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Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

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

#241

Post by Manjuuu »

musicale wrote: post #239
pseudosavant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until today, I had a positive perspective on Asahi, and HN is the only place in my life I ever heard about Asahi. Maybe they shouldn't paint with such broad brushes about the visitors to HN?

I don't get it either. I discovered Asahi via HN and my characterization of comments here is 1) enthusiastic (I can't wait to run linux on my m1!) 2) appreciative (impressive job, asahi team, in a short time!) and 3) impatient for new features (oh man I just need support for x and then Asahi will be my daily driver!). I think we can accept #3 as a form of #1.

Pretty sure marcan is not talking about "enthusiastic, appreciative, impatient for new features" people. I've read plenty of comments regarding Asahi along the lines of "why do we need this", "why is this not already in ", "this is already supported in the kernel, who are these people (the authors lol)".

Not much to get I'd say.

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

#242

Post by Manjuuu »

birdyrooster wrote: post #40
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…

Also lots of accusations about how our entire site is somehow abusive even though 1) I and many others here have contributed our resources to Asahi and 2) they have not put forth sufficient (any??) evidence. I can imagine how stressful it must be to run a major project like Asahi, but it seems like a bit misguided to cast Hacker News as a net negative source of interest.

Since you are doing basically a "Not all HNers!" it would be very interesting to know what you have actually contributed to Asahi. I've been here way longer than you, since the early days, and I don't feel the need to comment on what Marcan is saying. Why do you?

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

#243

Post by Manjuuu »

pseudosavant wrote: post #37
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…

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.

If you have a mac you will keep touching it, their code is forever in the mainline kernel.

But again, I guess you really didn't understand that he was just lamenting the lax moderation for the threads about Asahi.

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

#244

Post by Manjuuu »

dingledork69 wrote: post #55

Amusingly their solution[1] will likely get them delisted from Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/5c...

Amusingly for who? At least use your primary account for this BS...

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

#245

Post by anaganisk »

rascul wrote: post #228
anaganisk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending to Google is, asking you to go back to the road most info is accessed from Google, it's not a landfill, they're not sending you to some random troll website hosted on tor. They don't want interactions with HN plain and simple. It's up to them to choose how or on what parameters to deny your access, at least they did their part gracefully. But adding explicit evasion techniques for a particular site, is not at…

> They don't want interactions with HN plain and simple. Fine. So put up a page saying that. Don't instead send me to some privacy invasive and user hostile third party such as Google.

Ok, I finally see you what you meant by landfill, I mean Google is synonymous with search, for anyone. How many on HN think of Google as privacy invasive and hostile, yet use it as primary search engine? They literally redirected you to the internet's search page for general public. Your opinion is very subjective if you consider redirecting to Google is correct or not. The original argument of mine was, why should HN implement code explicitly for a target website, that is blocking it? Do they do the same for region locked content websites/pay walled sites, no? Then this is not correct.

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

#246

Post by drabbiticus »

analognoise wrote: post #198
Lammy wrote: post #36

Context: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110060225535294882 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/a7...

Thank you. I've read the entire thread and I had no idea what was really causing the issue as I don't think HN is a cesspool of transphobia, hate, etc. HN causes traffic to the Asahi blog, which causes comments which are generally of low quality, tangential, trying to dox Lina, or vile on the Asahi blog is my summary. There are other comments here which indicate that as a source of transphobic comments, HN appears to…

Cesspool? I don't know that I would go that far, but take for example a recent thread I was involved in that was... unpleasant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35010229

HN often can be a great place to seek interesting and varied discussion on purely technical topics. When discussions veer anywhere close to topics that may touch on how people want to view themselves and their relationship to the world, PEOPLE can be somewhat lazy, tribal, and narrow-minded and PEOPLE are bad at respecting other people's value systems that differ from their own: because commenters on HN are people, this includes discussion on this site. Intersectionality is poorly understood, "hurt people hurt people", displacement[2] is rampant and that can lead to some pretty toxic interactions. It takes a very low proportion of badly-behaved people to produce an overwhelming number of negative, hateful comments. I overall like the community here, but that doesn't mean that it can't produce bad behavior that is beyond the scale of an individual to cope with reasonably, and I can sympathize with an individual seeking to cut off ties with a source of such conflict. As a society, we still haven't really adopted to the scale of contact that the internet creates.

The [insert social networking site here] effect is real and can cause enormous traffic spikes, which have real bandwidth costs and in this case potential emotional costs; removing a tool to deal with that spike isn't exactly a neighborly thing for HN to do, even if I can understand other arguments promoting less tracking, the realities of the internet etc. that people may want to make.

[1] Displacement: an immature defense mechanism in which a person acts out their frustration and negative feelings on a target that is not responsible for the situation evoking those negative feelings. Typically that target is less powerful and less able to retaliate within a given setting. Colloquially "punching down". The specific populations that are marginalized/less powerful are very context-dependent. Classic example is Person A getting a bad review from their boss and yelling at their domestic partner. Punching down at that individual/population puts Person A in a position of power, gives them a feeling of agency and control, and provides a feeling of moral/commercial/etc superiority that they feel is lacking in other aspects of their life, but it comes at the expense of others.

> obviously if vile comments frequently come with an HN referrer, a site admin who reads the vile comments will think poorly of HN

You can hate the site and the moderation team without believing that everyone on the site is bad. You can recognize when a referrer is generating a lot of stress and heartache and take steps to reduce that, and you can be upset when your attempts to reduce that are circumvented by site ownership, all without believing that the majority of the folks using the site are bad.

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

#247

Post by danShumway »

dang wrote: 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…

I'll also throw a vote out that I do not see the value in having a public feud over whether one specific site is allowed to block HN traffic. I actually agree with stripping referrer headers from all posts (for user privacy reasons), but in addition I think it's clearly the right move to block links to asahilinux.org

It would:

A) not ban people from talking about Asahi Linux and would not prevent links about Asahi Linux from being shared.

B) be at least somewhat of a gesture of goodwill that the HN community is not trying to force itself into other communities (which we shouldn't be doing anyway).

C) not force HN to build a generic "anyone who wants to get blocked can get blocked" system.

HN moderation regularly takes context into account when making decisions (and in fact, the moderation would be much worse if it didn't). Yeah, of course the NYT should not be able to ask HN to stop linking to articles. But that's not the current situation. Regardless of whether or not HN is obligated to block links to asahilinux.org from being posted, it would be a low-impact move for the HN community that would go a long way towards both diffusing the controversy and would (from the sound of things) be a high-impact positive change for the Asahi Linux community.

And regardless of whether people think the Asahi Linux community is being reasonable or not, if there's an easy way to accommodate people who have a concern and it's not forcing us to do something drastic or high impact -- we should do it. If it becomes a problem in the future, if tons of sites start doing this and it impacts the community's ability to have conversations about current events, then change the policy. You're not locked into anything.

In the meantime, why not try to accommodate someone who feels harassed by certain HN users? It just seems like a very simple way to show some kindness towards another community.

---

To the point that users might misinterpret those blocks as hostile, I know that HN tries to make very minimal code changes, but no matter how hard I try I also do not understand why it wouldn't be possible with minimal code changes to show/redirect to an error that explained the situation.

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

#248

Post by howinteresting »

arp242 wrote: post #232
howinteresting wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a concrete example, the person who posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231243 should have been immediately banned and made an example out of, and the people who challenged them should be unflagged. > These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest. They're not meaningless gestures! Thry stake out a clear position on controversial topics with all the attendant effects.

But it is moderated away, via user flags, and you can't even see it unless showdead is on. You can't really judge things based on this IMHO, because you're essentially judging a community based on posts it removed. Whether or not they should be banned just for this: I don't know – maybe? It's not a new account and I didn't check their history, who knows what they meant with "colored"? I'm guessing dang never even saw…

Well, my posts have been moderated away as well. So maybe "moderated away" isn't a great filter.

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

#249

Post by analognoise »

drabbiticus wrote: post #246
analognoise wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I've read the entire thread and I had no idea what was really causing the issue as I don't think HN is a cesspool of transphobia, hate, etc. HN causes traffic to the Asahi blog, which causes comments which are generally of low quality, tangential, trying to dox Lina, or vile on the Asahi blog is my summary. There are other comments here which indicate that as a source of transphobic comments, HN appears to…

Cesspool? I don't know that I would go that far, but take for example a recent thread I was involved in that was... unpleasant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35010229 HN often can be a great place to seek interesting and varied discussion on purely technical topics. When discussions veer anywhere close to topics that may touch on how people want to view themselves and their relationship to the world, PEOPLE ca…

[flagged]

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

#250

Post by bitwize »

Veen wrote: post #203
howinteresting wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan, you can avoid all this by fixing your moderation. Start banning the transparent bigots (like the "colored flag" person here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231243 ) right away. Care about what the actual hackers like marcan have to say. Even do a little thing like put a little pride flag on HN during June. (People are going to complain about it. Ban them!) This isn't that hard, it just requires a clear co…

So your solution is to ban everyone who disagrees with you? In fact, your solution is to ask HN to take an explicitly political position of no relevance to its intended purpose, and then ban everyone who objects to that?

[flagged]
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