Reddit now tracks all outbound link clicks by default, existing users opted in
np.reddit.com
np.reddit.com
Did anyone really think websites weren't doing this? This is incredibly innocuous compared to other things.
[1] http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/google-tag-manager-tuto...
The ones against any kind of monetization at all are already vocal enough, let alone the people who would balk at anything that monetizes user data.
If you look at their change where they introduced affiliate link rewriting it's really surprising. They did it in a way that made sure they wouldn't affect any 3rd party apps, they gave everyone 2 ways to opt out, and didn't rewrite links that already had an affiliate code. And yet even with all of that, there was a ton of outcry and anger at the change.
Reddit as we know it won't be massively profitable, because the vocal users of reddit are so completely against any form of monetization.
There will always be vocal minority which will never be pleased, no matter what you do. And later they forget it and move to other thing. Sometimes you just have to carry on with your plan knowing that you will lose some users, but aiming to do better overall in the long turn.
It's important to listen to the users. What's even more important is knowing when to say 'no'.
Yeah, no matter what there will be naysayers, but the majority of comments in the announcement thread for the affiliate links thing were negative.
Combine that with the reddit demographic's love of a controversy (no matter how trumped up) and you have a ticking time bomb that makes mistakes hurt for much longer and much worse than most platforms.
Just look at their previous "algorithm change" fiasco. They changed the front page algo, and after about a week they changed it back because of outcry. For the next several months people continued to complain about how everything was worse now, and that they were lying about "reverting" the algorithm. It's insanity.
Reddit was successful in the early days due to the quality of the comments of its userbase. It got diluted after the user base expanded.
However, qualifying it as toxic only means that if you were head of Reddit, you would probably run it into the ground like Digg.
I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.
EDIT:
As much as I like bashing Reddit I feel like I need to mention something. Reddit is the UNDISPUTED best news source for large, breaking, news stories. Reddit's live threads are curated and crowd sourced feeds containing information from police scanners, News outlets, twitter feeds, and a variety of other sources. It's value is in its ability to display conflicting information instantly such that the viewer can get the clearest picture possible. This thread of today's Dallas shooting is a prime example [1].
https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...
Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.
The sane way to use Reddit is to log in, unsubscribe from everything that's by default, and add only things you are very interested in. Also go into your Settings and turn off all the suggested subreddits (and the outbound click tracking, surely).
Do that, and you can browse your niche technology news and computer game and magical-girl-anime subreddits in peace -- otherwise it's just a losing fight against clickbait popularity contests and flash mobs for justice.
> I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.
You're both talking about servers and difficulties with them.
The biggest issue was that we didn't have the budget (both money and manpower) to deal with scaling a global transaction system, which is just plain hard. Reddit gets almost as much traffic as eBay, but eBay has thousands of engineers and Reddit doesn't even have 100.
Back when I was there, the site worked well enough, there were only a few of us, and we spent about 50% of our time on spam and about 25% on community management. That didn't leave much time for scaling and performance. For context, we were serving a billion pages a month on a budget of $50K/mo.
Today they are making great progress in scalability because they finally have the budget to hire the people to make it great.
I was positively aware that they weren't doing it and noticed about an hour ago that they started doing it. If I noticed this change I'm sure that many other people noticed and many more are being subconsciously annoyed.
Thin ice Reddit, thin ice.
Although at their scale, I think things are very very different.
Even more annoying when the destination url is a PDF which you now can't copy the link to but only download.
I've been thinking it might be interesting to allow for easy hosting of Google proxies, like a one-click install on digitalocean that could be shared among a group of friends (~100 users at most).
> even though Chrome supports the <a> ping attribute that obviates the need for it (and which was presumably added to Chrome exactly for Google Search's own use-case)?
And that's one reason why I don't use Chrome.
There is so much wrong with a company adding features to their browser in order to facilitate special cases for their own website.
Isn't <a> ping good for the end user? Unless you disagree with any ability to track outbound clicks - in which case we can politely agree to disagree.
I don't see this as a special case at all - a substantial proportion of link shortener usage, for example, is not for link shortening, but because most of them offer analytics.
Which means you end up having to open the URL first yourself just to copy and share it. And that doesn't even always work, since URLs triggering downloads don't update the URL in the address field (at least in Firefox).
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I'm sharing it with you. Is this unusable? Did you not get to the news article I was sharing with you by clicking on the link? So what's your point?
Same reason that URL shorteners are bad UX. Source (creator of Delicious): http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
The redirect links are fairly easy to trim. The real URL is at the end. So in the worst case, just snip it out.
I'm sure there are browser extensions that will do it for you.
The real URL is at the end. So in the worst case,
just snip it out.
No you don't. They start out clean, but when you click or right click on the link, it changes.
But I just checked again, and you're partially correct. Some but not all links are replaced with the redirect on click or right click. If you browse with JavaScript disabled, some links are prepopulated as redirects, and others are not.
Google is a moving target.
https://ddg.gg (short URL)
[0] the search engine that doesn't track you
edit: i can't find a way to disable this behaviour in the settings either.
edit 2 : Strange. It doesn't seem to be doing it now. I could sworn i have seen it use redirect links on multiple occassions.
"You can circumvent that by right clicking and holding elsewhere then moving the mouse to the link, releasing and then copying."
User: gasdoves
When it comes to Google Analytics and etc, I really prefer having a plan in mind and tracking the key things I need to know about. Focus, improve, move on. As the time passes, you collect more data but at the same time, it's very usable and actionable.
And they've definitely lost users over this. Probably not enough to make them care, but it's still a considerable risk and definitely not something that you want to toy with, just because you can.
Reddit has a large community of technology savvy users what looks better "We started doing X that some of you may not like" vs "We updated our privacy policy"..few days later "They started doing X, burn them!".
I wish more companies would be smart.
It's not even in their announcements.
This message is only in /r/changelog, and going backwards they first introduced this 4 months ago, had to roll back and have been rolling it out again with other options.
This is not a nice way of introducing what is, to me, a fairly large privacy change.
Of course, I imagine the big win here would be people not logged in, so even registering to opt out would be a win for reddit.
It's not like you can pay facebook to respect your privacy.
Arguably, this is a massive loss of revenue to Facebook as click rate goes down year over year. It's a tradeoff for them, too. I would certainly pay $10/month to not see all the shit they thrown in my timeline, to opt out of all the bullshit features I don't want (ads, "memories" which seem to pop up daily with no way to opt out, friend celebrations, annoying suggestions, sports scores, non-chronological timelines, etc etc). Instead, I'm forced to limit my likes to non-commercial entities and I use heavy user stylesheet customizations to remove all the other crap. Facebook just loses $10/month this way while being unable to make money (at least via serving ads; I'm sure my information is fair game to sell to ad networks).
Of course, if this were popular, the ads would accelerate in decreasing value. Which is probably why Facebook or other ad networks don't want to start this trend.
Also, privacy here is privacy from reddit and the government, not privacy from an unprivileged person. I think the distinction is valuable here.
That's all well and good, until someone posts a photo of you, tags you in a message, or embeds its tracking widgets on another page you visit, and you become its product despite not being its user.
Half the software you use is probably hemorrhaging info to Google Analytics, buried in a checkbox in the settings.
It's a shame the wording on the banner doesn't make it's purpose clear.
So you get these incredibly articulate replies which move the conversation forward but people "dislike" so wind up hidden with -5. Which is treated no differently to pure trolling and nonsense.
I can name another website with that same issue...
A like/dislike system is fine. But you need three buttons, like/dislike, and "bad." No amount of dislikes should ever make a comment hidden or punish the account, that's what "bad" or "flag" should be for.
Heck even the karma total on Reddit encourages an echo chamber, effectively reinforcing the idea that downvotes are "bad" and you have less "worth" with less of them.
In any case, I'm much more hesitant to down vote here just because I disagree with an opinion than on Reddit, and I think a lot of people do the same. To me, that higher standard for what's both considered a good comment and what's acceptable are what makes HN more useful for interesting discussion. There are probably 5-8 aspects of comments that could be voted on, but what we see with these singular rating systems is that the community forms around what is acceptable and what is not, and people generally fall in line with the community norms (both in submissions and in their own rating of others). Reddit is interesting in that I've noticed that this community norm is somewhat malleable based on the subreddit. /r/gifs and /r/programming have a distinctly different feel in the comments.
I don't think any of this sentence is true. Getting [dead]ed was an experiment a long time ago which afaict ended quickly. And bans for non-spam-related reasons are obviously quite public.
Further, I believe the GP was referring to HN, which has, like reddit, a one-dimensional voting system (for the most part).
With like/dislike and flag, you could restrict them from replying or voting on replies which they flagged. Meaning they cannot argue with someone they just flagged, if they want to argue all they can do is "dislike" (which is how dislike SHOULD be used).
It's not that most of the people are rational and self-critical - many people think that their personal opinions are right and others are nonsense :)
You can't design system on the assumption that people are rational.
There will always be issues with anything like voting, but it's an interesting approach.
HN also stops you from downvoting someone who replies to you, I think, which is another good idea.
One of the common complaints around here are about "anonymous downvoters", since the other user is often left wondering why they were downvoted. Should we enforce this as a rule?
I always considered "bad"==flag, no?
You aren't supposed to up/downvote something because you like or dislike it. According to Reddiquette:
"If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it."
I'd say I want to hack on a federated Reddit clone, but looking at the state of federated social networking, I already feel it'd be dead in the water.
Having to opt-out of tracking feels like another nail in the coffin.
But I take your point about echo-chambers. That is one of the reasons I lurk and post here.
It's full of racism and bigotry and it's not nearly as active as Reddit, but it's something.
That got turned off immediately.
Pinterest does something similar, which is why I blocked it in Google Personal Blocklist. The best way of encouraging people to join your site is to show them what you have to offer, it isn't to put up a wall and make them jump through hoops.
Part of Reddit's early success was due to how accessible the content was and how easy they made it to sign up (e.g. three fields, no email address required). That is not something they should throw by the wayside for short term metrics.
Reddit is moving towards more concrete, less anonymous identification of its users, a more advertiser-friendly environment, and a ramp-up in monetization.
Not that people should be surprised. Reddit started as some magical place that got really fun as it reached critical mass. But the business realities of that in terms of funding and everything else eventually will ruin that party. Taking outside investment was one of the final nails in the coffin in that regard because that investment doesn't happen without a significant expected return.
The question is, how quickly can they boil all the frogs in the pot without the majority of them jumping out, and how quickly can they keep filling the pot with new frogs once it is already boiling.
Saying you will never come back to a site that is literally doing the thing that allows them to understand their own business is super weird; it suggests you may not know, or never decided to look up, how many sites already mark which internal and outbound links you're clicking. After all, any site you're on can trivially check which links you click with a JavaScript one liner loaded on DOM completion that sends off a network even before the link is allowed to resolve (for instance: any websites that use google analytics, a free service for gathering site metrics)
And transmitting that data into another country – as done with Google Analytics – is even more of a problem.
If a site does that, either I write a filter to prevent it from running any JS, or I’ll stop using it.
I run a site based on links, and I specifically do not make this intrusive choice. I am aware of google analytics and no, they cannot make that js roundtrip because I am also blocking js from loading from their site.
Do not assume ignorance on hacker news or you will appear ignorant yourself.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-cto-marty-weiner-on...
Also, you apparently cannot (yet) delete [2] the data reddit already surreptitiously collected.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/help/privacypolicy?v=33a67dd2-e2c6-11...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3tlcil/we_ar...
[2] https://m.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4rl5to/outbound_cl...
It's not as if Reddit is the only major site doing this kind of thing (hello, search engines) but that doesn't make it any less creepy, IMHO.
Why is this feature being prioritized and snuck in, while the most significant announcement from their last raise (that users will receive 10% of the raise) seems to have been all but forgotten?
It really puts this interview with Steve in some context: https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=13m50s
Edit: I suppose it's a dumb question because the answers can only be one-sided.
That would be stretching the definition of "valid".
You would get statistics about a group of "I don't care I'm being tracked" people, which is surely statistically different than the group of "I do care about being tracked" people. At the very least, they would have significantly different click rates (and involvement) with the subject like "how to disable web site tracking", but I suspect it's deeper than that -- e.g., they will have statistically significant involvement with security related subjects.
Why do they do this? To somehow extract something from the associates of a Google user? I think it borders on scummy.
Would it gratify intellectual or voyeuristic curiosity?
I'm glad someone noticed it, though!
(Bounces seem like they should be quick, but often seem not to be -- and if I'm sitting there with a bounce page open rather than the article I want to read when I've just run out of reception, it's super lame (in my mind: infinitely lame).)
From a statistics perspective, I often find an article elsewhere and then come here to vote for it (or submit it) -- so it's inaccurate from that perspective.
Ultimately: indifferent.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...
I know a few sites that do it (including Google and DDG); so I guess some people feel it's the best way to do it?
Edit: Ping doesn't look to be in the HTML5 spec anymore, maybe that's got something to do with it?
https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/single-page.ht...
Interesting, I didn't know that. And now that I look at it, ping is only supported in Chrome and Opera, which explains it even better. I would still expect there to be some other alternatives to bounce addresses, though.
Don't change it, please.
HN is "tracking" you when it routes a comment or an upvote anywhere other than /dev/null. Following a link to a story would be a similar interaction with the application, which also sends you to the article.
I strongly disagree. I would be quite proud of myself for finding a hack to maintain expected functionality in that case. As a user of the web I constantly mouse over links to see where they will take me. It annoys me when that's broken.
Genuine question, in case the tone comes across snarky.
It matters to me less that you know what I clicked, it matters to me more that your site is useful.
(FWIW, I often read something really interesting and then go "I wonder if this is on HN" and go over here to find the comments, so that would count as voting for a story or reading the comments without actually clicking on it. IDK if that's normal)
In-house solutions for analytics : makes sense.
If the implementation is lightweight, robust, and not leaky I'm not paranoid enough to care.
There is only one vote button, but there are (at least) two distinct things I use it for:
1) I've read the story. I'm upvoting the story because I think people would be interested.
2) I haven't read this particular story, but I've recently read about this topic elsewhere. I've looked thru the comments and the comments are interesting. I'm upvoting because I think people would be interested in the comments.
I often learn far more about a topic from the comments here than from the story itself.
As for things that drove me away, this Reddit-post sums it up pretty well: https://np.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_lik...
Even if it's overall an innocuous thing, I find it shady that an opt-out tracking system is not announced publicly to Reddit. Were they trying to hide it until someone found it? Seems it would have been smarter for them to control the message around this option than let their users do so.
1. Why do you think deleting and creating a new account helps? The data isn't account-bound, it's aggregate.
2. Do you realize there's an option in the account settings to disable it? Deleting your account only serves to reset that option.
3. If you're against reddit's behaviour, why do you continue using the site?
It's funny, your post feels pretty representative of what I've come to realize is "privacy extremism". In the name of privacy, refusing to tolerate or even understand what websites, companies etc are doing. It's counterproductive to your own cause. I mean, even if you thought you were doing yourself a favour deleting your own accounts, you're a fool if you think it's not possible to associate your old accounts to your new ones.
Once the trolls there start stalking you simply for making comments, you'll understand.
This kind of unethical behavior is going to bite the industry in the long run. Get informed consent first.
How so? It seems like this could quite easily improve reddit's content. If you're so ornery to complain about tracking outbound link clicks you probably have already blocked said tracking so it is a moot point. The rest of users (and indeed also the ornery ones!) will benefit from better content.
When I explain modern tracking practices to normal, non-technical people that have never heard of it before, on e of the most common responses is, "Why aren't they in jail?"
A lot of people feel unauthorized tracking should be a criminal offense. They currently feel powerless to do anything about it. In the long term, breeding resentment will eventually result in people finding a way to strike back. This is how bad regulation happens.
> improve reddit's content
Reddit can ask first. Getting informed consent is not hard (opt-in). Are basic manners and politeness that hard of a concept?
> already blocked said tracking
That requires specific technical knowledge. Privacy should not be limited to a technical priesthood.
> ornery
Maybe you should stop labeling people that would like to preserve privacy as "ornery".
In my honest opinion, if you are using a website that I built, you've given implied consent that I can record your actions while on my site. As long as I can't trace it back to an individual, and can only view it in aggregate, I don't see the problem.
Then make them care.
> track with ga and gtm
That is a far bigger problem than advertising. I'm fine with sites that track the pages they serve, because that is local only. The problem is when these per-site events are aggregated into a single database.
If someone has the event log of every website you visit, not only do they have your entire reading list, they also have a very accurate picture of your pattern-of-life. Google can probably estimate e.g. when you sleep or the length of your commute simply from the timestamps of the GA events they can correlate to your account.
I see your point, but realistically I don't think any organization could/would ever do this. Outside of NSA vs. Snowden type cases, but I guess that is where it really counts.
Now ask in any privacy-focused community whether you should block Google Analytics and you'll almost certainly be laughed out for even considering that you should not.
Add to that that there is already an industry emerging around privacy. Many anti-virus programs already today ship with anti-tracking features. This industry is very much interested in telling their users about user tracking. And they won't give the fluff-explanation of "Yes, you are being tracked, but it's for your own good." like Google and friends are trying to establish.
Also don't like tracking in general for privacy reasons, but it's a minor concern next to performance.
You are just a damn website! I do want every website considering itself so important that it needs to subsume duties of the OS and present them with its own branding.
But "the internet"? Straight hubris.
I'm just not sure how they could seriously work on this, and in the end say "Yes. This is such an improvement, we will force everyone to use it".
What sort of internal regime causes that level of denial?