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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Is this some sort of infosec performance art? This seems extremely inadvisable for users or the person running the site. What if someone posts something illegal in the jurisdiction of the viewer or a link to a site with an embedded exploit?

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It's no more dangerous than clicking on any shortened URL.

People click on shortened URLs ? Why would you do that ?

Well, that could happen on any website that you visit. IMO it does not make a difference whether you know the link before you click it or not, because you still don't know what you will get. But I am thinking about implementing some sort of virus/malware scanning.

By the way, URLRoulette has a disclaimer that says

"Use at your own risk, the internet is a dangerous place!!"

Is it worse than clicking random links on Reddit, other than maybe you can't see the url first?

Not seeing the URL is an incredibly huge difference, on average.

Also you have zero context and no hive-mind to check the link for you ahead of time.

I dunno...you have plenty of context from my point of view. It's a site with the word "roulette" in it that tells you what it's going to do: "Submit to be redirected to the previous visitor's URL!"

I knew it was likely to throw me to the wolves.

Well in GP you asked if there was any difference than clicking links on Reddit. I think you've found one: outside of /new (and even then rarely), posts on Reddit will not throw you to the wolves.

Generalizing about Reddit is hard.

There are plenty of subreddits where outbound links are dangerous or offensive.

Even one where they are almost guaranteed to have a 50/50 chance of being so.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FiftyFifty/

I feel like every time I leave a comment on HN that is 98% true, someone comes a long to helpfully inform me of the remaining 2%.

Sorry man, but that sort of thing just drives me nuts! Maybe I should paste a signature onto my posts. Something like "I estimate this comment to be 93 +/- 5% accurate. Please inform me of inaccuracies only if they fall out of those bounds." :)

Heh. I see what you mean, but that wasn't the intention. I'm not a reddit regular, but I know it's got plenty of dark places. I just don't get the uproar of OMG, something called "xyzroulette" that says it will send me to random places is dangerous. It doesn't seem deceptive or unexpected, that's the comparison I was trying to make.

Maybe I should have compared to outbound links on 4chan.

Yes: links on redding or many other sources come with a degree of trust.

No risk, no fun ;)

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