Live data from Hacker News

Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

91–100 of 264 posts

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

#91
post #78

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 t…

Why use noreferrer instead of banning the domain, out of curiosity?

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I don't think the flagrantly flagged stuff counts. Nor should it, otherwise I could intentionally tank any community I didn't like with 30 minutes of spare time. I think they are upset about things that weren't explicitly downvoted/flagged, like comments on the identity of Lina.

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

#93
post #78

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 t…

IMHO banning links to such sites, as you've done for other example(s?) for a long time, was the way better policy.

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

#94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it should. Personally speaking, I flagged this thread, and I hope others do as well. There's nothing productive to be accomplished here, nor anything intellectually stimulating to discuss. So yeah, I'm totally for deleting/killing this entire post.

Well I’m still wondering how they are showing a text only to people who submitted something to HN and nobody seems to know either in the thread so at least there’s that…

Fair enough. :-)

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

#95
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905

That comment is quoting its parent comment in order to object to it. The parent comment was flagged and we banned the account that posted it. I'm not sure what else we should have done there.

Personally I would hold up HN's moderation up as an example of how to preserve civility without suppressing ideas. I don't think you can "do better" for one group without doing worse for another.

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

#96
post #78

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 t…

Don't budge; noreferrer is absolutely the right call.

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

#97
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…

This is enough to make me never touch Asahi Linux. What a childish game for a Linux distro? How dare someone link to their website without their approval...because that is totally how the internet works?? ffs.

Do you hate jwz, too? Because I assure you, if you follow a link from HN to jwz.org (without removing the referer header), you will get much worse than a Google redirect.

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

#98
post #78

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 t…

It's probably good to not allow redirects or targeted content to users, and those are valid complaints. I totally shouldn't get link redirected, sent to a shady site, or displayed offensive content, different than what the submitter might have seen since they didn't have a referrer, because the other side of the link is hostile to users here. That said, I think a "banned link" list for submissions might serve this purpose better and more neutrally, if you're wanting to please both sides. I don't think you were out to "go after" anybody at all though, I think you were just blindsided by something you didn't think as deeply about as some of the folks on the other side expected. From that perspective, I feel for ya and don't blame you for getting stuck in the spot you ended up in at all.

From the above though, I'd say an opt-in (either via moderator here or site owner request) ban-list on top of a general all-link "noreferrer" policy would be my preferred solution as a users. Heck, an "ultra technical" answer would be let robots.txt filter a HN bot agent which checks when the submission is polled, way less manual. Others may disagree, and it does come with the downside sites won't be able to tell where the sudden burst of traffic originates, but that's my 2 cents.

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

#99
post #78

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 t…

For my 2c I'd say either doing nothing or blocking links makes the most sense. They've sent a clear message they don't want HN traffic, and I don't see a lot of value in posting links to sites that explicitly don't want it.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're thinking of nofollow

Damn, you're right, oops.
Post reply on HN