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Comment by osobo | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the digital naiveté of the nineties. Nowadays, cool URLS get changed on purpose so you have to enter the platform through the front instead of bouncing off your destination.

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And they get loaded down with query string fields for analytics. I kill those with https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

I keep checking to see when this add-on will get approved to Firefox Android's anointed list

Good thing I still keep the version pinned at 68!

If you are using Firefox Nightly, you can install arbitrary add-ons (though quite a number of them don't work due to UI difference, container doesn't work too) now after going though some steps: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

I wonder if there is a similar extension that leaves in the UTM parameters but fills them with curse words and other sophomoric junk data.

Good idea, but risky if not done right or not adopted by many people. You'd be increasing your specificity and therefore the ability to track you.

Good point. If you’re the only user with utm_origin=boogers&utm_medium=poop, it’ll be trivial to connect you between websites. It’s all automated, so there’s slim to no chance of making a server admin chuckle while checking the logs, unfortunately.

What's happening with this project? The rules repo hasn't been updated for months even with several PRs

I'm not aware of anyone doing this on purpose. It's bad for bookmarks, it's bad for SEO, bad for internal linking, and external linking.

URLs change because systems change.

A proposed solution to this: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Characterizing TBL as naive is absurd. He was right. And the URLs you describe are anything but cool.

I'm fairly sure the parent was joking and in full agreement with you. Just so this isn't a point out the joke post, a few years ago I saw a HN post from a bunch of people who used print to PDF, and pdfgrep as a bookmarking solution. It doesn't solve the original problem, but it does act a a coping strategy for when content goes missing. I've been using it for a good while now and it's been real useful already.

Fantastic way to lose your traffic though.

Someone follows a link, gets a 404 or main page and they're gone.

It's not traffic they are after, but monetization. The traffic that does not monetize only costs money.

Sigh. I remember when people used to put up websites for fun.

Also when example.com/2010/10/10/article-title redirects to the homepage m.example.com

Up there with the Netiquette. I'd love a timeline where this matters, but this ship has sailed long, long ago.

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