Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

Claiming that the urchin URL parameters are "one of the malicious effects of URL shortening" is confusing cause and effect. Urchin's software dates from at least 2003, and was already massively distributed by Google in 2005, while URL shortening did not catch on in any meaningful way until the advent of Twitter, which was not founded until 2006.

The very long URLs created by Urchin and other web analytics was one of the problems that URL shorteners were created to solve.

Whether short URLs have a "malicious" effect is a topic for a different discussion, but whatever the effects of URL shortening, Urchin parameters are not among them.

Urchin parameters certainly do make it harder to detect duplicate URLs, which would be pinboard's primary problem with them. However, so lots of other URL parameters like sessions, landing page refs, etc.. Urchin's are just the most common ones.

[Disclosure: I work for awe.sm, which provides social media analytics using, amongst other methods, short URLs]

I'm not arguing that URL shorteners came first, but rather that their widespread use is what has enabled this kind of URL crapification to become so pervasive.

[Disclosure: I hope your entire product category dies]

Wow. That's a little rude.

I'm arguing that URL shorteners have had nothing to do with the popularity of Google Analytics, which is the source of urchin parameters. The dominance of Google and the massive profit incentive around accurately tracking adwords and adsense is what's driving that. Consumers don't care what their URLs look like, so it doesn't matter whether URL shorteners obfuscate them.

I recognize that shortened URLs are troublesome for a bookmarking service, but they are hardly insurmountable. I'm not sure I understand why you'd have so much hate for us.

(And for the record, URL shortening is not our primary product)

What he's saying is that, because url shorteners hide the Urchin crap, it has allowed it to become more pervasive, since most people don't see the Urchin crap until it's hidden far to the right in the browser.

Couldn't you say the same thing about an ordinary hyperlink on a page? I see the text of the link and even less of the URL than you see in the address bar in the 64 char preview at the bottom of the browser when I hover. It's only a very small percentage of the population that copies the destination URL and strips out unnecessary query parameters. The URL shorteners just an inferior version of regular anchor tags...

Shortened URLs are also troublesome for anyone who likes clicking on links, due to the propensity for URL shorteners to run out of money and die, breaking tens of thousands of links.

Welp, now I know another service not to use. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Why? Because he doesn't like URL shorteners?

No; because he seems to be convinced that the advertising-funded revenue model is the only viable source of funding for content providers.

I can think of quite a few other support frameworks for content creators -- some within the capitalist system, some outside it.

(My take is that almost all advertising sucks, from a consumer point of view, because it's designed to steal the consumer's attention from the item that drew it in the first place. At its worst, it becomes as unwelcome as spam. After all, we've only got 168 hours in any given week to pay attention to stuff: ads steal the only thing from us that money can't buy, and that's time.)

Would you mind linking to some resources about alternative revenue models? I've never been a fan of ads and I'n curious as to other viable alternatives.

I pay via Readability and ( while I'm no expert) I think that is a good balance between the content producers need to feed their kids and my aversion to irrelevant ads.

Might want to change that to "he (eropple)" there. I started typing out an enraged response here before I figured out that you were talking about him, not idlewords.

Ah thank you - that completely threw me!

At this point I should probably just stop talking, but I don't see how my comments indicate that I think advertising is the only way for content providers to make money. I said it was a very popular way, and that popularity has affected the way URLs are formed.

No; I don't much like URL shorteners myself. I will avoid his products because he's a dink. There's no reason to mock somebody because they work for a company you don't like.

Content creators need analytics and that is not going to die.

I saw URL shorteners first in a paper magazine, the articles about Internet provided the links in that format (tinyurl.com), much easier to write in a computer keyboard.

Yes, we just want free content, no strings attached. There must be no way anyone could ever benefit even from distributing free stuff, because that's how entitled we are.

We pay for content one way or another. At this point money would be the least painful of alternatives, if only it were an alternative.

If only more people were willing. I'm 100% positive that most current ad-based free content providers would like nothing more than to charge for their content and get rid of the ads.

I think the argument is that url shorteners hide this types of URLS which has led to them being used more often since they fly under peoples radars.

Sounds reasonable to me.

It doesn't sound reasonable to me, and for obvious reasons I spend quite a lot of time thinking about URLs and how people interact with them.

The truth is that outside of nerd circles most people don't even understand URLs, far less care whether they have extra parameters in them. Major browsers are considering getting rid of the URL bar entirely. The tidiness of URLs is therefore of almost zero concern to major online publishers, but accurate analytics is, which is why UTM tracking is so popular.

It's not just tidiness. There's also a valid privacy concern.

These parameters have nothing to do with serving the content the user wants and are only there to track users and behavior and are metadata about the real url that's attached like a parasite. I understand the value for content providers, but I think stripping them off for archival purposes is appropriate.

I do too! It's absolutely the right behaviour for a service like pinboard, and it's even the right behaviour from Google's perspective, since any clicks on that link will be from pinboard, and not whatever the original source was listed in the UTM parameters.

Exactly these parameters are the ones helping webmasters identify what the user wants. Knowing what pages are popular, where the users come from and what acquisition channels can you use and at what costs in order to bring eye-balls to your content influence directly what content area is going to be invested into and expanded by the content providers, which makes them do exactly what the user wants.

In a world without analytics you have tons of crappy content written or created at the whip of an executive who thinks she's good at guessing market demand (and nobody in the company can prove her wrong scientifically speaking before the job is done). That content will prove to be a failure when it's launched in let's say 9 out of 10 cases, which means 9 bankrupt projects, 10 times less interesting content on the web at 10 times higher costs of production, which in turn leads to less competition, higher prices (paywalls anyone?), reduced rate of learning/innovation etc.

I have a balanced view on the issue and I know the pros and cons of each side, including the privacy issues involved for everyone when surfing the web. But I'm sad when I see remarks as "I hope your product dies" or when someone chooses to blatantly represent just one side of the story.

Nobody is suggesting we abolish analytics as a practice, but it's misrepresenting the issues to suggest that content providers will die a sad death if they lose out on whatever benefits those querystring params provide.

Content providers already have feedburner for rss metrics (also, now by google) not to mention google analytics (nee urchintracker) and good ol' fashioned server access logs (which you can analyze with urchin proper (or mint, or what have you)).

I can see from a gut-reaction standpoint how you could write what you did, but aside from gawker (who notoriously uses analytics, c.f.[1]), how many legitimate content providers use analytics as anything other than a rough barometer for trends? The problems you describe are problematic for certain types of tabloid publishers (drudge report, ny post, etc.), but they are hardly addressed by a handful of querystring parameters.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_...

> how many legitimate content providers use analytics as anything other than a rough barometer for trends?

Nowadays it's built into Adwords, so the answer is anybody that sets up conversion tracking in his Adwords account.

More details: Google provides a tool called conversion optimizer[1]: it's enough to put a tracking code on one of your objective pages (the purchase page, the signup page etc) and Adwords will use machine learning to see the analytics for ads that convert well to your objective (what keywords did they use in Google, what locations are they coming from etc). This way, you can stop paying money for keywords with 20 clicks and 0 conversions, and instead you can raise your ad bids on those keywords performing well (i.e. 5 clicks and 3 conversions). The publisher is happy (more conversions, less clicks, less money), Google is happy (better targetting means less impressions used means more impressions remaining in the inventory to be sold to others for additional income), the customers are happy (publishers with lower customer acquisition costs can pour more money into the actual content/product).

[1] http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/howitworks...

In a world with analytics you have content farms.

"these parameters are the ones helping webmasters identify what the user wants."

That's a completely one sided and biased portrayal. They also help webmasters manipulate the psychology of users, hinder privacy, make an open web more difficult, etc, etc.

Also, if stripping the utm parameters are supposedly going to make it easier to dedup urls, why not just make the deduping logic strip them before running? So that argument is not fully thought out either. Of course, that doesn't make the conclusion invalid, it just means that this point cannot rationally be used to support it.

Because it's not just going to compare URLs; he might well index by that column and compare hashes or something. And doesn't want to store two copies of each URL - decrapified and normal.

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