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There are many news sites that make it extremely hard to share their content on sites like HN or reddit because of these tricks. I wonder if they are actually l
by cryptoz 10y ago
There are many news sites that make it extremely hard to share their content on sites like HN or reddit because of these tricks. I wonder if they are actually losing traffic from it, or if their tactics work? I'm referring when you copy the text in the title of an article to try to paste it into the Title box on HN or reddit. But what you 'paste' is actually a huge paragraph about how great the news website is and how you should download their apps and read more on their website. At that point, I can't be bothered to clean it up and I refuse to type out some text that I should have been able to copy.
Does it really work? Do sites actually get more traffic by hijacking your keyboard's basic functions to insert advertisements? I guess it probably does. :(
- grenoire 10y agoI don't have data on this, but it's a significant turnoff for me. Unless I really have to share the quote, I never bother cleaning it. It doesn't bug me to the extent that I won't share it altogether (I'll just type it out or copy from Chrome devtools); yet I'll be more hesitant to share from that website from thereon.
- dawnerd 10y agoI had to implement this kinda code when I worked for Demand Media and it certainly worked. Whats funny is you don't need any fancy new apis to make it work. We were doing some pretty basic tactics actually. Only real way to prevent it is disable javascript.
- mrfusion 10y agoYou should have refused
- akshatpradhan 10y agoYou shouldn't refuse. You should document the privacy impact and make sure everybody is aware of the privacy implications.
- dawnerd 10y agoBelieve me, there was lots of pushing back. It was right before Google dropped panda and basically killed ehow.
- cpach 10y agoMoralizing about dawnerd’s employment doesn’t really add to the discussion, IMHO.
- nitrogen 10y agoA new discussion of the ethics of software engineering might be valuable. Other professions have codes of ethics; maybe it's time for software, too.
- HerpDerpLerp 10y agoUncle bob agrees http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/11/18/TheProgrammersOath.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/11/18/TheProgramme...
- jlgaddis 10y agocf. ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct: https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-profess...
- nitrogen 10y agoI like most of the ACM code. I think it could use an update with more direct prohibitions on modern forms of user harm, such as trading in private information and manipulating search results to promote low quality sites.
- mannykannot 10y agoAt least no underhanded techniques have been used to deliver it to you.
- sethammons 10y agoWhat do you mean by it worked? Did you have metrics supporting increased views that were tied to the paste highjacking?
- dawnerd 10y agoI don't personally have any supporting data but the business people were not ones to do things unless it worked. Just look how high in the rankings ehow was able to get before panda hit.
- woodman 10y agoDemand Media makes money by monitoring ad networks and then paying people to churn out worthless content that pollutes search results. They watch metrics very carefully.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoSounds like a pretty unethical way to make money.
- woodman 10y agoI'm sure that those involved have very interesting rationalizations, but I don't think that it should be viewed from an ethics perspective. Expecting people to behave against their own self interest in the short term, for the good of strangers in the long term, will always end in disappointment. This is actually a pretty simple case of poorly stated objectives being cleverly met by people who are completely self interested. LOC metrics, rat tail bounties, click-through rates. I know this sounds kind of "well what did you expect wearing something like that", but if advertisers establish metrics that are more closely aligned with their objectives then we'd all be better off. But yeah, Demand Media is terrible and their employees are not on my Christmas card list.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> I know this sounds kind of "well what did you expect wearing something like that" Which is a perfectly rational question/argument. > Expecting people to behave against their own self interest in the short term, for the good of strangers in the long term, will always end in disappointment. I agree. This is a systemic problem, and appeals to ethics won't work (and the advertisers won't change their metrics because of them) - one needs to attack the economic incentives underlying their current strategies.
- wtbob 10y ago> Only real way to prevent it is disable javascript. Oh, darn … /s
- conradev 10y agoOr to block the loading of the offending javascript!
- losteric 10y agoWhat's stopping websites from minifying all their javascript into one file and preventing the site from functioning without JS?
- capitalsigma 10y agoThen refuse to use them. That's what I do.
- tehrei 10y agoThen you start writing GreaseMonkey scripts and patching the APIs they use.
- asddddd 10y agoToggling dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in Firefox has fixed this on every implementation I've seen apart from the PoC here.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ggsp 10y agoOr inspect and copy from there?
- ccozan 10y agoBest solution. Also works for websites that block right click, and other similar tricks, to "protect" the content.
- lmm 10y agoWould you even need javascript to do it? You could just include that text at the start of each paragraph and hide it with CSS.
- leephillips 10y agoMany pages in the New York Times are impossible to select text in. But I just select the text from the page source. After reading this article, I'm thinking that might be a good idea in general.
- mirimir 10y agoI do too. But sometimes there's no text in source, just scripts :(
- arviewer 10y agoIn Firefox use CTRL-SHIFT-I or use Firebug to inspect the code on the page after it's generated. I guess many times it's a transparent div covering the text, not javascript tricks like this, but I might be wrong. You can remove the div using Firebug. Selecting the text in Firebug will work, but may be a lot more work. How about printing to PDF, then selecting the text there?
- majewsky 10y agoremembers the times when computers were supposed to make things easier for us
- beachstartup 10y ago"supposed" to, but never really did.
- paulryanrogers 10y agoEasier to take (possibly steal) on your terms?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- logicallee 10y agoThe proof of concept didn't work for me. I highlighted the text, right-clicked and clicked "copy". I thought it was just broken or not hooking the on-copy properly. Then I realized that the reason I was doing that instead of ctrl-c is all the times that web sites break ctrl-c. I literally have gotten used to highlighting, right-clicking, and clicking copy, for a "clean" copy :) I wasn't even aware I was doing this. Of course, web sites can hook right-clicks. It would be funny if they threw up a fake context menu matching the default context menu of the browser and operating you're using, but with evil versions of commands :) I don't disable or modify javascript, so with that addition it would have tricked me.
- jschwartzi 10y agoRight-click hooking could be defeated by inserting a sequence number in the right-click menu and displaying the same sequence number somewhere in the browser window. I will say that the people who generate event hooks in browsers need to pull their heads out of their asses before this kind of thing becomes necessary.
- dzhiurgis 10y agoHighlight, then Edit -> Copy. But then, I've seen sites that break highlighting. Either intentionally, or accidentally, thinking people will share their every highlight on Twitter (I am looking at you, Medium).
- qb45 10y agoIn Firefox, holding CTRL or SHIFT (don't remember which one) bypasses JS hooks and always displays the menu. I think it's even better solution :)
- amelius 10y agoThe problem is that browsers are trying to protect the wrong people. An average joe will not even have a terminal to paste commands in. Most people who use terminals know how to protect themselves, and they can recognize questionable content. This whole problem shouldn't even exist.