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I 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 ab
by GavinB 16y ago
I 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?
- tomlin 16y agoThe solution is simple. Don't visit sites that employ Tynt.
- mbateman 16y agoOr do what Gruber suggests and block Tynt in /etc/hosts
- bshep 16y agoor add it to adblock ;-)
- za 16y agoIt's in the easyprivacy filter - http://easylist.adblockplus.org/ http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoAh. And I was wondering why I didn't see it anywhere. One more reason to run AdBlock and NoScript.
- tomlin 16y agoNot sure why I was downvoted. The premise to kill Flash by not visiting Flash sites gets me upvoted (trendy hate). I am sure there will be a force-fitted reason coming. I don't get the average HN user, I suppose.
- decode 16y agoI'm guessing you were downvoted because your suggestion was neither simple nor a solution. Since you can't easily predict which sites will use Tynt, it's not simple. Since you (presumably) still want to read the content on sites using Tynt, it's not a solution.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- garret 16y agoGruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this. Maybe because it's obvious. The point of the article is that breaking copy/paste, whatever the reason, doesn't work: "Who, when they paste such text and find this “Read more:” attribution line appended, doesn’t just delete it (and wonder how it got there)?"
- Turing_Machine 16y agoIn Ted Nelson's original model for hypertext, the equivalent of a backlink happened automatically. Quoted material was "transcluded" rather than copied outright. It had several other nice features that go well beyond what we have with today's Web. Worse is better once again. :-)
- trezor 16y agoIn an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. If you copy something from a website (in for instance Firefox) and paste it into Microsoft OneNote (which is awesome, by the way), it will not only paste the content, but will also include a link to where it was copied from so you can easily locate it later. I'm not sure how much metadata the clipboard contains in Windows, but I know (from clipnoard code I've written) that you can send the same content in several formats (plain-text, word-doc, html, etc) and it is up to the pastee to figure out which format to pick up and use. I also know that the Linux clipboard-implementation is utterly fucked with X conflicting with KDE/Gnome and lots of things not behaving like you would expect from a unified implementation, and I wouldn't expect anything "sophisticated" like this to work. At least that was the state of affairs from the last time I attempted to use Linux as a desktop-OS, around 6 years ago. Maybe things have improved in the meantime, and in that case please let me know.