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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

#151

Post by zamadatix »

josephcsible wrote: post #143
zamadatix wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clearer relation to how preventing hairy-ball responses, like JWZ has, is like making it easier to post bad comments would be appreciated, I'm having trouble following the relation. Note: sites can still detect HN users and modify content without the referer. E.g., using the CSS styling for if "news.ycombinator.com" is a visited link. If not visited, content hidden. If visited, content shown. Based on the status th…

> Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point. Thankfully no it can't, because browser vendors already know about that vulnerability and have fixed it. Visited link styling can only affect color now, and isn't reflected in getComputedStyle, exactly to prevent that kind of thing.

Shows how up to date I am on the web :). Did this change prevent all custom messages from being displayable or just triggered actions such as the redirect?

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

#152

Post by josephcsible »

zamadatix wrote: post #151
josephcsible wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point. Thankfully no it can't, because browser vendors already know about that vulnerability and have fixed it. Visited link styling can only affect color now, and isn't reflected in getComputedStyle, exactly to prevent that kind of thing.

Shows how up to date I am on the web :). Did this change prevent all custom messages from being displayable or just triggered actions such as the redirect?

You can display custom messages still, by making the unvisited and visited colors different, and then making the background color the same as the unvisited color, but you can't do anything more elaborate than that.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

TheChaplain wrote: post #17
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.

They don't want the HN crowd there because it brings abuse & harassment. If Dang instead would block the domain, everyone would be happy.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by linster »

0_____0 wrote: post #59
uberman wrote: 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…

The other HN tell I’ve started seeing in work chats is excessive italics. I’m not five, I know the gravity of what you’re writing.

For example, often HN users need to scold their readers into a hair-splitting debate around semantics.

The other one I’ve seen is pretend-gaslighting-as-begging-the-question:

“Can we all stop pretending that object-oriented programming is an efficient way to build software?”

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

#155

Post by jix »

dang wrote: post #145
minimaxir wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Banning the domain actually doesn't work because people see that the domain is banned, observe that there's nothing wrong with the domain, and then accuse us of being unfair and hostile to the author/site. In doing that they usually jump to the most uncharitable, horrible reasons they can imagine for why we might have done so. It doesn't work to say "but they asked us to ban their site" because there's no reliable wa…

"In doing that they usually jump to the most uncharitable, horrible reasons they can imagine for why we might have done so."

So you do understand why one wouldn't want to deal with a significant part of the user base here given that they behave in such ways, and thus why one might want to avoid any traffic coming from here, but feel that it's not your job to deal with those users, because then their behavior would affect you? I really hope you'll reflect on that...

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

#156

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

dang wrote: post #145
minimaxir wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Banning the domain actually doesn't work because people see that the domain is banned, observe that there's nothing wrong with the domain, and then accuse us of being unfair and hostile to the author/site. In doing that they usually jump to the most uncharitable, horrible reasons they can imagine for why we might have done so. It doesn't work to say "but they asked us to ban their site" because there's no reliable wa…

Sounds like a good opportunity for a distinction between banning and opting out, or at a note field where mods can put some text pertaining to the reasoning behind it. I feel like you and the community will be better served with some nuance around banning domains.

On a side note, I think HN had a long history of non-toxic behavior but I'm starting to see a shift. It reminds me of when Reddit grew and the crowd became more and more unruly. Has the community grown quickly recently or have moderation priorities changed? Sorry I don't have any evidence lined up for this, just an anecdotal observation for now. Seems apropos to this issue in particular.

If a group of users here are disrespectful enough to attack creators for personal reasons and it's boiling over like this, that's a really bad sign.

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

#157

Post by dmarchand90 »

NoGravitas wrote: post #97
pseudosavant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What beef does jwz.org have with hackernews?

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

#158

Post by foogazi »

pseudosavant wrote: post #113
foogazi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about robots.txt ? lots of sites have preferences on how you access them Paywalled articles are posted here everyday Why not respect the site owners wishes ?

Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded? What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too? It is the exact same principle. I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

Yes!

Edit (quoted context):

> Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

Yes! - I can’t vouch for anyone here, but me

> What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too?

Yes!

> I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

I don’t care, don’t take it personally. I’d be concerned about Asahi’s actions if I was a member of that community

I’m concerned HN being a part of chicken-shit tech games

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

#159

Post by foogazi »

zamadatix wrote: post #117
foogazi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sounds like a bad outcome - what is the upside to this ?

For that outcome? Probably none, that's why it's the main downside. For other outcomes? It allows the current redirect/content change strategy to be applied without being called out as a specific one-off action to person/group/site, as it is here.

> without being called out as a specific one-off action

But it is a specific one-off action and should be called out

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

NoGravitas wrote: post #97
pseudosavant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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