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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

41–50 of 305 posts

Re: Inside a viral website

#41
post #31
post #19

So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...

I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?

It just navigated the page itself by assigning window.location.href, which isn't subject to the same restrictions as popups.

Re: Inside a viral website

#42
post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

I think he's just playing around/being cheeky with all this stuff, so I don't think it was ever meant to stand up to robust scrutiny :>

Re: Inside a viral website

#43

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

Well, in my view this was actually a very fitting nail for the hammer he had.

Re: Inside a viral website

#44
post #31
post #19

So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...

I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?

[deleted]

Re: Inside a viral website

#45
post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

even with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you don't even own the art.

> a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity

The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either.

All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer".

Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just bought and selling that.

So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in themselves, NFT's are useless.

Re: Inside a viral website

#46
post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly?

This question applies to all NFTs! All you 'own' is a smart contract on a blockchain. That contract might contain a URL, and that URL might have some content on it. Or it could be a broken link. But you definitely do not own the thing that the URL points to. Nor do you have any guarantee that there are no other NFTs on the blockchain using that same URL.

Luckily enough for the scammers/sellers, the buyers don't seem to care about these details!

Re: Inside a viral website

#47
post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

NFT is just a joke went too far.

I'm starting to consider creating a NFT to sell NFTs of NFTs emitted elsewhere. Or one for people who doesn't "own an asset" to sell it.

Re: Inside a viral website

#48
post #4

> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use acco…

You can't match up the product with an actual user or person in any way.

Create a web page of various recommendations, send it to a specific friend whose household regularly makes purchases on Amazon. Unsuspecting friend clicks on affiliate link, now you know all things they buy in the next 24 hours.

Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and click frequency is low.

Re: Inside a viral website

#49
post #31
post #19

So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...

I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?

Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them.

So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.

Re: Inside a viral website

#50
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?

Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them. So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.

Ah, got it, yes re-reading the tweets I see that this is what happened.
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