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Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

51–60 of 264 posts

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

#51
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.

Whenever there is news regarding one of the members of the Asahi Linux team or their contributions, people write a bunch of really shitty comments trying to dig up the identity of that participant who very clearly does not want their real name associated with that identity or the project.

That and in the beginning there were a lot of very negative "they didn't really write that. someone else must have done the hard work for them" type comments as well.

So as a response the team wanted to just stop their stuff from showing up on HN but then the noreferrer thing happened and now we are here.

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

#53
post #13

[flagged]

> everyone who has ever submitted to Hacker News gets to see this banner on our website until they clear their browser history and stop contributing to HN

Wow, that is even more insane. They are actively going to show an ugly banner, to every user they can determine has contributed to HN, telling them to stop contributing to HN?

Does your Linux distro actively try and push you into specific social media patterns?? Me neither.

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

#54
post #13

[flagged]

Looking at the HTML for the blog post section of the site, it's not what's advertised, or they haven't implemented it yet as it's just the Google redirect.

    document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")&&(console.log("Hacker News is becoming worse than 4chan. Do better."),document.location="https://google.com")
EDIT: Yes, it's the old redirect added in March: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/a7...

EDIT2: per this new commit not yet deployed, the site hides the text but makes it visible if you've visited the HN submit page through a CSS trick: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/5c...

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

#57
post #44
post #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 tea…

> 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" There's a surprising number of tankies ("State violence is okay if it's against people I don't like") on HN.

[flagged]

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

#58
post #44
post #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 tea…

> 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" There's a surprising number of tankies ("State violence is okay if it's against people I don't like") on HN.

I mean they might ban twitter as well then, but they don't.

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

#59
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.

My opinion: HN has a particular culture and attitude to discussion that can be grating for non-users.

One example: HNers tend to approach topics as if they have a solid grasp on the context of a matter, and are often negative, hence dang's plea against 'middlebrow dismissal.'

Another example: the common practice of leading rebuttals to a comment with "No. \n" While that's OK here, there are a lot of people who would qualify that as "really fucking annoying."

HN culture leaks onto sites that get linked to by it, and fairly enough, not everybody is down with that.

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

#60
post #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 tea…

Lesson learned for them is that you can never rely on the http referrer because it can be removed/updated/spoofed etc. A team that runs Linux should at least be aware of that and not block a website based on this value.
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