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I still remember one fake news site that took this to the extreme, in that it linked to a story that flat out didn't exist on the site it linked to. You clicked
by CM30 6y ago
I still remember one fake news site that took this to the extreme, in that it linked to a story that flat out didn't exist on the site it linked to. You clicked on the link, and you just ended up with a 404 error page.
The fact that fooled anyone should probably give you a worrying insight into how many people are willing to trust/distrust links without even clicking on them.
But yeah, either way, make sure the link actually goes somewhere, that it goes to a relevant page/article/video/whatever, and that said source does indeed say what the linking said says it does.
- ballenf 6y agoThat's also a good reason for news orgs to have strict policies around never taking down articles or changing URLs. It happens enough to give cover to the behavior you cite. News sites could also replace their 404 page with an explanation "there used to be an article here, but we decided to remove it because ____" or "there's never been an article at this address".
- btrettel 6y agoThere's a HTTP status code for pages which were deleted: 410 Gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Client_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_... This was famously used by Mark Pilgrim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#%22Disappearance%22_from_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#%22Disappearance%...
- elliekelly 6y agoHas anyone ever seen this in the wild? I didn’t even know it existed. Who knew there were so many different status codes.
- btrettel 6y agoSeems that I edited my comment to add an example at the same time you posted yours.
- LukeShu 6y agoI'm sure I've seen 410 in the wild, but it's pretty uncommon. If you're keeping track of things well enough to know that there used to be a page there in order to serve a 410, you're probably keeping track of things well enough to be able to do something better, like redirect to an updated URL. > Who knew there were so many different status codes. As an HTTP nerd, the authoritative listing of the different codes is: https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes Note: Everything with a reference that's not RFC 7231 is an extension; don't use that status code unless you actually implement that extension. For example, don't use 401 (Unauthorized) instead of 403 (Forbidden) unless you actually implement the RFC 7235 Authentication extension.
- irl_zebra 6y agoGitLab does it for links to deleted repos!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tracker1 6y agoI use it for APIs when an item gets marked as deleted, vs actually deleted... depends on the underlying data though.
- spc476 6y agoI use it to mark pages that I have taken down for good [1]. I have also used 418 ("I'm a teapot") response code on my gopher server to discourage web bots from attempting to index the site. Edit--added note [1] For all the good it does. I just checked my logs and I still see requests for pages I marked as "gone" 15 years ago.
- komali2 6y agoAbout five or six years ago I spent a long time making outrageous claims on Reddit, and I'd wrap various parts of it in link tags. The links would go to random nytime articles, random papers, or simply nowhere at all. Then I'd watch as the outrageous claim propagated (this in niche communities). It was absolutely terrifying. I never, ever got called out. EDIT: I'm remembering now I'd pretend to be all sorts of people, swapping hats within minutes, always waiting for someone to just pop open my post history and see that at one moment I'm a teacher and 5 minutes later a firefighter. It was kind of a joke, kind of an experiment, kind of an angsty setting-of-fire to the internet.
- kardos 6y agoThere is a huge asymmetry between the effort to make an outrageous claim and that to refute one. > I never, ever got called out. In Reddit parlance: ain't nobody got time for that
- dqpb 6y agoThey also have an inherent information theoretic advantage over non-outrageous claims when consumed by someone who is unable to discern their veracity.
- Buge 6y agoCould you expand on that? Are you saying the more outrageous a claim it's the more likely people are to believe it? That itself sounds like an outrageous claim to me, so I would like to see evidence for it.
- malaya_zemlya 6y ago"Another topic is derived from things which are thought to happen but are incredible, because it would never have been thought so, if they had not happened or almost happened. And further, these things are even more likely to be true; for we only believe in that which is, or that which is probable: if then a thing is incredible and not probable, it will be true; for it is not because it is probable and credible that we think it true." Aristotle, Rhetoric 2:23 (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0060:book=2:chapter=23 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...)
- Goronmon 6y agoI still remember one fake news site that took this to the extreme, in that it linked to a story that flat out didn't exist on the site it linked to. More common what I see is these sites just link to other articles on the site as a "source" for claims made in more recent articles. You almost never see sources to external sites or resources, its just internal site links all the way down.
- dgellow 6y agoAlmost every time I check a source in a Wikipedia article I get either a 404, or it actually links to the homepage of the target website, or the domain redirects to a YouTube channel, etc. I arrived to the conclusion that nobody every check the source. They started using archived articles for some links, that’s already an improvement IMHO.