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Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

11–20 of 264 posts

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#12
post #7

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

unless you're debating some small irrelevant controversial piece of tech it's usually pretty civil yes

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#14
post #7

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

It's the standard "Every time I hear something I disagree with it means they're harassing/fake news/going down the toilet" nonsense. The funny thing is this person's post is way more unhinged than hardly any comment that I see bubble to the top of HN.

I made a similar point related to all the comments I see about "Well, it's well known that HN hates crypto..." No, I don't "hate crypto", I've done a rational assessment of it, and I'm not willing to buy whatever snake oil is being sold this week. You can reasonably disagree with my assessment, but I see this all the time where people try to say "HN hates crypto..." because we're all just emotional, or my other favorite, that we just missed out on the early boom and are bitter we didn't get rich.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#15
post #7

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

unless you're debating some small irrelevant controversial piece of tech it's usually pretty civil yes

WAIT, are you insulting my emacs?

/s of course

I would like to know the backstory, since this made the front page though.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#16
As best I can tell from perusing the thread:

- The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google.

- HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work.

- Asahi Linux team is mad that HN is playing shenanigans on the outbound-link level, even though Asahi Linux team is playing shenanigans on the inbound-link level.

I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#17

Hacker News has every right to include noreferrer in its links. The destination site was playing games based on the HN origin, so dang just fixed the bug.

They don't want the HN crowd there because it brings abuse & harassment.

If Dang instead would block the domain, everyone would be happy.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#20
post #7

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

Post here mentions harassment in HN comment sections: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719

Which is surprising to me too, because the comments I've seen on every Asahi Linux post have been pretty overwhelmingly positive and impressed by their progress. Was there some drama that I missed?

Or maybe they're complaining about some non-Asahi related comment threads, but I have no idea what.

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