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Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links
- yukion 3y ago[flagged]
- bigbillheck 3y agoI think it's worth a little self-reflection on the part of the rest of the commentariat here about why someone would ask that we leave them alone. It's hard for me to see this as anything other than spite, in a situation that needs a little bit of grace.
- dang 3y agoOk, I've finally had a chance to look at this properly. It's clear that putting noreferrer on sites selectively was bad, and I'm sorry. This should have been obvious beforehand, and I just missed that. The OP is incorrect that we did this for just one site. We did it for several sites—all the sites we knew about which were punishing HN referrers and which users had complained to us about. The consensus in the current thread, as well as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249414 and emails, is that a better approach is simply to put noreferrer on outgoing links in general. I've made that change now.
- josephcsible 3y agoEven though what you ended up doing wasn't my first choice, I'm way happier with it than I would have been with removing noreferrer from the abusive sites.
- arp242 3y agoMost times I found out that one of my articles was on the HN frontpage was because I got a spike in traffic and news.ycombinator.com was the most common referrer; now it's "spike in traffic, maybe it's HN?" which isn't really an improvement. This applies even more to other authors who won't think "maybe it's HN?" and will never show up here as a result, which would be a loss IMO. The Asahi people still won't be able to "soft block" HN, so nothing changes for them. It's punishing everyone because some people threw a hissy fit. Lobsters has a "compromise approach", where it sends referrers for the first hour after posting and then stops sending them [1] (not sure if it really helps to "disincentivize content marketers" as the comment says; they generally don't seem to care as long as they can spam out their links), but that may be a more complex change to make. This is how I discovered that Lobsters exists a few years ago: somone people posted my article and I "found" it in the refers, so I asked for an invite and replied to some comments. [1]: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/2981689c26a1bd2461fab123e6816c692f5d6b71/app/models/story.rb#L895-L900 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/2981689c26a1bd2461...
- dang 3y agoIt's true that some people discover HN through referers. In fact, one of the best contributors I know found Hacker News that way. Perhaps we should go back to the status quo ante. To be honest I'm not sure what to do.
- arp242 3y agoIt seems to me that: 1. Don't send referrers at all because some sites pick up on them. 2. Don't send referrers for specific sites because we know they pick up on them. Are essentially the same, except that with (1) you're also losing all the benefits. Or maybe HN just shouldn't muck about with referrers at all. IMHO the entire thing seems petty and childish from the Asahi people (and also jwz and others), but they have a right to be that. Then again, you'll end up with lots of confusion in the comments and the work-arounds are trivial (see: all the archive links to bypass paywalls). The Lobsters "compromise solution" will result in links working for some and then not for others, which would be very confusing. I don't envy your position, but but adding noreferrer to everything seems like the worst option.
- ezekg 3y agoFWIW, I had a hard time determining the source of a spike of traffic today because it had no referrer. It ended up being from HN, coming from some auxiliary discussion happening on a run-of-the-mill comment I made. I saw the rel=noreferrer on my link and was curious if it was new (because I had always remembered seeing HN referrals), and it was. I personally like the referrer. People will always complain, and you shouldn't feel too inclined to please or slight people like this who are openly hostile to the HN community. But you do what you think is best for HN, of course. Just my $0.2.
- throwawayadvsec 3y ago[flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoOh no, another HN conspiracy!!! Not everything needs to be a conspiracy when some of us are sick of other people's nonsense.
- throwawayadvsec 3y agonot a conspiracy, HN mods routinely delete stuff they don't personally like even when it doesn't go against the rules
- the_only_law 3y agoDon’t think I’ve ever seen the mods remove anything like that, plenty of user flags do that all the time though. The worst I’ve seen the mods here do is focus on the most pendantic, barely rule breaking comments while allowing explicitly off topic flamebait to simmer.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThere are no real "HN mods", this isn't reddit. There is basically one admin, dang, who does not do this. What is actually happening is enough regular users who have been on the site long enough (myself included) just disagree that some particular piece of content belongs on this site, so they flag it. What people really have a problem with is not understanding that lots of other people just disagree with them.
- dang 3y agoThat's definitely not true. What specifically did you see that made you think that?
- mindcrime 3y agoAs it should. Personally speaking, I flagged this thread, and I hope others do as well. There's nothing productive to be accomplished here, nor anything intellectually stimulating to discuss. So yeah, I'm totally for deleting/killing this entire post.
- Zetobal 3y agoI really miss the days when you just battled it out with some eggdrops and a well timed netsplit.
- 666satanhimself 3y ago[dead]
- willcipriano 3y agoIt seems they are the ones who want to avoid criticism.
- linster 3y agoThe “no, you” of discourse and debate.
- tekla 3y agoThis is hilariously awesome
- birdyrooster 3y agoNot really because I don’t think dang is a “scumbag” as Hector put it. That is quite harsh, right? And like it seems like a misunderstanding turned into a spat for no good reason.
- uberman 3y agoI'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.
- throwawayadvsec 3y agounless you're debating some small irrelevant controversial piece of tech it's usually pretty civil yes
- mathrawka 3y agoWAIT, are you insulting my emacs? /s of course I would like to know the backstory, since this made the front page though.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoIt's the standard "Every time I hear something I disagree with it means they're harassing/fake news/going down the toilet" nonsense. The funny thing is this person's post is way more unhinged than hardly any comment that I see bubble to the top of HN. I made a similar point related to all the comments I see about "Well, it's well known that HN hates crypto..." No, I don't "hate crypto", I've done a rational assessment of it, and I'm not willing to buy whatever snake oil is being sold this week. You can reasonably disagree with my assessment, but I see this all the time where people try to say "HN hates crypto..." because we're all just emotional, or my other favorite, that we just missed out on the early boom and are bitter we didn't get rich.
- wlesieutre 3y agoPost here mentions harassment in HN comment sections: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719 Which is surprising to me too, because the comments I've seen on every Asahi Linux post have been pretty overwhelmingly positive and impressed by their progress. Was there some drama that I missed? Or maybe they're complaining about some non-Asahi related comment threads, but I have no idea what.
- yawaramin 3y agoI get around this problem by blogging on dev.to, which is shadowbanned by HN.
- georgeg23 3y agoHacker News has every right to include noreferrer in its links. The destination site was playing games based on the HN origin, so dang just fixed the bug.
- TheChaplain 3y agoThey don't want the HN crowd there because it brings abuse & harassment. If Dang instead would block the domain, everyone would be happy.
- dingledork69 3y agoThey could add a login form if they don't want their website to be publicly accessible.
- georgeg23 3y agoIf they don't want people visiting their website maybe they shouldn't put it on the internet.
- _cenw 3y agoAside from the actual situation, this pattern of words seems reminiscent of victim blaming.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoIt's not true that everyone would be happy. Banning an otherwise fine and on-topic site leads to angry complaints that we've banned it for unfair reasons. Nobody thinks, "oh, I guess they banned it because the site owner asked them to".
- 3y ago
- hfo 3y agoI don't get it, can someone explain what is going on here?
- ivankuz 3y agoBy default, when following `<a>` links from site FOO to site BAR, the browser will tell site BAR in the Referrer header[1], that you're coming from the site FOO. If you add attribute `rel=noreferrer`[2] to the `<a>` tag, the browser will not attach such a header. It looks like the guys from asahilinux dot org somehow altered the behaviour of their website in cases when Referrer was set to hackernews, so hn added the `rel=noreferrer` to those links. No idea about the context of the drama though. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel/noreferrer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
- mvdtnz 3y ago[flagged]
- sandy_mountains 3y agoI was wondering the same thing, not sure how that works...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- streety 3y agoIt doesn't look like it is active on their site but I would assume it is a link to the submit page with some conditional CSS based on whether the user has visited the site. Changing the display setting and text color.
- jacooper 3y ago[flagged]
- frodowtf 3y ago[flagged]
- spondylosaurus 3y ago[flagged]
- jacooper 3y ago[flagged]
- a_shovel 3y ago[flagged]
- zamadatix 3y ago
- jawns 3y agoAs 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 team is mad that HN is playing shenanigans on the outbound-link level, even though Asahi Linux team is playing shenanigans on the inbound-link level. I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"
- sebmellen 3y ago> zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities" is a hilariously unclear accusation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hn_thrwn 3y ago[flagged]
- LinuxBender 3y agoFWIW HN sets the Referrer-Policy header [1] to origin [2] and it seems most browsers maybe support it. [3] Perhaps some addons override or spoof it and/or maybe some bots ignore it. [1] - https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-referrer-policy/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-referrer-poli... [2] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&hide=on&followRedirects=on https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato... [3] - https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy
- pseudosavant 3y agoThis 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dingledork69 3y agoIf you abuse the privileges of being sent a referer header then they can be taken away.
- personjerry 3y agoAs far as the thread goes, the author sounds as though they are a child throwing a tantrum. In the original OpenGL thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36212674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36212674 there seems to be some discussion as to why the author hates HN, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229753 quoted here: > It's not really all that much of a moral conundrum. Marcan's belief - expressed a number of times on his Mastodon - appears to be that he can prevent other people from discussing something, for the sole reason he doesn't want it discussed. It's not a particularly defensible position in an open society. > In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself. > Me, I have absolutely no problem with Marcan having an anime alter ego, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to refrain from noticing this and remarking on it. Marcan disagrees, and this is the source of the HN-Marcan rift.
- anaganisk 3y agoYou can't just claim that without knowing the context. Also I think, if some website doesn't want you to link to it, and politely redirects you. You shouldn't deploy code evade referrer for that site particularly. C'mon we aren't talking about using a VPN to evade a region block, it's one website abusing their referrer tags against another.
- josephcsible 3y ago> Also I think, if some website doesn't want you to link to it, and politely redirects you. You shouldn't deploy code evade referrer for that site particularly. Why? You don't have a right to not be talked about.
- anaganisk 3y agoWhen did I ever say that, HN is free to talk about them, but they don't want you to visit them. And I think it's up to them to choose with whom they want to interact.
- terminalcommand 3y agoI thought HN puts noreferrer in every new link. Could there be a whitelist of links that do not include noreferrer?
- sandy_mountains 3y agoHN puts nofollow on every link for SEO reasons, which is different. They're adding noreferrer to this domain specifically so that Asahi Linux isn't able to tell whether people are coming from HN or not.
- terminalcommand 3y agoOkay, now I understand. Thank you for clarifying.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kome 3y agowhy are they so angry at HN?
- brohee 3y agoBecause they get abuse from the vocal transphobe subset of the HN population. (https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388)
- Lammy 3y agoContext: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110060225535294882 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110060225535294882 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/a720f6ca68805f336e844523fe3f37f6827019c1 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/a7...
- analognoise 3y agoThank 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 be the prevalent in the referrer of said comments. I think though that most people who read HN do not comment. I have used HN for a long time and have not seen anything to indicate a prevalence for transphobic remarks - far from it this place seems very tame compared to the same material placed on say Reddit (to me). This, then, was the issue for me: obviously if vile comments frequently come with an HN referrer, a site admin who reads the vile comments will think poorly of HN - but I don't think those comments reflect the actual commenting HN population, leading to the confusion.
- drabbiticus 3y agoCesspool? 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 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dingledork69 3y agoAmusingly their solution[1] will likely get them delisted from Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#hidden-text-and-links https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/5cfbbedd25a6d96d5ef9127b6ea50f34e5a779d8 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/5c...
- Manjuuu 3y agoAmusingly for who? At least use your primary account for this BS...
- RobotToaster 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoWe 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 that a fairer and simpler solution is to just put noreferrer on all links. It's late enough that I don't trust myself to deploy even a trivial code change, so I'll do that tomorrow.
- danShumway 3y agoI'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.
- barredo 3y agoI have been in HN since many of the current users could even type on a keyboard, and allow me to chip in. * They have the right to block by referral * HN has the right to set up that attribute to the links * I don't think they are arguing about HN doing it, but to do it silently or covertly by someone in the moderation staff I wont argue about legality or morals. It looks like they have an issue with the current dynamics of comments in here, and it's an honest way of protesting about it. If the moderation staff does edit the link, title or attributes it should be reflected at least. Like when they add a date to specify that it's from a few years ago. Of course, HN users could always choose to protest by protesting and sharing and discussing about the articles anyway. But that doesn't make their point any less valid.
- barredo 3y agops Sure, there are a lot of technical methods to circumvent any block. Users in here share archive[.]today links that break paywalls all the time.
- johnea 3y ago[flagged]
- ubermonkey 3y ago[flagged]
- solarkraft 3y agoI'm happy that some of the reflection Hector is asking for is happening in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231051