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Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks
- alaithea 16y agoI haven't looked at their script. I'm curious whether they transmit selected text, as Daring Fireball seems to suggest, or only copied text. If the former, they're going to get a lot of false positives from those of us who neurotically select blocks of text on pages for no reason while reading.
- eli 16y agoIt's selected text. And they're trying to spin that as a feature (i.e. they can show you the section of text has the highest "user engagement" based on relative number of selections)
- robryan 16y agoThat sounds like a better feature than the inserting of text into the copy. I would say that over a large same of people selecting text you could see engagement patterns.
- what 16y agoIt seems to only report back when you actually copy the selection (either ctrl/cmd+c or right click+copy). Just looking at the headers, the JS is obfuscated and I'm too lazy to look at it.
- masterj 16y agoIndeed, I highlighted your comment at least a few times while reading it.
- smokinn 16y agoI guess at least now I know I'm not alone. I'm very OCD about clicking on random words, triple clicking on paragraphs to highlight them entirely while I'm reading or just dragging my mouse over random amounts of text on the page. I don't know why I do it but it drives pretty much everyone reading the same thing as me on the same computer insane.
- harry 16y agoI do this as well, more of a "track where I am when I'm reading" when I get distracted by something else, I quickly return to the spot. I dislike it when something like WSJ puts those 'learn more' links after you highlight something right under the cursor.
- yesbabyyes 16y agoI do all of this, too. Especially selecting paragraphs. Actually, now that I think about it (which I do fairly often, tbh), this is one of the reasons I've stayed with Firefox. It only highlights the text of the paragraph. WebKit highlights to the end of the line, and some more, I think. It isn't as visually appealing, at all. We had an intern at our company for a week, a smart guy who is graduating from high school, and he pointed out all of these things about me. I also manically tap caps lock with my left pinkie. I'd rather not think about this part of me too much, especially when it comes to picking browser based on how it renders (manically) selected paragraphs.
- ComputerGuru 16y agoNo it doesn't, at least, not any more :) Chrome 6 on OS X, triple-clicking on the word "WebKit": http://grab.by/4DKh http://grab.by/4DKh
- Periodic 16y agoMy cousin does this as well. When she reads something online she highlights the half-line she's reading at the time. You can always tell when she's gotten distracted and started reading something because there's a constant clicking coming from her mouse.
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- phreeza 16y agoI also do this, but I think it is at least slightly correlated with what I am reading. So the false positives aren't really false, they might represent, to a degree, what people are spending time reading. Also, this would be really to filter out, the amount of highlighted areas would just be ridiculously large.
- jbarciauskas 16y agoJust joining the chorus of "me toos"... Didn't think it was that prevalent, I wonder where the instinct comes from? Anyone have any fun pseudo-scientific theories?
- hernan7 16y agoMaybe it's the equivalent of sliding your finger under the line of text you are reading? Like they teach small kids in school.
- aero142 16y agoThat is a nice theory, but I don't do that when reading. Why would I highlight on screen, but not use a ruler edge when reading?
- alaithea 16y agoWhat if it's not to help follow the line for reading, but to "feel" the page as you read it? A proxy for dealing with immaterial bits on a screen instead of holding and feeling the paper of a book or magazine? Showing you have some sort of control over it.
- alaithea 16y agoI think it's just that highlighting is neat. Some portion of my brain is pleased by the flashing/changing colors (different than a flashing ad, etc., since I'm controlling the action).
- alanh 16y agoIt’s not neurosis; it’s not OCD. It helps establish a line for your eyes to follow when flicking back to the left side of text. It’s just like the ruler or piece of paper that speed-reading and sight-reading teachers instruct students to use. Notice that you will hardly or never do this on narrow columns of text.
- alaithea 16y agoNot everybody highlights text in a functional way. In fact, what I'm highlighting usually has nothing to do with what I'm reading at the moment, and is more of a nervous habit/tic than anything else.
- bpm140 16y agoYou're making the assumption that the two things are mutually exclusive. Not all functional behaviors require overt mental processing.
- Volt 16y agoThe only name that I've seen for this is "impulsive highlighting". There used to be a Wikipedia article about it, but it was unfortunately deleted since it cited no sources. http://awurl.com/C8uVAsoJN http://awurl.com/C8uVAsoJN (Yes, I know it looks like a questionable URL, but it's all I could find since, as I said, it was deleted).
- adamhowell 16y agoI couldn't help but pronounce it "Taint" as I read this. What a terrible name.
- Semiapies 16y agoWhy "taint" and not "tint"?
- pierrefar 16y agoIt's making copy/paste worse, so definitely "taint".
- Semiapies 16y agoFair enough, but I thought the prior poster meant a non-intentional version of that.
- adamhowell 16y agoNope, very intentional. Same kind of thing happens whenever I read about Minority Leader John Boehner, too, for some reason.
- javery 16y agoHonestly it doesn't really bother me, it has been useful from time to time when copying something (saves me the next step of copying the URL). It sounds like they should add an opt-out though.
- mjijackson 16y agoTo suggest an opt-out is missing the point entirely. If anything, it should be opt-in.
- Timothee 16y agoIt should be a browser feature/plug-in, or not be there at all.
- hockeybias 16y agoI do a lot of copying and pasting for the 'hand-edited' portion of links on hockeybias.com and I too have noticed an uptick in this cr*p. Thanks for shedidng light on the perp!
- WiseWeasel 16y agoThis "service" has bugged the hell out of me, making me delete the garbage at the end each time I copy some text. The worst is on sites that have user comments, when you're having conversations with people and quoting their text to reply to them. Tynt is now happily added to my Hosts file.
- latch 16y agoI ran into this today...it took me about 3 copy/paste attempts to realize what was going on. I could see some users never really figuring it out. Changing the behavior of copy/paste seems quite silly.
- wvenable 16y agoI don't fault Tynt for creating this service; it's actually a bit clever. I reserve all my blame for the websites that actually use this service.
- benmathes 16y agoWait, what? There's plenty of blame to go around, here. Blame the websites that decide to screw their users, but also blame a company who makes a product that screws users.
- probablycorey 16y agoHow is it screwing you? At most it is a minor inconvenience.
- benmathes 16y agoMy copy buffer is my copy buffer, and a fundamental aspect of computer interaction. It does not belong to The New Yorker or Techcrunch.
- Kadin 16y agoThat's a good point and I agree, but why then do browsers let this sort of crap happen? Why do they allow JavaScript to modify what gets copied to the copy buffer, rather than just copying whatever you happen to select from the rendered page? I can't think of any good reason why that functionality should be allowed. The copy buffer should be as off-limits to the JavaScript VM as the contents of my hard drive. So while the developers of this "feature" and the websites that implement it are partially to blame, I think there's a flaw in browsers that's allowing them to do it in the first place. There aren't nearly enough fine-grained controls over JavaScript in modern browsers, given the really obnoxious shit that's beginning to be done with it (JS-based popups and popovers). Browser developers have left an opening for abuse and, particularly with the last decade-plus of WWW development in the rear-view mirror, we shouldn't be surprised when it gets abused in really user-hostile ways.
- sacrilicious 16y agoMaybe I'm too old if I start identifying with corporations like this, but.... This actually seems like something Tumblr or Posterous should allow their customers, "aggregators" of choice quotations, to opt-in for. Then it would be in the hands of people who want the sites they are considering important enough to 're-broadcast' to know how their work is being excerpted, and when. Just an idea of a positive outcome of this practice being released on the world.
- sacrilicious 16y agoTo clarify, I'm not suggesting Tumblr use this service, or any other that refers to peoples work as "content". "Keep the corporations out of my clipboard!" is being a bit overreactive, as this is of dubious use to the market and obviously ineffective so it will probably go away of its own accord. I'm speaking for myself when I say it seems we should have better ways to bring writers into the dialog when we don't explicitly go through the steps of attributing their work, if a blogging engine like Tumblr doesn't already incorporate that to some extent.
- bartl 16y agoI've never seen this, not even on the page the article linked to as an example, but that may be due to NoScript. Yet another example of why NoScript is a good idea.
- DrSprout 16y agoTynt was the primary thing that drove me to install NoScript.
- tumult 16y agoYes, I hate these douchebags. I also hate the people who use them. I have a modified Chromium that specifically prevents this tampering with selection (null out the webkit javascript hooks for selection stuff) and an extension that will give a little blip whenever I land on a page that uses them or something like it. It pisses me off. I can't believe people think this is a good idea. When the spammers/ad people start using HTML5 audio to blast annoying crap at you, HTML5 locations to figure out how to send junk mail to your house, and other crap that browser makers were too short-sighted to realize were a bad idea to give sites the power to control, then we're going to see a regression in browser features as "does less" becomes the default. Right now, the sites you visit have way too much control over what they can do to your browser. It's naïve to think that these people will just 'play nice' and not abuse features. The SEO and ad people will take whatever length of thread you give them and completely unravel the shirt off of your back.
- daleharvey 16y agocrippling the functionality of the browser isnt going to harm people developing these exploits, they will just use toolbars and plugins whatever. all it does is hurt people who want to build real web applications, the complete lack of support for copy and paste is a major major pita in that regard.
- tumult 16y agoUh, you can tamper with the clipboard from JavaScript. That's why this works, and why it's a problem. You shouldn't be able to by default.
- daleharvey 16y agoyou cant, these things employ tricks like a hidden textarea that gets focused and selected when ctrl+c gets keyed down (safari does have a copy / paste events), the same can happen on paste, flash also has access to write to the clipboard, sometimes. its buggy and annoying though. but it means 1. applications cant have copy paste buttons 2. if you have a special clipboard (googles cloud clipboard), you have 2 clipboards that can very easily become out of sync. preventing abuse of the clipboard by completely killing its functionality is like banning apples because someone chocked on one once, there are much simpler solutions (like firefoxs geolocation permission dialog)
- mrkurt 16y agoThey drive me nuts. There's an opt out here though: http://www.tynt.com/support/opt-inout/ http://www.tynt.com/support/opt-inout/ I just block it at the home router. It feels more brutal. :)
- minalecs 16y agoStrange no matter what browser I try to copy and paste, can't seem to see this happening. Any ideas as to why I'm unable to see this script.. I guess its a good thing I'm not effected by it, but out of curiosity would like to see.
- blhack 16y agoI have a social bookmarking site and this drives me nuts. Lots of users just copy the articles headline, and this garbage comes with it... I suppose one way of fixing that would be to chop everything after \n... Huffington post was the first one I noticed.
- ekanes 16y agoBefore I clicked on the link, I thought "Tynt" was a new acronym I hadn't heard of since it didn't sound like a word. I figured it must be Thank You No Thanks... which kinda works. :)
- pavel_lishin 16y agoNot only does this break copy and paste, it's incredibly annoying when I want to paste a single line into my IRC client, and tinker with it before sending. Instead, I end up pasting the thing, and the stupid URL, since the newlines send the message.
- jamesshamenski 16y agoI think tynt actually knows what was selected and copied even if it wasn't pasted. That nugget of data is captured and the content source can see what info people wanted a deeper dive on. ex: people commonly paste names and unfamiliar words. It's an indication of the lead generated by the article and helpful for editorial and advertising teams.
- phreeza 16y agoThe New York Times has something similar, where they look up any word you highlight in a dictionary. If I recall correctly, this used to be worse, but is still around in some form. Used to drive me nuts, because I neurotically highlight text all the time.
- mattmanser 16y agoThe copy-paste thing bugs me, but what really drives me insane is the highlight 3-words or less functionality. When I spot a word or thing that I want to know more about, I usually highlight, right click, and choose search. This works in both Chrome and IE8+. Firefox may even do it too, I don't use it. With Tynt, it cancels the right-click menu and pops up a search bubble. Mucking around with browser behaviour is not cool. Usually I try 3 or 4 times in confusion until I realise and promptly close the website in disgust.
- alanh 16y agoSimilarly, the New York Times intrusively assumes I want to "define" anything I select, even it’s lines long, breaking my normal browser behavior. Edit: I triple-click to select paragraphs (an OS X idiom); the define-word script prevents this, recognizing not a triple-click but rather a double-click (select word) followed by a single click (activate definition pop-up).
- pjscott 16y agoI checked on Chrome, and NY Times only tries to define single words for me -- but when I de-select any text, the embedded video player (if any) reloads. Buggy.
- perokreco 16y agoTriple clicking is not an OS X idiom, it works on Windows too.
- alanh 16y agoDoes it work everywhere? Last I checked, it doesn’t work in browser address bars, for example.
- wmeredith 16y agoThat's the end result of a content site trying to add value with features. Instead they get feature bloat.
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- malvosenior 16y agoThe New Yorker is a high caliber publication?
- raganwald 16y agoThis stinks of Enterprise Software, the alternate reality where a salesman sells something that doesn't work to an executive that doesn't really care because there is no objective metric of success applied to the purchase, just the question of whether it can be 'spun' into something that makes the purchaser look good. I'd like to see any of Tynt's customers weigh in and explain how they are measuring Tynt's effectiveness. Are any of them using A/B testing or otherwise quantifying the costs and benefits?
- GavinB 16y agoI find it a bit odd that Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this: to get people to click on the links and increase their traffic. It's not about SEO black magic or increasing their ability to track links, it's including an attribution with copied material in order to increase page views and visibility. Now, I don't like that they use javascript to break your copy-paste functionality. It's unexpected and unrequested, so we are annoyed and confused by it. I wouldn't use Tynt. Still, it's worth remembering that citations are a good thing. How many times have we on HN lambasted a site for not including proper attribute to copy and pasted text? How many times have we complained when someone pasted a quote or data in a comment here with no citation? As unsavory and anti-usability as it is, I can understand the motivations behind Techcrunch and NYT. They're tired of their material being spread around without the courtesy of a backlink, and hope that by making it easier to cite than not to cite, they can encourage links. In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. Tynt isn't doing it right, but attribution and links are a good thing to encourage.
- CapitalistCartr 16y agoHmmm, an interesting idea. Context-sensitive addition to the right-click menu, perhaps, where I can choose to add the meta-data to my paste. I think I can get that going in Javascript.
- alxp 16y agoMeet Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/
- MWinther 16y agoZotero seem to have the right idea, the behavior should be in the browser. Although they seem to want to do a lot more than that, an additional simple "Copy with annotation"-command in my Safari would be useful. Preferably with formatting settings, for me the newlines seem strange. If I do annotate, why wouldn't I want it right after the text?
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- coverband 16y agoCitations are good. Web analytics are good. Personalized service is good. This service doesn't bother me at all -- if you plan not to give attribution to your source ("you bad bad dog"), just remove the link they add. If you have difficulty copying something because of their JavaScript, just open the source and copy/paste from there. Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint. Gruber should surf those sites on his iPad to get rid of the right-click hooks... Or use an older version of iPhone that doesn't offer copy/paste...
- nocman 16y ago"Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint." Obviously not everyone here agrees with you that it is a stupid complaint.
- mortenjorck 16y agoThis is merely the Web2.0 version of the old image-protection script that pops up an indignant message from the webmaster upon right-click. It too will die out.
- w1ntermute 16y agoI don't understand why people are complaining. Not only are these websites giving you free content (beggars can't be choosers), but this problem is ridiculously easy to fix; just add the EasyPrivacy filter to your AdBlock Plus installation from here: http://easylist.adblockplus.org/ http://easylist.adblockplus.org/ Here's a direct link to subscribe: abp:subscribe?location=https%3A%2F%2Feasylist-downloads.adblockplus.org%2Feasyprivacy.txt&title=EasyPrivacy
- mirkules 16y agoAnother easy way to block it if you're running NoScript is to disallow scripts from Tynt.
- mfr 16y agoIf you don't understand why people are complaining, you may want to take a moment to understand why. You have shown how to block it, but there is a larger discussion of why or why not it's bad, how it breaks copy/paste, attribution problems, and so on. You might do well to look outside the narrow technical bounds of fixing a specific technical problem to think about the greater issue.
- w1ntermute 16y agoWhich is exactly what I prefixed my technical solution with - beggars can't be choosers. You are getting to access all this content for free, content which people spend their precious time creating. I find it astonishing that people actually have the gall to complain about the content creators partaking in a little self-promotion.
- jrockway 16y agoTo be fair, it's kind of like leaving your door open and sticking a sign on the side of your house saying "TV inside", and then complaining when someone steals your TV. Sure, they shouldn't have done it, but you would have never even thought about the problem if you just locked your door. Locking your door on the Internet includes using AdBlock (with easylist and easyfilter), NoScript, Privoxy, Tor, and so on. (I skip Tor, but the other ones are quite non-invasive. Sometimes I accidentally browse the Internet without Adblock, and feel very confused as to why every site is all of a sudden so ugly.)
- tamersalama 16y agoThis has been here here before (perhaps with milder tones) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491003 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491003 A relative comment is that this service is not for the "technically inclined". Personally - I'm used to highlighting all the text I read (not sure why). I would prefer an opt-out option to remember my choices across tynt-enabled websites.
- NathanKP 16y agoThis article doesn't even mention the biggest problem with Tynt: copying and pasting code snippets. I hate it when Tynt is installed on a website that has code snippets or tutorials. When I copy the code I have to delete the Tynt message. It wouldn't be so bad if it was smart enough to detect the coding language and insert the attribution within comments. I suggested that feature months ago when I first discovered Tynt, but they never implemented it or even responded.
- edanm 16y agoThat's actually a feature I wish existed in e.g. StackOverflow. They actually do know which language code is written in, so they should include a comment before the copied code which links to the question. I do this myself with any snippets I copy from sites, since I always find myself going back to the site at least once.
- kareemm 16y agoGruber's an edge case, and he admits it: "Now, the nature of my work writing Daring Fireball involves copying and pasting many snippets of text from web sites every day. So this Tynt stuff probably annoys me more (or at least more frequently) than most people." I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I pasted a passage from a Tynt-enabled website into an email and the URL showed up. I send these types of emails all the time and it saves me time.
- irons 16y agoI'd have thought there was a bright line between people like my parents who use the ubiquitous "share this link" site features, and people like me who send messages with links and excerpts tailored to the recipient. If I'm right, you're an edgier edge case than Mr. Gruber.
- agentultra 16y agoOr... block the .js in your browser. Or use a text-based browser for browsing your text. I find that w3m actually works quite well. With a few extra programs it can even load images. Fancy that!
- grogers 16y agoThankfully select + middle mouse button in X isn't affected by this.
- DotSauce 16y agoFor those interested in the benefits of Tynt Insight for publishers, please read this article: http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/03/09/website-data-social-sharing-traffic-trends/ http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/03/09/website-data-social-shari... "Email is used for 70% of all social sharing and accounts for 48% of new site traffic." For comparison, Facebook only accounts for 25%. I'm guessing Gruber didn't get a chance to review this report from Tynt.
- pclark 16y agothis must have recently been implemented on techcrunch. I just wanted to forward an article to a friend, i selected a paragraph and pasted it in the email - it was actually really handy having the read more snippet at the end of the paste. but it'd be infuriating if you were doing this, for example, in IM and had to remove 5 lines every paste. opt in, not out.
- TorKlingberg 16y agoSome Chinese websites do this, but they put their address after each paragraph. I think they do it the Web1.0 way though: white text on white background.
- marcamillion 16y agoThe truth is, the first time I encountered this it was a little off-putting. However, it actually turned out to be quite useful. Especially, given that when I quote I am usually doing attribution anyway, it saves me at least 3 or 4 steps (i.e. post paste of quote, go back to URL, copy URL, go to blog, insert link, etc.)
- cookiecaper 16y agoI've never noticed this, I guess because I almost always highlight and middle-click to copy things, which only works on Linux/X afaik.
- alextingle 16y agoThis reminds me of the arguments over Google's attempts to "fix" copying from their broken URL-bar in the latest versions of Chromium: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467
- sscheper 16y agoGruber sounds like a whining teenager. It's the publishers' prerogative to (i) get attributed for their work, and (ii) get some SEO juice back to their site. I suspect that he's just bored, suffering from writer's block, and needs and outlet to get it out. There, you've cried on the shoulder of a bunch of hacker news dudes. Feel better now?
- metachris 16y agoWow, tynt recently raised $8m. What do they need all that money for? http://www.tynt.com/tynt-raises-8m-in-venture-capital-to-fuel-growth-in-web-2-0-content-sharing-analytics/ http://www.tynt.com/tynt-raises-8m-in-venture-capital-to-fue...
- dkarl 16y agoBeing jerks.