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Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

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

#71

Post by the_only_law »

throwawayadvsec wrote: post #26
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, another HN conspiracy!!! Not everything needs to be a conspiracy when some of us are sick of other people's nonsense.

not a conspiracy, HN mods routinely delete stuff they don't personally like even when it doesn't go against the rules

Don’t think I’ve ever seen the mods remove anything like that, plenty of user flags do that all the time though. The worst I’ve seen the mods here do is focus on the most pendantic, barely rule breaking comments while allowing explicitly off topic flamebait to simmer.

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

#73

Post by RobotToaster »

cj wrote: post #45
georgeg23 wrote: post #9

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.

Dang, have you considered applying the noreferrer to all links? HN users wouldn't notice the difference. I guess the main downside would be the owner of the submitted page might see a spike in traffic without knowing where the traffic is coming from. Edit: Thinking more, maybe not a great idea across the board. It would make it harder for site owners to recover if HN is causing downtime (hug of death).

Noref would also mean they don't gain search engine rank from the link (wikipedia uses it for all external links, to prevent spam), which could annoy some.

edit: that's nofollow not noref, derp.

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

#74

Post by streety »

sandy_mountains wrote: post #41
mvdtnz wrote: post #13

[flagged]

I was wondering the same thing, not sure how that works...

It doesn't look like it is active on their site but I would assume it is a link to the submit page with some conditional CSS based on whether the user has visited the site. Changing the display setting and text color.

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

#75

Post by yard2010 »

minimaxir wrote: post #54
mvdtnz wrote: 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.git…

[dead]

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

#76

Post by jonathankoren »

indrora wrote: post #44
jawns wrote: 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 wouldn't use the word "tankie" since that's specifically about communists. There are exceeding few communists on HN. That isn't to say there's a disturbingly large number of authoritarians here, but they're of the opposite persuasion.

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

#78

Post by dang »

We got complaints from users about sites punishing HN referrers so I tried to oblige them, the same way we do other user requests.

At the moment I feel caught in a double bind because there are complaints no matter what we do.

I'm in a workshop today and can only check HN on breaks, so I can't properly read this thread yet. I'll return to it later, probably this evening.

Edit: I think I agree with the users arguing that a fairer and simpler solution is to just put noreferrer on all links. It's late enough that I don't trust myself to deploy even a trivial code change, so I'll do that tomorrow.

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

#79

Post by ladberg »

wlesieutre wrote: post #70
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Oh, about the main developer being a vtuber? I can imagine people being shitty about that, but I always read through the Asahi posts when I see them and I've yet to see it come up here.

Not just being a vtuber, but outing them as an alter ego of marcan. Not exactly the nicest thing to do on HN's part (and I'm probably complicit by posting this comment), but also the information is already "out there" and blocking HN to keep it under wraps isn't a great strategy.

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

#80

Post by barredo »

I have been in HN since many of the current users could even type on a keyboard, and allow me to chip in.

* They have the right to block by referral

* HN has the right to set up that attribute to the links

* I don't think they are arguing about HN doing it, but to do it silently or covertly by someone in the moderation staff

I wont argue about legality or morals. It looks like they have an issue with the current dynamics of comments in here, and it's an honest way of protesting about it.

If the moderation staff does edit the link, title or attributes it should be reflected at least. Like when they add a date to specify that it's from a few years ago.

Of course, HN users could always choose to protest by protesting and sharing and discussing about the articles anyway. But that doesn't make their point any less valid.

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