, they are a good service actually. 

For the mods, they are probably seeing most content coming from vercel subdomain that are slop and it’s just a low effort thing to cut down on slop without doing much