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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

I'm stunned they weren't already doing this. It takes all of 30 seconds [1] to track this and is /incredibly/ useful, especially on a site that's used largely for outbound links. I have outbound link tracking set up for every client and personal website. Same with email address clicks, button clicks, file downloads, etc.

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...

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Given that they always had the occasional, well, quite frequent actually, "all our servers are busy" problem, while having a monetization problem (meaning investing in infrastructure isn't something decided lightly), I find it perfectly reasonable. Or do you have a concrete - and I mean concrete monetization plan for that data? Not just an "idea", it should be as real as the cost of creating and maintaining the additional server(s) for tracking (even more) stuff, and also why it's more important than finally solving their "busy servers" problem. Everything sounds easy from a high-level management perspective. Until you actually have to do it and can't just wave hundreds of "details" aside.

That is a good point. I forget how small of a team they have and their existing/significant problems. I guess I should be more amazed at reddit's lack of .. success? They have so many users and so much engagement and yet they tried to monetize with a 3rd part affiliate link program. I suppose data isn't something they could competently use.

Users and engagement don't always make for profit unfortunately (or even revenue for that matter!).

You also have to take into account the average reddit user.

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.

But people are vocal against pretty much every significant change, aren't they? Think of all the times when Facebook iterated and change the format of the profile.

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'.

But reddit's "Vocal Minority" is much larger, and much more vocal than most. Almost to the point that it might actually approach the majority of active contributors.

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.

But aren't these horribly entitled and grumpy users... toxic?

I'd say so, but when they make up a not insignificant amount of your userbase, can you afford to just ignore them?

If 60% of your users don't want your company to make any money, maybe you need 60% fewer users.

I think that Reddit tends to have a bit higher level of users than the typical site. The mods of each group spend a lot of time curating the content - unpaid. Most users and Reddit itself know that pissing off the majority of this group that actually produces their product for free could have negative consequences, and they'd end up like Digg without much warning. It seems that Reddit's way forward is not with ads or affiliate links, but paid content in the form of up voted articles and comments. It's becoming quite noticeable.

Are they toxic if they are the primary reason the website exists?

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.

What do you class as success. More users or more money.

I'm fairly certain most of Reddit's server problems came from database R/W operations. If you look at some of the metrics they've put out recently you'll see things like "queued upvotes/comments/messages" suggesting that they now heavily queue them. They also cache SUPER aggressively, very noticeable on large threads like those for sporting events where you can refresh a page and not see any updates for several minutes.

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].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/live/x7xfgo3k9jp7

Reddit also gets it wrong. They blamed a completely unrelated person (who had killed himself) for the Boston bombing, which is now a meme ("We did it Reddit!"), and even today a photo of a black man in army camo and holding an M16 was falsely claimed to be a shooter.

Absolutely it can be dangerous, such as the use of police scanners (which will often broadcast uncorroborated information).

That photo today was published by the Dallas PD, it wasn't a reddit thing.

https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...

Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.

> 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.

And do subscribe to /r/cats to get your daily dose of cat.

http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg

Completely off-topic here

    > I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.

I don't see the point of your reply, since it doesn't counter or even remotely relate to anything I wrote. It certainly wasn't about whether humans or machines are there limiting factor.

"doesn't... even remotely relate"

You're both talking about servers and difficulties with them.

Yeah... if you use enough abstraction an apple is like an orange. I can't argue on that basis.

As one of those talent, I have to respectfully disagree. First of all, R/W to the database was solved pretty early on. We had queues many years ago for the writes and tons of read slaves for the reads. Also, the servers that serve comments and listings were not the same ones that took in votes and comments. It was most definitely a "throw servers at it" problem, with a few bottlenecks on caching that were solved as they came up.

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.

It's an extra redirect. It's an incremental deterioration of user experience, the first of many to come under the vc drum beat.

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.

Unsurprisingly, and just like with their affiliate link set up, they did it poorly. You can track links with a tiny bit of js and no redirect.

Although at their scale, I think things are very very different.

I'm showing my age here but I remember when Google started doing it. It still annoys me because I can't Right Click->Copy Link and get a proper url for the link.

The way google does it is really sneaky, they show you the url when you hover over it but copy the URL and it is something unusable.

Even more annoying when the destination url is a PDF which you now can't copy the link to but only download.

FWIW, startpage (like scroogle.org before it) re-enables the behavior that is so familiar to most web-knowledgeable people. Startpage is just a Google proxy.

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).

Interesting: it looks to switch out the value for the href on mouse down...

Reddit does the same thing.

I don't understand why they do it this way. If they're using javascript to replace the value anyway, why not just leave the value alone, and capture the data they want behind the scenes with javascript? What does running the traffic through a redirect get them that javascript itself cannot?

well, i guess if the click triggers a page reload, the onclick-async event won't fire (or at least complete).

Do they still bother to do this in Chrome, 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)?

I don't know, I don't use Chrome.

> 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.

> 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.

Even if you disagree with the ability to track outbound clicks, ping would be good as if it becomes the main way of tracking clicks you'd be able to stop tracking by turning it off. When people do tracking by rewriting links server-side, on the other hand, you don't have an easy out.

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.

The url that you copy is not unusable, it's a redirect url.

But that does make it unusable for anything but directly posting it into the address field of your own browser window.

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).

Lets try.

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?

It's unusable. Before I clicked the link I couldn't tell if it was going to take me to chicagotribune.com (it does) or go*tse.cx.

"before you clicked" the link you haven't used it.

I'd argue that link user experience starts before you actually click a link. Maybe when you're deciding whether or not to click?

Same reason that URL shorteners are bad UX. Source (creator of Delicious): http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

I'd argue that the vast majority of users have no idea what you're talking about.

That's my problem. I cannot in good faith give this kind of link to my friends.

If you are not logged in to Google, you get clean links. It's ironic that they treat less engaged users preferably.

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.

I hope you remember all your character URL-encodings so you can snip out http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.54.3597%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf right.

It's just hexadecimal ASCII. This is within our capabilities.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

> If you are not logged in to Google, you get clean links. It's ironic that they treat less engaged users preferably.

No you don't. They start out clean, but when you click or right click on the link, it changes.

It had been a long time since I checked. I don't use Google often.

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.

Use DuckDuckGo [0] and you would get the proper URL for the link.

https://duckduckgo.com/

https://ddg.gg (short URL)

[0] the search engine that doesn't track you

Incorrect. I just tried it right now. duckduckgo has the same redirect behaviour as Google.To test this, middle-click a search result, ie open the link in a new tab.

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.

Read this on Reddit. Haven't tried as I'm on mobile:

"You can circumvent that by right clicking and holding elsewhere then moving the mouse to the link, releasing and then copying."

User: gasdoves

Well, because Reddit depends on their community. And they have a pretty big demographic of geeks, nerds etc., who understand what this tracking means and who will get pissed off about it.

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.

Em, yes and no. I am not a huge fan of tracking as much as possible for the sake of tracking because it's possible with no plan how to utilize the data in mind.

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.

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