Hacker News Reader

Not supporting it means sites without tracking have better user experience. Now tracking is natively supported, everyone can just start doing tracking without any of the disadvantages.

View on HN

That argument would carry weight if you could point to sites that deliberately avoid outbound link tracking because of the impact on the user experience. I've never heard of any.

That's not what GP was saying. They were saying that given two websites, one that doesn't track and one that does, the one that doesn't would have a better user experience as a side effect, which would give it a competitive advantage in this "department" over the one that does track. So, all things being equal, users would choose the one that doesn't track for the simple virtue of it giving them a better experience.

This argument appears multiple times in this thread. However, realistically I've never seen a mainstream website that was drastically disadvantaged by their tracking mechanisms. I'm concerned that a lot of the tech savvy people who are making this claim may be working on severely outdated machines for which this makes a difference. With even the cheapest Dell computer sold today, it doesn't really matter, which is why everyone is tracking everywhere. I'm not a huge fan of ping, but the idea that websites are going to choose not to track with JavaScript based on the bad UX on a years old Core 2 Duo is just absurd. The economic incentive you are imagining does not exist, thus ping isn't truly eliminating a critical UX difference between tracked and untracked websites.

TL;DR ITT: "Link auditing / ping will eliminate the disadvantages of tracking!" - Ad Industry and sites that serve tracking: "What disadvantages?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com