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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit.

But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling.

Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.

I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.

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> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular

It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.

Reddit has become about rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site. Following a link and actually reading an article for 5-10 minutes isn’t as exciting as rapidly consuming a few videos, a few screenshots, and a few self posts along with the top comments for the most interesting ones.

Even on HN it’s common to read comments where the author obviously hasn’t bothered to read the linked article. Many people are more interested in the social and discussion aspects of these sites than being redirected somewhere to read an article for several minutes straight.

That's accurate more or less. Reddit has become IRC with retention. The value is in the interaction, not the aggregation, at least not anymore.

When was it not about that? The content that got the most attention was always things that were easy to consume. Images with a small amount of text slapped on top were dominant when I frequented Reddit 10 years ago. The only way you could escape that was a well moderated subreddit that enforced quality content.

Yeah, my wife scrolls /r/all, expands posts (some of them text posts), and closes them, possibly clicking into the comments to discuss.

If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off

It's nice to have videos, images, and short articles in a familiar layout

I know I'm much more likely to click a recipe link if it's a self-post, because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story

> because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story

Thank SEO for that.

Thank Google for that.

I went down that (thought) rabbit hole and it was a bit sad to realize the cat and mouse game at play, where content creators on sites (such as recipe sites) are optimizing for search results, and intentionally burying the searched for content in a way that the search engine has difficulty optimizing for, so promote their own ads (more scroll -> more ads). Then once people begin obtaining the info they want from said sites, it becomes (presumably) even more difficult for a search engine to automatically filter it out -- or even decide if it should.

I don't know how to solve the problem at scale, but would love a site that preferentially de-ranks content based on the ads it has. That is, rather than me using an ad blocker, I'd like the search engine to do that for me. That probably exists, but then it also has to be as good as Google which isn't easy. I default to duck duck go, but often (say, 10%) I can't find something I am looking for there, go to Google, and its a top 3 result. Tricky set of problems here but I'm optimistic five years from now I may be happier with my search engine of choice.

I recently came across the search engine Marginalia [1], which ranks web sites based on the ratio of text to HTML tags (more text, better score), with a very heavy penalization for JavaScript.

[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

I blame online advertising, and in particular CPM payouts, which incentivise extraneous content to drive up impressions.

> If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off

This is equal parts funny and hurting my soul...

> If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off

is it partially because new reddit is a SPA that just craps itself when going to a external link and loses where you were?

I have that exact frustration. I now consciously just close reddit.

I have deleted my reddit accounts a few months ago. One of the best decisions.

Oh, no, she, like me, is a dyed-in-the-wool RES user who uses the old style

It’s mind boggling - the primary feature of Reddit being a link aggregator - and clicking on a link breaks everything. Literally, Reddit will say “I’ve broken, please reload me” if you try to “go back” from the link you just clicked on.

I still use old reddit and Apollo on mobile.

It has to do more with every other platform being hostile to embedded videos, especially on mobile. Nothing plays inline anymore.

All problems that are instantly solved by opening links(even within the same site) in separate tabs. One of the many reasons I never use Reddit on the phone.

Too bad websites are even making this inconsistent and broken, by using cursed webdesign to a degree that the browser can't figure out if an element is interactive before the user clicks on it.

I disagree

The whole point is having everything

a) in the context of the feed b) stripped of extraneous crap

Opening links in new tabs accomplishes neither of those things

I've never been able to make myself use Reddit, so maybe this is an obvious point, but that sounds like a fairly apocalyptic "whole point" for the exercise of an attention span. Which, I realize, is the goal, but is probably not great for the people thus enmeshed, no?

I doubt it has anything to do with attention span. I have a very short attention span, and the only reason I tend to prefer consistent interfaces is because many websites still don't support dark mode. I'd say the attention span is actually the reason I do not use the reddit redesign, because it just wastes my time at every corner and I hate UIs doing that. If your website doesn't let me consistently middle-click links it's going on my mental blocklist.

My guess is that people prefer having everything on one site because it makes the whole UX consistent. If we're being honest apps, websites etc. are wildly different to navigate and use, and when you're used to one site's behaviour and quirks it makes visiting other sites a bit more cumbersome. Especially if you're not using adblockers.

I just hate how it is not consistent with the clicking. (Same problem everywhere). Click a thumbnail of image to expand full size. Click a thumbnail of image ling to go to site. I only wanted to expand the thumbnail and not go to the site. If after I expand the thumbnail and find it interesting, then I will want a link.

On HN, if post is not a link, clicking on title brings to comments. If post is a link, clicking on title brings to link. Can't we just have clicking on title brings to comments and a separate icon for going to external website?

> On HN, if post is not a link, clicking on title brings to comments

The title is a link in both cases. In the first case, it's a link to a HN discussion. In the second case, it's a link to an external website.

>>>It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.

I would love to see any semblance of evidence that this is true.

Reddit shoves a lot of things down your throat and forces users to do things without providing alternatives.

It's super aggressive in making you use their app (the mobile site is purposely broken), aggressive about making you create an account, and doesn't allow alternatives for sharing images in some instances.

And while we're at it (poor feature, not necessarily a preference), its search is awful.

I highly doubt these are things "Reddit's user base prefer."

The one saving grace reddit has right now are its niche communities where comments are still thoughtful and the content is still interesting. Reddit does everything it can to get in the way of that.

Reddit search is useless.

And let's not even start on their inline video player. It frustrates me that they look to shut down and stop bots and services like this, because their video play is such complete crap.

There's another reply to GP that illustrates this. "I prefer first-party content so I can effortlessly scroll"; It's a real shame, people like that turned Reddit into a politically manipulated 9gag where they waste hours scrolling through mind-numbing content. Self-posts? No. Links? No. Just funny images, or videos with obnoxious music stolen from TikTok, with a side of ads please.

I dread the moment when they remove old.reddit.com, but I guess it'll finally make me leave because there's absolutely 0 chance I will be using the new interface.

Also, this whole SaveVideo issue is laughable, most of the content on Reddit is already stolen from other sources.

> It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.

Do they have a choice or any say at all? Reddit is known as a leading employer of a vast collection of dark patterns to manipulate and pressure and restrict what a user can or cannot do.

>> It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.

While that may be a common user preference, it's also a strategy at at large companies. Shit, even a small brick and mortar store doesn't want you to leave the store because you may find what you want elsewhere. The web as it started out is the opposite of what any company wants.

Imho, part of this is an industry failure to provide an interoperable way to share documents that meets the needs of the modern web - a way to copy documents by-value instead of by-reference that runs in the browser, and can be composed into an existing website.

We made sharing images dead simple. You can copy and paste them around. Download them and upload them. You can copy the hyperlink and the target site can either display it by ref or it can copy the content and display it inline. On the modern web the copy/paste works amazing for images.

Text is similar - I mean, you can't load a .txt file into most comment boxes, but you can trivially copy and paste text.

Rich documents with inline images? Nope. If you copy and paste rich text data or HTML, the images are probably going to go away - Reddit's rich text editor fails on this. Raw markdown or HTML? Getting the images in is tricky, you generally need a parallel way to upload them and need to update all their paths separately. Copying and pasting rich text is always a roll of the dice about what's going to get mangled... for Reddit? It's images that get mangled.

That's why dumb screenshots have won. Because documents don't support dumb copy/paste usefully. I can't copy/paste a Tweet but I can screenshot it.

edit: This is also why gifs beat video.

To add to your point: on Mobile, taking a Screenshot is also

1. Really easy 2. Uniform across Apps

I've noticed that college students don't really know how to use e-mail anymore, and they will send screenshots of e-mails instead of forwarding them. Kind of makes sense, though, when only some Apps have "forward" and each one has a different way to do it.

Why fuck around with that (or copy/paste, which is a nightmare on Mobile) when you can Screenshot.

Embedding gifs is getting harder as well. I wish I could spit in the cereal of whomever at Google decided videos need to show up in image search. Even when you search for a gif you saw fifteen years ago you have to sort through a dozen webm or gifv or mp4 versions of it before finding one you can actually embed with an [img] tag.

> It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.

Well, that's what happens after you alienate everybody that prefers something else...

The most active parts of reddit's userbase showed up after facebook became unpopular and after the original reddit userbase was successfully driven off during the monetization period (2012-2015) following accepting large amounts of capital from third party corps.

Reddit's use-case now is mostly just a facebook that isn't facebook. This is exemplified by the addition of user profiles and the ability to "post" to your own user profile as well as customized profile avatars.

I agree with your description of reddit as it is. But the reason for this is that reddit stopped being reddit almost a decade ago. Sharing links is unpopular because Reddit is now Facebook.

That makes me really sad, not because due to this case specifically, but the web in general.

Practically any web nowadays try to be Facebook-like, giving fast to consume content to users, and having an unlimited scroll of pictures and autoplaying videos all over the place.

Reddit even copy some shady or dark patterns like forcing you to login in your computer or forcing to install the app in the phone just to see some post somebody sent to you. At least this can be solved just entering "old.reddit.com", but we don't know when this possibility would disappear.

I understand their website is theirs, and they rule how the things works there, but that kind or opacity makes me to never use those websites and recommend people to do that.

Is it not reddit's fault? Some sites such as imgur expand inline much like "native" videos. Is there any reason that twitter posts don't expand in the same way? Is it Reddit's fault, Twitters? I think it is pretty clear that it isn't the user's fault.

> rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site

Oh! So it's Facebook now?

> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere

Spam.

The target site may be spammy: lots of adverts, popup/unders, taboola "chumboxes" etc.

Or, if a site can make money from inbound link traffic, there's an incentive for its owners to spam links in subreddits to drive traffic to themselves.

> This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app

Definitely another problem, walled gardens that you can't link into as well as out of.

Apart from spam, scams too. Fake login pages, to the tech-illeterate are virtually indistinguishable from the real site.

> Spam.

This excuse doesn't really stick as reddit moderates content both by their user base but also by subreddit mods and reddit admins.

I'd say that this is all to do with the goal of turning reddit into a walled garden.

It absolutely sticks. Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress.

The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.

> Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for.

Moderating a subreddit is not a job. Moderators are regular users from the community who are picked to have a say in how the community is regulated.

> The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress.

Good to see that you're agreeing with me, unless you believe that mods fixing a problem without resorting to a walled garden is somehow a counterexample.

> The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.

You're needlessly overgeneralizing. Using an automated filter that's prone to false positives is not a problem at all, or refutes the point I made. In fact, it supports the fact that forcing a walled garden is needed or desirable.

Once upon a time, neat/surprising/weird/amazing sites were part of the currency of the internet. "Check out this link" was a welcome message. Sites full of links to neat stuff were really popular. You tried to fill your chat app with friends who consistently linked you to neat stuff.

Now, no more. "Check out this link" is not an enticing offer, it's assigning homework. I don't know if it's because neat stuff is no longer rare and we've collectively had our fill, or because everything got so co-opted and corrupted that we go in to every new site with one wary eye watching for the dark patterns. But one way or the other, people don't share links. They share memes instead, which ask far less of us, and are much harder to monetize.

The decline of welcome "Check out this link" messages is at least partly because everyone is getting the same links from the same sources at any given moment.

If you found it on a surface-level subreddit, a major Instagram account, a major news site, or a big podcast chances are decent that the content in question has already been seen by a fair number of people, and to them, seeing it again has no additional value.

I see this play out hundreds of times in real life where the conversations start with "Did you see...? and "I was listening to a podcast about..."

Maybe its also because good content is more frustrating to actually get to. Compared to a decade ago there's a lot more friction on a first visit to a site. All the marketing pop-ups, paywalls and surveillance consent boxes are a hassle and page load times seemed to have gotten worse. Maybe we've been gradually conditioned to avoid those frustrations unless its really worth it.

Part of it is that most links, even when the content is good, come with some amount of pain in accessing it. Cookie banners, in-line ads re-flowing the content, pop-over ads, "subscribe to my mailing list" popups, donation begging popups, long-winded articles needlessly stuffed full of SEO keywords, auto playing videos, and most websites so full of all this stuff they jank out my phone and make it heat up.

I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.

Subreddit moderators prefer first-party content instead of links, because all people do is fill subreddits with affiliate links or blogspam. Mods don't want to handle this, so they discourage external links completely.

In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.

I mod a programming subreddit. 99% of our submissions are screenshots. It drives me mad. I tried to enforce pastebin / text posts only a few years ago and the community was firmly against it, so I let it go.

We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.

I used to mod what is now a huge subreddit, and when I started it I made strict no memes/images/blogspam. It was lovely for a few years but then when it became big enough to become a default Reddit basically said you can't do that anymore. Now I see it commonly referred to as one of the most toxic subreddits on the site...

I wonder what the aggregate cost of text-only screenshots is. Not so much the lack of accessibility and discoverability (which are probably the biggest costs), but the energy wasted from the extra CPU cycles, the extra storage space, the increased load on networks.

Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...

In the case of Reddit, first-party content is better in almost every way.

If I can scroll through content effortlessly, then it's easy. If I have to open each link in a new browser view/tab, ugh. Embedded images on Reddit load instantly, while loading an entire Imgur page takes forever.

Not to mention that linked content is often ephemeral, whereas first-party hosting ensures it always stays viewable together with the thread.

So across usability, performance, and link rot, first-party content is a win in every way.

And if you're interested in the content's source/attribution, it's often in the comments. Even when (often) the OP doesn't post it or doesn't even have it (because they got it elsewhere), someone else does.

The video player is a horrible buggy mess though.

And now that Reddit is attempting to capture every user they can, quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. Not to mention the website constantly berates you to use the app.

I'd sooner suffer link rot.

I also don't appreciate the progression into carefully crafted doomscrolling. Content isn't so valuable that I'd sacrifice quality for quantity.

> quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet.

...?

Reddit's always been a place for memes. It's never been HN.

On the other hand, there are plenty of subreddits where quality of discourse is amazing. It's really up to you, so I don't know what you're complaining about.

> carefully crafted doomscrolling

That's an awfully perjorative way to say infinite scroll. But again, the quality is there in subreddits if you want it. Your choice. I think it's great they're able to cater to different types of users looking for different things.

I take it you haven't heard about the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension...

For my phone? No, I haven't!

In the case of person-to-person: links decay but screenshots do not. A screenshot is a record that I know doesn't have any trackers and won't one day disappear. It's the information that I want to send and nothing more.

> It's the information that I want to send and nothing more.

In some cases, it is...

But I think, most times, it's the equivalent of getting something you ordered online, encased in a large blob of jello.

You can look at it, but everyone is going to have a hard time interacting with it.

The persistence of a screenshot (or any image) depends entirely on the hosting platform, though. How many image hosts have gone down over the years, leaving niche forums with broken image links in the middle of otherwise very useful posts?

Is there any guarantee that even reddit will keep around image posts uploaded to its own servers, forever?

Person-to-person means not hosted by anyone. Sending a png screenshot over sms or imessage or signal, etc. means the image is bytes on a personal device. How the other person manages their data is their own business.

Fair point, I could have sworn your comment didn't say person-to-person when I first replied. I'll give you that point.

Personally, I still prefer links as I find them easier to sort and categorize in my bookmark library, or indeed take screenshots of the linked content if I deem it worth of it.

As it is with images, I don't really bother to sort them so I have them scattered all over. In the folder where my SMS app saves images, in the folder where whatsapp saves images, in the case of discord I rarely explicitly download and save the images outside the app, etc. Opening a link I receive opens the link in one program, my default browser, from where I can manage the link as I see fit. All these different apps have their own built in image viewers, save locations, or layers between the message and the content/image, making it much more of a hassle to manage that image as compared to a plain link.

Maybe this can be generational: people of my generation and up used to think that MD5 hash distinguish two pieces of information, kids these days can’t tell between texts and a screenshot of said text. Which isn’t fundamentally an issue I guess, maybe the whole concept of document files and file-systems are just quirks that are slowly moving towards obsolescence.

Maybe a coincidence, but my completely non-technical sister called me this week to pitch her ‘app idea’ (feature) “screenshots should have the link embedded in it”. And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android).

And ultimately that’s sad, because it should 1. Be possible to implement and 2. Should already have been implemented by the platforms.

Last week I struggled to send an Austin powers gif via signal.

Because searching via images on google & ddg forced me to a website (wouldn’t just give me the result) and then those websites did everything possible to NOT give me a gif.

I’m disappointed that this has become the reality of the internet, and I think many people on this site are in the same boat.

I created a bare-bones Firefox extension that does this but for copied text. It just appends the website URL and title to the end of the copied selection and uses Alt+Shift+C to trigger the extension.

I like saving stuff as plain text, and when stumbling upon an old quote or code snippet that I've saved it increases the chance that there is some context as to where it came from.

Here's a link to the addon, maybe someone here finds it useful.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-con...

Bing's image search still lets you view the image or copy the image url directly from the search result.

> And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android).

PDFs with embedded bitmaps can actually do that (and are currently supported widely, but PDFs are a terrible format with way too much attack surface). Same for any other composite html+whatever formats like epub. Standardizing a non-book format name and a spec that mandates nothing more than bare xhtml & image support with no JS or CSS interpreters would probably be quite sufficient.

> duckduckgo

Duckduckgo caches/proxies the images on its desktop site, which is useful when it gives results for sites that are since dead. Often at a lower resolution, but that's what reverse image searching is for.

The problem that Reddit's native vid/img upload solved was how every Reddit thread older than a year was a 404 link to imgur, a Youtube video since made private, etc.

It's essential to avoid link rot. Not long ago, old Reddit content was almost always dead.

As usual, it's just trade-offs.

Shouldn’t the creators of the original content have a say though? If someone made their youtube video private that probably means they don’t want people watching it anymore.

If that was a consideration, wouldn't they have hosted it themselves?

Even super small businesses that rely on training videos as paid income don't host things on YouTube because they want more control over the content.

it's likely the video creator used youtube so they could create an audience much more easily. Or didn't have the technical know-how to host a video themselves. Or they didn't expect making their youtube video private in the future would be an issue, or any number of reasons.

It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite

> But Reddit is moving towards first party content.

I just want to point out the extent to which marketing doublespeak has infected the world.

A person from the 1990s might think that this means redditors making new content. But in this case "moving towards first party content" means "copying the interesting part from your site, to my site, and making it so it can't be copied again".

At this point, Reddit is just Facebook but with more restrictions and fake names.

I think its because browsers started hiding links, and apps started replacing websites. You have a generation of people that grew up without links, and many many more late adopters that didn't willingly use the internet until the 2010s.

I had to help a friend send me a link to something a few days ago, he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't know how to copy/paste on his iPhone, and didn't realize you could get the link from safari.

...in a bit of an ironic twist, the reason he needed to send me a link was because the restaurant we were at had a QR code menu, and my phone doesn't have a QR reader.

> my phone doesn't have a QR reader.

It is possible it does. The default photo app on Android is a QR code reader, at least on Google Pixel phones.

I open the photo app and then point it at the QR code. After a moment or two text appears which allows me to open the QR code link.

I only realized this in the last month or two...

Although the recognition is hit-and-miss. A dedicated QR reader will grab the QR nearly instantly as soon as it is visible to the camera.

I have a CAT s61, it comes with it's own camera app. I used to be able to do it with the camera app on previous phones that I broke, which is why I got a rugged phone. (also the IR camera and laser pointer.) I would just install one, but at a glance, all of the QR code apps seem like scams, and I haven't cared enough to do any research.

good-old `ZXing` ( https://github.com/zxing/zxing ) does the job for me nicely, supports non-QR codes, and contains practically zero BS. The only downside IMO is the forcefully-narrowed scan window, which can cause complications with extremely large QR codes, as the pixels get a little blurry and decoding gets harder for the software.

Edit: you can find it on Fdroid or probably on the project site/page. It's not getting updates, but why would my QR scanner need those, anyways..... also Google doesn't want it to be published anymore, iirc due to it using relatively ancient APIs.

TikTok's meteoric rise has been because it's so easy to share the content you like, including exporting content.

You can easily download a video and re-host it on another platform. You can send a link to a friend and they don't need to install the app to view it.

TikTok is proving that walled gardens are counterproductive and that if you want your app to go viral, it should be easy to export and share across any platform.

Are they though? Are they making enough money to be profitable? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, reddit. They all used to be just as easy to share outside the walled garden at one point.

It's a constant push/pull of vitality vs profit it seems.

I thought it was decided by the tech-sphere that TikTok was basically a bulk information-gathering operation for the CCP.

Have you recently tried to share a link with someone?

There's so much tracking shit appended onto the end of the link that by the time they get it and whatever url parsing algorithm their device uses maims it, the url is no longer in tact and trying to click it brings you to a broken page.

I make a concerted effort to remove all of that before sending, but Google et. al. are working very hard to make that harder and harder by continuing to make changes to obscure the link. I already have to copy it, and re-paste it into the mobile address bar just to see what the entire link looks like. The vast majority of users won't even know what parts of the url to trim, nor will they care enough to do it.

So they just send a screenshot.

> and trying to click it brings you to a broken page.

Can you give an example of this (with the real link to compare)? Tracking info can be added to the URL but should not break the page.

There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.

It's not the tracking info that breaks it, it's that when the receiving device tries to parse the long url and figure out what part is a link and what part is just text, winds up with a broken link.

I'm not able to find an immediate example but usually happens when sharing links via a format that doesn't explicitly format them as links, such as SMS

As a rule I don't install any add-ons or extensions. Because a trusted extension today can become malicious tomorrow as has happened so many times.

>There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.

Yes, but we are talking about why the average person just sends a screenshot. Insanely long links filled with tracking data that may or may not result in a clickable link on whatever app-browser-OS they are using is the reason. There is always a workaround for people that A: understand the problem, and B: care enough to find and use the workaround. But since the average person is not likely to pick this topic to use their limited time, energy and knowledge on, they go with the easy consistent option.

Whenever there is a problem and the two options are 1. have all individuals change their behavior or 2. fix the system so the better option is the easiest, the answer is always 2.

It wouldn't just benefit users if UTM params were automatically stripped off links when they were shared, it would also benefit the marketers/analysts, since they'd have less crappy data.

Interesting point, I am making a reddit clone in China. My MVP would like the very first verion of Reddit: only link sharing, no self-post or comment.

Fundamentally Reddit is not a link aggregator but a content aggregator. Link is one way to reach those contents. It is simple and scalable. But content consumers would always prefer first party content, ceteris paribus. One link away is one MORE step away. Faster solution always wins.

> Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support

And it fucking sucks. It consistently fails to load, or stalls even at low quality. Even replaying a video often fails despite it already being in memory. And it degrades picture and video quality much more than other sharing sites. And all that without the convenient playback controls you can usually find. I don't understand how people put up with it

I noticed it works fine when the adblocker is disabled.

> is it just that people don't know where to find the links?

Speaking for my wife, she mostly browse and share stuff on her phone. It's much quicker and consistent to take a screenshot and share it than trying to discover/remember in each app what is the best way to produce a link to paste somewhere else (how many clicks to get a share link in the amazon app? how about the YT app? FB app, can you even do it?)

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page?

For the sender, especially on mobile, it takes less time to take and share a screenshot, then it takes to get the URL, copy it and paste it into a message.

For the receiver, it takes less time to receive and view a screenshot then it takes to recieve and open a link. Web page rendering times suck, so the people have found a solution to work around that.

I much prefer to receive a screenshot of what someone wants me to see, than a link. I can view picture messages much more quickly than I can view links, and I often wont click a link because I don't want to sit there waiting for a page to finish rendering.

It's either slow because it's full of adverts, or it's slow because it's stalling waiting for an advert/tracker to load that's blocked by the pihole.

For years I've been wishing for a kind of screenshot that included more than just pixel values. Like if it made a little pdf of the region you chose that rendered without fuss or external resources. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the convenience of screenshots, but also copyable text, clickable links etc.

Links sharing is also less predictable. What will the shared message look like? Will it contain useful context like the page title or will it be a giant unreadable URL? Will there be a link preview? Depends on the messaging platform (SMS and Signal no, iMessage and Slack yes). Will it even take the user to the same page? Will there be a paywall or a redirect to an infinite scroll?

A screenshot is truly WYSIWYG and is the most reliable way to know that they will see the exact same thing that you see.

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.

I've noticed this as well. I wonder if this is a desire path indicating the need for a universal "share" button on mobile? Or maybe it's a consequence of people becoming used to sharing real-life experiences by taking and sending a picture?

> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere

I see multiple reasons:

- Everyone knows how to take a screenshot, but very few people know what a URL is, why it matters and why you should use it to share content

- The URL is purposefully hidden by the app to make sure other platforms can't access the content. You must use the official app, with your account, to access content.

I have stopped using Reddit for this reason. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure the communities forcing Reddit video/images are mods paid by Reddit. I used to get traffic to some of my old sites from Reddit, but then I kept finding my vids & content uploaded to Reddit and I wasn’t getting credit and lost almost all the traffic to my sites. Those sites were run exclusively from ad revenue from people visiting my content. Reddit stole my content and I had to shut down my sites because they no longer made enough money to pay for domain and hosting.

I’ll point out, I wasn’t making much from my sites. $50 was a good month.

Taking a screenshot on your phone is far easier than finding where Share is in your current browser. Sharing is a mess.

Right-click being disabled in apps is one reason. Right-clicking being kinda hard to do on mobile is another. Also, oftentimes now a link directly copied from Google links to an Amp page on Google dotcom. And even web pages try to disable right clicking.

I hate it. Most apps don’t need to be apps. An actual regular website is so great. And if you can, just a static page is the best as far as accessibility and usability and linkability…

Also, the link will usually contain a bunch of tracking info which at best, makes it an annoyingly long mess, and at worst, makes it unclickable in whatever app the other person is using because it miss detects where the end of the link is.

I've in the past used chrome and Firefox on mobile and Share has never been a mess

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.

People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.

> I wonder why sharing links is so unpopular...

Speed... it's always speed.

It's about 4 seconds faster for me to look at a screenshot to understand a friends "LOL!" than click a link, have browser load page, render page, render ADS and then I scroll down to find the picture of the dog riding a skateboard.

Speed speed speed.

> Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page?

Something like 90% of sites don't have proper meta tags that can be scraped for previews, and the ones that do you get blocked by Cloudflare if you try.

Usability is non-existent.

I share screenshots and raw videos, images with friends to avoid sending any traffic to Reddit, Twitter, etc.

I’ve written a little service I run locally that allows me to “one tap” download videos right to my camera roll on my iPhone to make getting the raw videos as painless as possible.

Reddit turning to shit is the reason why I’m commenting here today.

I got on Reddit in 2009 when it reminded me of YC/HN. text only, cooler heads prevail, it’s not completely overrun by 12 year olds and Russian trolls yet.

Yeah, I think app creators (including the big guys) have obfuscated url sharing so much that it’s less usable than just doing a screenshot and uploading that.

Screenshot lives forever. Links die.

>I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular

Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds.

I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it

Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.

?? I think you're absolutely wrong here. My boomer parents who can't setup a Smart TV and played blu-rays in standard definition for years absolutely know that Google and Amazon are tracking everything they do and have reached out to me on several occasions about reducing how much data Big Tech gets from them.

I think you're totally out of touch with the general populace if you think average users don't keenly feel the spying gaze of big tech.

My 92 year old grandfather moved to iOS two years ago, at age 90, to reduce how much Google got from him. Dude doesn't know a damn thing about computers, but he knows Google is spying.

I think it's valid to suggest that people don't trade links to reduce spying.

Here's my anecdote to counter your anecdote. When I try to explain stuff like this to my family members, they barely humor me. Their eyes glaze over. They think I'm crazy. My sister-in-law works in marketing so she's kind of aware of it but has made zero changes to her behavior. Other friends tell me they get more benefit than cost and accept it.

Well here's some data to counter the anecdotes:

- 80%+ of Americans agree that there needs to be Data Privacy legislation controlling big tech https://epic.org/privacy/survey/

- Americans are rather in favor of breaking up big tech and popular anti-trust action continues https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tec...

- Apple has pivoted their iPhone advertising strategy to promote privacy against Big Tech (lol) as their #1 selling point

> This poll was conducted between April 16-April 19, 2021 among a sample of 1992 Registered Voters

80% on an online positive-assertive survey ran on population that small it's a completely bogus statistic.

heck I can't even fathom how people would cite this, the methodological note is three lines, doesn't tell how the participants were selected, say votes were weighted but doesn't say the weights nor the weighted parameters; they have like 72 pages of demographics, probably a couple person for each, and say the error margin is 2%

I apologize that my well-sourced comment, the only comment in this thread with any sourcing at all, did not sufficiently meet your quality standards.

I note with amusement that you did not post this same comment in response to every other reply which included no sources at all.

I suppose one only thinks critically when they disagree.

I checked the second link. Almost no one is actually independent. I am on mobile and don’t feel like doing the citation for this. But that’s one issue immediately with that one. Almost everyone votes one way for senators and president.

The phrasing of the question and prompting of it plays a huge part too. Including Trump’s name at all is huge. It makes it an immediate reactionary political question. Swap Trump for something on the left and you’ll likely get different results. Even without Trump. The prompting is worded the way it is. It’s so political it’s going to skew anything and everything.

For the first one. Your description just sounds reasonable. Why would you say no to general regulation against big tech? Besides not wanting to be a hypocrite if you’re on the right (which clearly shows a ton of them are fine being hypocrites with that 80% figure).

Change regulation to oil companies or manufacturing and suddenly those centrists and people on the right won’t be polling the same way.

Which again means this is more political than any actual knowledge of the situation. People don’t know or understand online privacy by and large. It’s such an obvious take. To argue against it with credible sources that don’t actually relate much to the topic shows how far out your thinking is. There will never be agreement because you’re not even thinking about this in the same way.

Answering yes on a poll about privacy legislation doesn’t mean that people think about it in their day to day life or make behavior changes. Look no further than annual reports of companies like Facebook and Twitter for proof of their success.

From the way you brought up the sources below which are more politically driven than anything else. As if numbers without context can show people care about tracking...I am going to wager you or other relatives at some point or another have said stuff to your relatives who are aware of big tech privacy stuff. Likely some political bias involved too. At that point they don’t know anything about any of it like you yourself admit. They’re just regurgitating what you or another relative have said [a bunch of times].

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