5 ms·

> Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web Indeed. Well, hyperlinks and URLs. URLs are the cornerstone of the web. A precise, universal (hopefully), long-l

> Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web Indeed. Well, hyperlinks and URLs. URLs are the cornerstone of the web. A precise, universal (hopefully), long-lasting (hopefully) way of referencing articles and other resources. It's always frustrating to see people fail to appreciate their brilliance, e.g. search this on YouTube rather than just pasting a link into a message. Giving a write-up a permanent home on the web can certainly help give it visibility, and help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again. Related classic essay: Cool URIs don't change. [0][1] [0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484

cxr 2y ago
Two under-utilized properties of URLs are also that: - there's a near-infinite supply of them - they support forward declaration Together the practical upshot is that if you're having a conversation with someone or responding during the Q&A of a talk or whatever and you want to be able to say, "Yeah, we thought about that, and we have some information about it on our site—just visit acmeinitiative.example.com/skub," except that you haven't already written the /skub article yet, that doesn't preclude you from being able to say in the moment (i.e. live) that /skub is effective immediately now the designated handle for such an article, it's where the article will appear once you do write it, and it's how any interested party should retrieve it once it does appear—whenever that is. (The same goes for articles published by other people/organizations and other third-party resources that you want to reference—just mint a URL from your namespace on-the-fly and then whenever you get a chance, set up a redirect to whatever it is you wanted to link to.) There are so many recordings (podcasts episodes, etc.) that I've listened to involving smart, technical people who definitely control their own domains but don't think to take advantage of this. Usually they sort of mumble some description that you might be able to use to find whatever they're talking about, or they manage to only get half the words in the title wrong when they're trying to recall it for the host, and then you and every other interested listener has to individually squander time and attention if you want to track it down. It results in a huge waste of collective energy.
- DelightOne 2y ago
  The UX is not good enough yet. We would have to 1) show that it is reserved to people going on the link and 2) offer good/enough ways to be notified once the link becomes online and 3) need to know the likelihood of the link to actually work in the future based on prior commitment. AND I probably forgot a couple of issues.
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    ...and URLs being forever cuts both ways. Want to reorganize your domain's structure? Better set up 301s to forward the old address, forever, and hope (or avoid) any overlap between the old schema and the new. Transfer of ownership? Well, all those hyperlinks from other sites don't know.
  - csh0 2y ago
    I think the idea is that if you were recording a podcast it wouldn’t be live (I know the parent used the word live but I think they meant “live” during recording or in conversation while the episode is being created), so you are free to make references to soon to be declared URLs. You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload or publish your episode for your listeners.
    - cxr 2y ago
      > You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload You don't even have to do that, though. It suffices to say, "I'll wire these things up on Monday."
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  This is not a criticism of URLs per se, but I find it troubling that the mere act of visiting one is something that we have to warn people away from. It's like: > Don't eat moldy food, else you'll get sick (unless it's bleu cheese, yum) Ok, that sounds like good advice, and easy do follow. > Don't look in the direction of modly food, else you'll get sick That's unreasonable. What kind of madman wrote the rules for this universe?! When I try to imagine a better way, it usually disallows the referents of a URL-equivalent from changing after they're created--that way trust bestowed once can be reused without prompting the user a second time for the "same" thing. For that reason, I'm not a fan of placeholder URL's like you're describing. The instability of URLs to me feels like more bug than feature.
giantrobot 2y ago
I hate the "search on <whatever>" statements. 1. It triggers my "AOL Keyword" yuck response immediately. 2. It completely ignores the concept of search bubbles. The results you and I get when searching the same term can be wildly different. 3. URLs and hyperlinks are right there. Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. That way I can see your exact reference instead of wading through a bunch of reaction videos to the video you wanted me to see.
- lobsterthief 2y ago
  FWIW I’ve heard ad spots on NPR where a brand says “search for “my financial adviser” and click on Some Brand”. Obviously trying to bump up their rankings by increasing CTR for that term in Google Search. They don’t even need to say “Google it” because they know most people already will.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. The flaw there is that, equally, malicious actors can do the same and, often with today's obfuscated URLs, you have no idea which is which. Quick - which of these is the video about puppies and which is a shock video? 1. https://video.site/watch?v=SDKiaA3r8Ol https://video.site/watch?v=SDKiaA3r8Ol 2. https://video.site/watch?v=ilsAQIp091j https://video.site/watch?v=ilsAQIp091j
  - MaxBarraclough 2y ago
    Cybersecurity is a big topic, and issues of trust aren't exclusive to URLs. Search engines are often manipulated into showing malicious pages high in their listings. If you're communicating with someone you trust, it's better if they send you the URL directly.
veqq 2y ago
The walled gardens increasingly block URLs - FB blocks many sites for sharing copywrited content (even random blogs) - reddit blocks all dot ru, may archival sites, telegram links etc. etc. - twitter blocked some blogging platforms - also many smaller sites block discord (which is justified) Hopefully this will motivate people to leave them.
- simonw 2y ago
  Yeah, this is so frustrating. The contortions people have to go through on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and now increasingly Twitter to work around the "algorithm" punishing or forbidding links is infuriating. "Link in bio" culture is the reason companies like Linktree even exist! And good for them, they're providing a sadly necessary service.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    Likewise it's difficult to link to content within those platforms. But the reason they don't like external links is that If they can't easily follow, external links, they are more likely to shrug and keep scrolling, instead of doing something else. That means marginally more ad impressions shown.
  - cxr 2y ago
    Link-in-bio services would be a lot more useful if they accepted a link from the reader—the link of the item that referred them there because the platform it was on didn't allow direct-linking to off-site pages—and then returned the link that the author intended to convey there but was prevented from posting.
fragmede 2y ago
It's easy enough to tell someone to click on https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ, but how do you transfer that URL verbally, over a phone call or some other voice-only medium like podcasts with out resorting to an equally hard to memorize url shortener?
- emporas 2y ago
  In BTC, they have devised a way to transform the private key, to twelve words. I don't know how that technique is called or where on github it is, but there is for sure a way to for a YT url to be made into words.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    seed phrases are a thing, sure, but how is that more memorable than searching for what the podcast was talking about?
    - emporas 2y ago
      Well, twelve words can certainly be transferred verbally, even though the generated words are not that memorable. Encoding a link to a much better memorable scheme could be done through a url service which parses a web page through an LLM, generates some tags, and creates custom routing using the tags. Rails or a more modern tool like Actix-web can do that easily. For example i asked Llama-8B to suggest tags for this HN thread using the title and the first 2 comments, and it suggested: web, URLs, hyperlinks, online-identity, permanence, flexibility, referencing, resource-management, web-architecture. The user can select which tags better represent the link, and create custom routing as such: https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/ https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/
      - codetrotter 2y ago
        And then the web service that routes the links with those memorable words goes down and now all your links are dead all at once
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again. Oh, how I wish! Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it encroaches on their "attention territory". If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or censored for "promoting". More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more deeply. There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in systems that control expression.
- MaxBarraclough 2y ago
  Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as a blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post. From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste the relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. None of us are in the habit of following every link. Even if you do have to copy+paste in this way, at least the text you're copying from has a permanent home. The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contributing to the discussion. Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to try to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post. That's a bit like being in the thrall of an intense and interesting conversation and saying "sorry I have to go mail you the documents". It breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of a technology that was designed to overcome exactly that pitfall. > From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. True. And I do that often enough as well. In addition I want to give the reader a genuinely interesting link (which itself contains further well researched links to explore the topic. Again, that's what we built this technology for. > The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contribution to the discussion. Understood. And sometimes people aren't motivated to by hits. Crucially there's no mechanism for distinguishing the two and so conversation is stifled out of fear. > Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to t to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app. They certainly are, but do we want to emulate that and let HN become the same?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

cxr 2y ago

Two under-utilized properties of URLs are also that: - there's a near-infinite supply of them - they support forward declaration Together the practical upshot is that if you're having a conversation with someone or responding during the Q&A of a talk or whatever and you want to be able to say, "Yeah, we thought about that, and we have some information about it on our site—just visit acmeinitiative.example.com/skub," except that you haven't already written the /skub article yet, that doesn't preclude you from being able to say in the moment (i.e. live) that /skub is effective immediately now the designated handle for such an article, it's where the article will appear once you do write it, and it's how any interested party should retrieve it once it does appear—whenever that is. (The same goes for articles published by other people/organizations and other third-party resources that you want to reference—just mint a URL from your namespace on-the-fly and then whenever you get a chance, set up a redirect to whatever it is you wanted to link to.) There are so many recordings (podcasts episodes, etc.) that I've listened to involving smart, technical people who definitely control their own domains but don't think to take advantage of this. Usually they sort of mumble some description that you might be able to use to find whatever they're talking about, or they manage to only get half the words in the title wrong when they're trying to recall it for the host, and then you and every other interested listener has to individually squander time and attention if you want to track it down. It results in a huge waste of collective energy.

DelightOne 2y ago
The UX is not good enough yet. We would have to 1) show that it is reserved to people going on the link and 2) offer good/enough ways to be notified once the link becomes online and 3) need to know the likelihood of the link to actually work in the future based on prior commitment. AND I probably forgot a couple of issues.
- kevindamm 2y ago
  ...and URLs being forever cuts both ways. Want to reorganize your domain's structure? Better set up 301s to forward the old address, forever, and hope (or avoid) any overlap between the old schema and the new. Transfer of ownership? Well, all those hyperlinks from other sites don't know.
- csh0 2y ago
  I think the idea is that if you were recording a podcast it wouldn’t be live (I know the parent used the word live but I think they meant “live” during recording or in conversation while the episode is being created), so you are free to make references to soon to be declared URLs. You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload or publish your episode for your listeners.
  - cxr 2y ago
    > You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload You don't even have to do that, though. It suffices to say, "I'll wire these things up on Monday."
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
This is not a criticism of URLs per se, but I find it troubling that the mere act of visiting one is something that we have to warn people away from. It's like: > Don't eat moldy food, else you'll get sick (unless it's bleu cheese, yum) Ok, that sounds like good advice, and easy do follow. > Don't look in the direction of modly food, else you'll get sick That's unreasonable. What kind of madman wrote the rules for this universe?! When I try to imagine a better way, it usually disallows the referents of a URL-equivalent from changing after they're created--that way trust bestowed once can be reused without prompting the user a second time for the "same" thing. For that reason, I'm not a fan of placeholder URL's like you're describing. The instability of URLs to me feels like more bug than feature.

giantrobot 2y ago

I hate the "search on <whatever>" statements. 1. It triggers my "AOL Keyword" yuck response immediately. 2. It completely ignores the concept of search bubbles. The results you and I get when searching the same term can be wildly different. 3. URLs and hyperlinks are right there. Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. That way I can see your exact reference instead of wading through a bunch of reaction videos to the video you wanted me to see.

lobsterthief 2y ago
FWIW I’ve heard ad spots on NPR where a brand says “search for “my financial adviser” and click on Some Brand”. Obviously trying to bump up their rankings by increasing CTR for that term in Google Search. They don’t even need to say “Google it” because they know most people already will.
zimpenfish 2y ago
> Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. The flaw there is that, equally, malicious actors can do the same and, often with today's obfuscated URLs, you have no idea which is which. Quick - which of these is the video about puppies and which is a shock video? 1. https://video.site/watch?v=SDKiaA3r8Ol https://video.site/watch?v=SDKiaA3r8Ol 2. https://video.site/watch?v=ilsAQIp091j https://video.site/watch?v=ilsAQIp091j
- MaxBarraclough 2y ago
  Cybersecurity is a big topic, and issues of trust aren't exclusive to URLs. Search engines are often manipulated into showing malicious pages high in their listings. If you're communicating with someone you trust, it's better if they send you the URL directly.

veqq 2y ago

The walled gardens increasingly block URLs - FB blocks many sites for sharing copywrited content (even random blogs) - reddit blocks all dot ru, may archival sites, telegram links etc. etc. - twitter blocked some blogging platforms - also many smaller sites block discord (which is justified) Hopefully this will motivate people to leave them.

simonw 2y ago
Yeah, this is so frustrating. The contortions people have to go through on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and now increasingly Twitter to work around the "algorithm" punishing or forbidding links is infuriating. "Link in bio" culture is the reason companies like Linktree even exist! And good for them, they're providing a sadly necessary service.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  Likewise it's difficult to link to content within those platforms. But the reason they don't like external links is that If they can't easily follow, external links, they are more likely to shrug and keep scrolling, instead of doing something else. That means marginally more ad impressions shown.
- cxr 2y ago
  Link-in-bio services would be a lot more useful if they accepted a link from the reader—the link of the item that referred them there because the platform it was on didn't allow direct-linking to off-site pages—and then returned the link that the author intended to convey there but was prevented from posting.

fragmede 2y ago

It's easy enough to tell someone to click on https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ, but how do you transfer that URL verbally, over a phone call or some other voice-only medium like podcasts with out resorting to an equally hard to memorize url shortener?

emporas 2y ago
In BTC, they have devised a way to transform the private key, to twelve words. I don't know how that technique is called or where on github it is, but there is for sure a way to for a YT url to be made into words.
- fragmede 2y ago
  seed phrases are a thing, sure, but how is that more memorable than searching for what the podcast was talking about?
  - emporas 2y ago
    Well, twelve words can certainly be transferred verbally, even though the generated words are not that memorable. Encoding a link to a much better memorable scheme could be done through a url service which parses a web page through an LLM, generates some tags, and creates custom routing using the tags. Rails or a more modern tool like Actix-web can do that easily. For example i asked Llama-8B to suggest tags for this HN thread using the title and the first 2 comments, and it suggested: web, URLs, hyperlinks, online-identity, permanence, flexibility, referencing, resource-management, web-architecture. The user can select which tags better represent the link, and create custom routing as such: https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/ https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/
    - codetrotter 2y ago
      And then the web service that routes the links with those memorable words goes down and now all your links are dead all at once

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again. Oh, how I wish! Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it encroaches on their "attention territory". If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or censored for "promoting". More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more deeply. There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in systems that control expression.

MaxBarraclough 2y ago
Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as a blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post. From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste the relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. None of us are in the habit of following every link. Even if you do have to copy+paste in this way, at least the text you're copying from has a permanent home. The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contributing to the discussion. Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to try to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post. That's a bit like being in the thrall of an intense and interesting conversation and saying "sorry I have to go mail you the documents". It breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of a technology that was designed to overcome exactly that pitfall. > From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. True. And I do that often enough as well. In addition I want to give the reader a genuinely interesting link (which itself contains further well researched links to explore the topic. Again, that's what we built this technology for. > The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contribution to the discussion. Understood. And sometimes people aren't motivated to by hits. Crucially there's no mechanism for distinguishing the two and so conversation is stifled out of fear. > Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to t to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app. They certainly are, but do we want to emulate that and let HN become the same?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]