Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

As best I can tell from perusing the thread:

- The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google.

- HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work.

- Asahi Linux team is mad that HN is playing shenanigans on the outbound-link level, even though Asahi Linux team is playing shenanigans on the inbound-link level.

I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

> zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

is a hilariously unclear accusation.

FWIW HN sets the Referrer-Policy header [1] to origin [2] and it seems most browsers maybe support it. [3] Perhaps some addons override or spoof it and/or maybe some bots ignore it.

[1] - https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-referrer-poli...

[2] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...

[3] - https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy

This is enough to make me never touch Asahi Linux. What a childish game for a Linux distro?

How dare someone link to their website without their approval...because that is totally how the internet works?? ffs.

Do you hate jwz, too? Because I assure you, if you follow a link from HN to jwz.org (without removing the referer header), you will get much worse than a Google redirect.

> Do you hate jwz, too?

I mean, he definitely needs to look in the mirror.

....like what?

It's at least clear where the balls come from. A tab redirected to Google would just leave me confused and concerned about malware.

What beef does jwz.org have with hackernews?

let's try: https://jwz.org http://jwz.org https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/06/and-its-a-great-looking-sku...

edit: strange, it works perfectly for me.

Your link anchor tags have `rel="nofollow noreferrer"`

What about robots.txt ? lots of sites have preferences on how you access them

Paywalled articles are posted here everyday

Why not respect the site owners wishes ?

Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too? It is the exact same principle. I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

> Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

That's not how it works. If you want to copy the URL into a new tab, you can still access the site. They just don't want to make it easy for people to click on the link from HN to their site.

It's a super trivial thing to avoid and this whole thing could be avoided entirely by allowing sites to submit their domains to HN if they don't want to show up on the front page.

Yes!

Edit (quoted context):

> Respect that Asahi thinks people like you and me, because we dare to get tech news from Hacker News, deserve to be excluded?

Yes! - I can’t vouch for anyone here, but me

> What if the site wasn't accessible to people who had been to the Washington Post or Fox News because Asahi didn't like those people as a blanket rule too?

Yes!

> I don't think you ever need to respect people that are actively trying to exclude you.

I don’t care, don’t take it personally. I’d be concerned about Asahi’s actions if I was a member of that community

I’m concerned HN being a part of chicken-shit tech games

Asahi Linux paywalling their blog is a very valid option for them if they want to control who sees it and who doesn't.

HN types traditionally have a hard time with the distinction between things they SHOULD do and things they have a RIGHT to do.

"Why not respect the site owners wishes ? "

The answer, overwhelmingly with the HN demographic, is "because we don't HAVE to."

Agreed. I like to try out different Linux distributions every so often. After seeing this immature tantrum, I wouldn't go near Asahi Linux.

If you have a mac you will keep touching it, their code is forever in the mainline kernel.

But again, I guess you really didn't understand that he was just lamenting the lax moderation for the threads about Asahi.

Also lots of accusations about how our entire site is somehow abusive even though 1) I and many others here have contributed our resources to Asahi and 2) they have not put forth sufficient (any??) evidence. I can imagine how stressful it must be to run a major project like Asahi, but it seems like a bit misguided to cast Hacker News as a net negative source of interest.

Until today, I had a positive perspective on Asahi, and HN is the only place in my life I ever heard about Asahi. Maybe they shouldn't paint with such broad brushes about the visitors to HN?

I don't get it either. I discovered Asahi via HN and my characterization of comments here is 1) enthusiastic (I can't wait to run linux on my m1!) 2) appreciative (impressive job, asahi team, in a short time!) and 3) impatient for new features (oh man I just need support for x and then Asahi will be my daily driver!). I think we can accept #3 as a form of #1.

Pretty sure marcan is not talking about "enthusiastic, appreciative, impatient for new features" people. I've read plenty of comments regarding Asahi along the lines of "why do we need this", "why is this not already in <favourite distro>", "this is already supported in the kernel, who are these people (the authors lol)".

Not much to get I'd say.

Since you are doing basically a "Not all HNers!" it would be very interesting to know what you have actually contributed to Asahi. I've been here way longer than you, since the early days, and I don't feel the need to comment on what Marcan is saying. Why do you?

> I scrolled down a few pages to try to find out what their grievance about HN is, but it's still not clear to me. The best I could find was "zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

There's a surprising number of tankies ("State violence is okay if it's against people I don't like") on HN.

Source?

#freejulianassange

I mean they might ban twitter as well then, but they don't.

I wouldn't use the word "tankie" since that's specifically about communists. There are exceeding few communists on HN. That isn't to say there's a disturbingly large number of authoritarians here, but they're of the opposite persuasion.

Lesson learned for them is that you can never rely on the http referrer because it can be removed/updated/spoofed etc. A team that runs Linux should at least be aware of that and not block a website based on this value.

I suspect they were aware of it. They didn't rely on it to block bad actors like bots or spammers or ddos-ers, they relied on it to block actors who were at some level implied to follow the social contract of how the internet works (e.g. a website focused at developers).

The actual lesson learned here I think is that certain communities don't have respect for the social contract when it benefits them. Though I suppose you are right, a team of linux users should never have expected a site ran by a venture capitalist firm to respect the social contract.

We got complaints from users about sites punishing HN referrers so I tried to oblige them, the same way we do other user requests.

At the moment I feel caught in a double bind because there are complaints no matter what we do.

I'm in a workshop today and can only check HN on breaks, so I can't properly read this thread yet. I'll return to it later, probably this evening.

Edit: I think I agree with the users arguing that a fairer and simpler solution is to just put noreferrer on all links. It's late enough that I don't trust myself to deploy even a trivial code change, so I'll do that tomorrow.

Why use noreferrer instead of banning the domain, out of curiosity?

Banning the domain actually doesn't work because people see that the domain is banned, observe that there's nothing wrong with the domain, and then accuse us of being unfair and hostile to the author/site. In doing that they usually jump to the most uncharitable, horrible reasons they can imagine for why we might have done so.

It doesn't work to say "but they asked us to ban their site" because there's no reliable way to get that message to people.

Please don't and just keep the noreferrer, but if you do insist on banning the domain then you could perhaps add an explanation that it was at the request of the site author. Preferably with a link to this post or something else showcasing the insanity.

Why is it that you characterize their view as 'insanity'?

They think they get to control who visits their website without putting up authentication controls, and choose to fight this battle by breaking Google's rules for deceptive websites (white text on white background).

Google, despite their best efforts, does not yet own the internet.

"In doing that they usually jump to the most uncharitable, horrible reasons they can imagine for why we might have done so."

So you do understand why one wouldn't want to deal with a significant part of the user base here given that they behave in such ways, and thus why one might want to avoid any traffic coming from here, but feel that it's not your job to deal with those users, because then their behavior would affect you? I really hope you'll reflect on that...

I didn't see any evidence for the claims made.

I haven't expressed myself clearly enough if that's a possible response to what I tried to say there.

Unfortunately I'm at a workshop today and not free to take the hours I normally would to go over the explanation until it's clearly understandable. I only have a few minutes of break time. Perhaps it would have been better not to try in the first place, under such circumstnaces; but I'm not going to delete my GP comment now.

I've read it a couple times and it's hard for me to disagree with them. It sounds an awful lot like you're saying 'if we ban the domain, people will yell at me and get mad,' with the implication of 'and I would rather they yell and get mad at someone else.'

Sounds like a good opportunity for a distinction between banning and opting out, or at a note field where mods can put some text pertaining to the reasoning behind it. I feel like you and the community will be better served with some nuance around banning domains.

On a side note, I think HN had a long history of non-toxic behavior but I'm starting to see a shift. It reminds me of when Reddit grew and the crowd became more and more unruly. Has the community grown quickly recently or have moderation priorities changed? Sorry I don't have any evidence lined up for this, just an anecdotal observation for now. Seems apropos to this issue in particular.

If a group of users here are disrespectful enough to attack creators for personal reasons and it's boiling over like this, that's a really bad sign.

IMHO banning links to such sites, as you've done for other example(s?) for a long time, was the way better policy.

Don't budge; noreferrer is absolutely the right call.

I would go further: noreferrer should be the default. Alternatively, let each user configure it, as a privacy option.

On one hand, social media sites tend to want to tell the target site "we brought you there" for some pretty traffic statistics and monetization. On the other hand, I seriously doubt HN, the news site of a VC company, actually takes any money from that.

It's probably good to not allow redirects or targeted content to users, and those are valid complaints. I totally shouldn't get link redirected, sent to a shady site, or displayed offensive content, different than what the submitter might have seen since they didn't have a referrer, because the other side of the link is hostile to users here. That said, I think a "banned link" list for submissions might serve this purpose better and more neutrally, if you're wanting to please both sides. I don't think you were out to "go after" anybody at all though, I think you were just blindsided by something you didn't think as deeply about as some of the folks on the other side expected. From that perspective, I feel for ya and don't blame you for getting stuck in the spot you ended up in at all.

From the above though, I'd say an opt-in (either via moderator here or site owner request) ban-list on top of a general all-link "noreferrer" policy would be my preferred solution as a users. Heck, an "ultra technical" answer would be let robots.txt filter a HN bot agent which checks when the submission is polled, way less manual. Others may disagree, and it does come with the downside sites won't be able to tell where the sudden burst of traffic originates, but that's my 2 cents.

You're missing the point. Site owners shouldn't be allowed to say "people aren't allowed to talk about my site on Hacker News".

People shouldn't post bad comments on HN either, but HN still needs to ban users and handle spam anyways. The point is about what can realistically be done, not each of us lamenting a different "how the world should be".

The analogy isn't being able to ban users and handle spam. It'd be more like adding a feature with the sole purpose of making it easier to post bad comments.

A clearer relation to how preventing hairy-ball responses, like JWZ has, is like making it easier to post bad comments would be appreciated, I'm having trouble following the relation.

Note: sites can still detect HN users and modify content without the referer. E.g., using the CSS styling for if "news.ycombinator.com" is a visited link. If not visited, content hidden. If visited, content shown. Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point. My comment was that it seems better to let the site just opt out directly, not about what site operators should or shouldn't be doing.

> Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point.

Thankfully no it can't, because browser vendors already know about that vulnerability and have fixed it. Visited link styling can only affect color now, and isn't reflected in getComputedStyle, exactly to prevent that kind of thing.

Shows how up to date I am on the web :). Did this change prevent all custom messages from being displayable or just triggered actions such as the redirect?

You can display custom messages still, by making the unvisited and visited colors different, and then making the background color the same as the unvisited color, but you can't do anything more elaborate than that.

For my 2c I'd say either doing nothing or blocking links makes the most sense. They've sent a clear message they don't want HN traffic, and I don't see a lot of value in posting links to sites that explicitly don't want it.

It's absolutely super gross to selectively apply noreferer to links only to Asahi Linux or JWZ's blog, because it's obvious you're doing it specifically to spite the people running those sites. If you applied it to every link, that might be different. I mean, the receipts are still out there, people still know what's up. But at least you're not being openly prejudicial.

I don't think there is any reason it's "obvious" it's being done specifically out of spite. I think trying to solve the user complaints but not thinking deeply enough about the solution is a far more reasonable story.

Aren't the people selectively doing stuff on their websites for people with a HN referer header doing it out of spite?

> because it's obvious you're doing it specifically to spite the people running those sites. If you applied it to every link, that might be different.

It's not to spite those people. It's because only those sites abuse the information. Applying it to all links would almost be collective punishment.

Hacker News serves the interests of its users, not the interests of the sites it links to. It's not spiteful to help Hacker News users avoid unwanted redirects.

I think your current site-wide Referrer-Policy of origin is fine. It's probably just bots and some addons overriding or ignoring it. People can still see where traffic is coming from via the bots and addons that ignore it and spoof referrer by adding one. There is no way to make everyone happy especially with something that varies so much by user-agent configured behavior.

Dang, whatever you do, someone will be unhappy.

You did the right thing by adding noreferrer to their links. Knowing where people got to your site from without them explicitly telling you is a privilege, and it's one that they chose to abuse.

There's a reason websites that host several communities ban such interactions upon the request of the recipient of the traffic; brigading is bannable on reddit.

Except HN keeps the comments on HN, so it's the opposite of brigading.

Have you considered that they may have done this in "self defense" to the abuse this aggregator was causing them?

Besides, by your argument, connecting to websites at all is privilege. HN wants the privilege of reading their content (otherwise why not just block their site) without taking any responsibility for it.

Agree, there's no mandatory standard that there must be valid referrer information on all hyperlinks. It's an optional extra from what I understand.

Similar to how freedom of religion also guarantees the right to not have any declared religion.

You guys could just add noreferrer to all links.

Marcan alleges that he sent you an E-Mail explaining the redirection with specific criticism about HN's moderation (https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503050993279759) and that your only response was adding the rel=noreferrer.

Is this true? Could you address his points of criticism?

I'll also throw a vote out that I do not see the value in having a public feud over whether one specific site is allowed to block HN traffic. I actually agree with stripping referrer headers from all posts (for user privacy reasons), but in addition I think it's clearly the right move to block links to asahilinux.org

It would:

A) not ban people from talking about Asahi Linux and would not prevent links about Asahi Linux from being shared.

B) be at least somewhat of a gesture of goodwill that the HN community is not trying to force itself into other communities (which we shouldn't be doing anyway).

C) not force HN to build a generic "anyone who wants to get blocked can get blocked" system.

HN moderation regularly takes context into account when making decisions (and in fact, the moderation would be much worse if it didn't). Yeah, of course the NYT should not be able to ask HN to stop linking to articles. But that's not the current situation. Regardless of whether or not HN is obligated to block links to asahilinux.org from being posted, it would be a low-impact move for the HN community that would go a long way towards both diffusing the controversy and would (from the sound of things) be a high-impact positive change for the Asahi Linux community.

And regardless of whether people think the Asahi Linux community is being reasonable or not, if there's an easy way to accommodate people who have a concern and it's not forcing us to do something drastic or high impact -- we should do it. If it becomes a problem in the future, if tons of sites start doing this and it impacts the community's ability to have conversations about current events, then change the policy. You're not locked into anything.

In the meantime, why not try to accommodate someone who feels harassed by certain HN users? It just seems like a very simple way to show some kindness towards another community.

---

To the point that users might misinterpret those blocks as hostile, I know that HN tries to make very minimal code changes, but no matter how hard I try I also do not understand why it wouldn't be possible with minimal code changes to show/redirect to an error that explained the situation.

As far as the thread goes, the author sounds as though they are a child throwing a tantrum.

In the original OpenGL thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36212674 there seems to be some discussion as to why the author hates HN, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229753 quoted here:

> It's not really all that much of a moral conundrum. Marcan's belief - expressed a number of times on his Mastodon - appears to be that he can prevent other people from discussing something, for the sole reason he doesn't want it discussed. It's not a particularly defensible position in an open society.

> In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself.

> Me, I have absolutely no problem with Marcan having an anime alter ego, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to refrain from noticing this and remarking on it. Marcan disagrees, and this is the source of the HN-Marcan rift.

You can't just claim that without knowing the context. Also I think, if some website doesn't want you to link to it, and politely redirects you. You shouldn't deploy code evade referrer for that site particularly. C'mon we aren't talking about using a VPN to evade a region block, it's one website abusing their referrer tags against another.

> Also I think, if some website doesn't want you to link to it, and politely redirects you. You shouldn't deploy code evade referrer for that site particularly.

Why? You don't have a right to not be talked about.

When did I ever say that, HN is free to talk about them, but they don't want you to visit them. And I think it's up to them to choose with whom they want to interact.

> and politely redirects you.

I never got the redirect here but from what I understand about it, it is absolutely not polite in my opinion to redirect from an Asahi Linux blog to Google because I happened to find the blog post on Hacker News. In fact, it's quite rude.

If someone doesn't want you to come into their house, even if you found the address through a friend it's not rude. They neither are scolding you nor berating you like certain websites that are linked from HN. They just redirect you to Google, from where you can still visit the site. They don't want direct links, that's it.

I don't buy the website equals house analogy. But if I did, redirecting to Google is like sending me to the landfill instead of locking the door and putting up a sign.

Sending to Google is, asking you to go back to the road most info is accessed from Google, it's not a landfill, they're not sending you to some random troll website hosted on tor. They don't want interactions with HN plain and simple. It's up to them to choose how or on what parameters to deny your access, at least they did their part gracefully. But adding explicit evasion techniques for a particular site, is not at all graceful. HN is a discussion forum, not an archive or search engine or content repository, it seems funny for it to add explicit techniques to allow its users to evade restrictions.

> They don't want interactions with HN plain and simple.

Fine. So put up a page saying that. Don't instead send me to some privacy invasive and user hostile third party such as Google.

Ok, I finally see you what you meant by landfill, I mean Google is synonymous with search, for anyone. How many on HN think of Google as privacy invasive and hostile, yet use it as primary search engine? They literally redirected you to the internet's search page for general public. Your opinion is very subjective if you consider redirecting to Google is correct or not. The original argument of mine was, why should HN implement code explicitly for a target website, that is blocking it? Do they do the same for region locked content websites/pay walled sites, no? Then this is not correct.

You have no business being on the internet if you don't want to be linked to. I can't believe I have to type this out..

What you CAN do and what you SHOULD do are often different things, and that difference is something that the HN crowd would do well to reflect on.

Asahi doesn't want attention from HN. It's a small project about hardware that most HN commenters seem to hold in contempt anyway. Why not just honor the request?

Contempt? I've seen nothing but praise about the Asahi from HN. Its also the only place I've ever heard people talk about it.

Cool let's shutdown all the filters for spam, adblockers etc

> > In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself.

Is that just gospel on HN now? I have seen zero proof for this accusation, it reeks of the same kind of thinking that some people had when they claimed a person who had died from suicide after relentless bullying must actually be alive because they allegedly have the same writing style as a person in marcan's chat.

But, you know, maybe all of Asahi is just Marcan.

Can't wait for the Kiwifarmers throwaway to tell me how this is not actually a conspiracy and totally real and... just please don't. You are the reason Marcan wants nothing to do with this site.

>anime alter ego

I find that quite funny that he has an anime character as a second identity. If he wants, let him have it, but that he wants to ban any discussion and suppress any dissenting opinion as his own (for example, by declaring it as hate) shows a completely totalitarian worldview.

Thanks for explaining it. I don't care whether Lina is or is not a Marcan persona and don't think anyone should (which I try to propagate here).

But what a counter-productive reaction. I know it hurts (and that this is easy to say), but I believe that it would be much more effective to explicitly mention it and respectfully ask people to shut up rather than doing ... this.

Before they (at worst) casually disrespected him/Lina, now they largely at least mildly dislike them. I don't think much was gained here at all.

Hacker News has every right to include noreferrer in its links. The destination site was playing games based on the HN origin, so dang just fixed the bug.

They don't want the HN crowd there because it brings abuse & harassment.

If Dang instead would block the domain, everyone would be happy.

They could add a login form if they don't want their website to be publicly accessible.

If they don't want people visiting their website maybe they shouldn't put it on the internet.

Aside from the actual situation, this pattern of words seems reminiscent of victim blaming.

It's not true that everyone would be happy. Banning an otherwise fine and on-topic site leads to angry complaints that we've banned it for unfair reasons. Nobody thinks, "oh, I guess they banned it because the site owner asked them to".

This has been done multiple times by different authors.

All this is because there are a certain number of people who read HN who turn around and go out of their way to abuse the author (outside of HN).

noreferrer was a mistake and such has been said so elsewhere.

Dang, have you considered applying the noreferrer to all links?

HN users wouldn't notice the difference. I guess the main downside would be the owner of the submitted page might see a spike in traffic without knowing where the traffic is coming from.

Edit: Thinking more, maybe not a great idea across the board. It would make it harder for site owners to recover if HN is causing downtime (hug of death).

A large number of people (including myself) do pay attention to HN referrer analytics as a proxy for tech interest.

> the main downside would be the owner of the submitted page might see a spike in traffic without knowing where the traffic is coming from.

Sounds like a bad outcome - what is the upside to this ?

For that outcome? Probably none, that's why it's the main downside. For other outcomes? It allows the current redirect/content change strategy to be applied without being called out as a specific one-off action to person/group/site, as it is here.

> without being called out as a specific one-off action

But it is a specific one-off action and should be called out

This is in reference to CJ's proposed change of making it a global policy instead of the one off it already is. Without that change, the downside mentioned does not exist.

Noref would also mean they don't gain search engine rank from the link (wikipedia uses it for all external links, to prevent spam), which could annoy some.

edit: that's nofollow not noref, derp.

that would be the nofollow attribute iirc

You're thinking of nofollow

Damn, you're right, oops.

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

unless you're debating some small irrelevant controversial piece of tech it's usually pretty civil yes

WAIT, are you insulting my emacs?

/s of course

I would like to know the backstory, since this made the front page though.

It's the standard "Every time I hear something I disagree with it means they're harassing/fake news/going down the toilet" nonsense. The funny thing is this person's post is way more unhinged than hardly any comment that I see bubble to the top of HN.

I made a similar point related to all the comments I see about "Well, it's well known that HN hates crypto..." No, I don't "hate crypto", I've done a rational assessment of it, and I'm not willing to buy whatever snake oil is being sold this week. You can reasonably disagree with my assessment, but I see this all the time where people try to say "HN hates crypto..." because we're all just emotional, or my other favorite, that we just missed out on the early boom and are bitter we didn't get rich.

Post here mentions harassment in HN comment sections: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719

Which is surprising to me too, because the comments I've seen on every Asahi Linux post have been pretty overwhelmingly positive and impressed by their progress. Was there some drama that I missed?

Or maybe they're complaining about some non-Asahi related comment threads, but I have no idea what.

Whenever there is news regarding one of the members of the Asahi Linux team or their contributions, people write a bunch of really shitty comments trying to dig up the identity of that participant who very clearly does not want their real name associated with that identity or the project.

That and in the beginning there were a lot of very negative "they didn't really write that. someone else must have done the hard work for them" type comments as well.

So as a response the team wanted to just stop their stuff from showing up on HN but then the noreferrer thing happened and now we are here.

Oh, about the main developer being a vtuber? I can imagine people being shitty about that, but I always read through the Asahi posts when I see them and I've yet to see it come up here.

Not just being a vtuber, but outing them as an alter ego of marcan. Not exactly the nicest thing to do on HN's part (and I'm probably complicit by posting this comment), but also the information is already "out there" and blocking HN to keep it under wraps isn't a great strategy.

Wait, so this is about a virtual avatar identity project leader possibly being the alter ego of one of the other project leads?

I just naturally assumed that to be the case after doing a search on "Asahi Linux" as I knew nothing about that project.

If that is actually him and he doesn't want to be associated with that persona then making this video [0] was a weird choice... But in any case it seems natural that people are curious about this, after all it's a popular project and listing virtual avatars as members is strange.

At this point he should probably just own it if it is indeed him.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk

Someone sensitive to this kind of thing may already perceive this comment as offensive (because it contains an arguably overreaching suggestion and a hint of disgust), which seems like a good explanation for the strong response.

Because I'm not directly emotionally involved I can make the following response:

> he should probably just own it if it is indeed him

Well, maybe, but consider that he may just not want to. That should be respected.

> listing virtual avatars as members is strange

Not at all, really. Publishing under a pseudonym is the norm rather than the exception online, so is having multiple of them. Multiple on the same project may be unusual, but so what. They can do whatever the hell they want.

I agree on your other points and believe that a clear "we will leave this question open and would like you to stop wondering about it" would go further towards the goal than what's currently happening.

One question however: would Linus accept merging the commits signed by a pseudonym? Or Asahi patches would not be upstreamed due to this?

I believe these patches can be upstreamed, even under a pseudonym. Per a recent clarification of their policy: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

"using your real name" was changed to "using a known identity". And from the commit message:

> And despite the language, we've always accepted nicknames and that language was never meant to be any kind of exclusionary wording. [...] Just simplify the wording to the point where it shouldn't be causing unnecessary angst and pain, or scare away people who go by preferred naming.

That wording would lead me to believe that Asahi Lina as a pseudo-anonymous vtuber would not qualify for upstreaming. It sounds like they want to allow people to use preferred names that might not match their legal name but still are tied to their physical person.

AFAIK Linus has accepted plenty of patches from "Solar Designer" over the years.

At least initially they need someone else signing off with them and potentially even submitting on their behalf. But as it is now, it looks like if you submit high quality contributions for a sustained duration, they can eventually submit as just themselves.

Well that's not at all what I expected when I saw "harassment" accusations thrown around. Bummer for them if somebody caught on to their alter ego, but also a dick move to take it out on an entire community who happen to use the same website.

One way or the other I'm going to continue not caring who Asahi Lina is.

I found this [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905

That comment is quoting its parent comment in order to object to it. The parent comment was flagged and we banned the account that posted it. I'm not sure what else we should have done there.

Personally I would hold up HN's moderation up as an example of how to preserve civility without suppressing ideas. I don't think you can "do better" for one group without doing worse for another.

> and we banned the account that posted it I'm not sure what else we should have done there.

Take a moderator action at the time and not a month later?

Good moderation requires time for deliberation and careful judgement. Hasty decisions will lead to bad decisions and given the huge volume of comments that Hacker News gets, Dan does a sterling job.

I've seen some... unproductive comments about Asahi Lina and of course they never go away because every HN thread is a 101 thread. And the Alyssa thread was probably a disaster but I didn't read it for that reason.

My opinion: HN has a particular culture and attitude to discussion that can be grating for non-users.

One example: HNers tend to approach topics as if they have a solid grasp on the context of a matter, and are often negative, hence dang's plea against 'middlebrow dismissal.'

Another example: the common practice of leading rebuttals to a comment with "No. \n" While that's OK here, there are a lot of people who would qualify that as "really fucking annoying."

HN culture leaks onto sites that get linked to by it, and fairly enough, not everybody is down with that.

Oh, I feel it's pretty grating too, as a user.

There's also a pretty hard bias in what is considered political and what is not. When I happen to disclose my identity (which is considered very political, apparently), even if it is topical, I roll dice on having that comment be purged to hell no matter the value of the contribution. Depends a bit on the time of day, even.

The other HN tell I’ve started seeing in work chats is excessive italics. I’m not five, I know the gravity of what you’re writing.

For example, often HN users need to scold their readers into a hair-splitting debate around semantics.

The other one I’ve seen is pretend-gaslighting-as-begging-the-question:

“Can we all stop pretending that object-oriented programming is an efficient way to build software?”

Yeah you’ve sold me. I’m out of here.

I use that leading "No" as a marker for comments I can safely ignore. I think there's a fair chance the author lacks enough humility for an honest reflection on their position if they think it's appropriate to start their contribution to a discussion with a single paragraph of "No." It's somehow a more grating version of "well ackshually".

No.

;)

I tend to agree with you (finding the leading No\n grating when it's used as a "well actually" replacement) but ime its sometimes used by people from cultural backgrounds where the standard for communication is more direct than what the English-speaking world is used to, and not intended to come across as smug or know-it-all, and I don't mind it as much in those cases.

That's an interesting angle that I had not considered - cheers for sharing.

Context:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110060225535294882

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/a7...

Thank you. I've read the entire thread and I had no idea what was really causing the issue as I don't think HN is a cesspool of transphobia, hate, etc.

HN causes traffic to the Asahi blog, which causes comments which are generally of low quality, tangential, trying to dox Lina, or vile on the Asahi blog is my summary.

There are other comments here which indicate that as a source of transphobic comments, HN appears to be the prevalent in the referrer of said comments.

I think though that most people who read HN do not comment. I have used HN for a long time and have not seen anything to indicate a prevalence for transphobic remarks - far from it this place seems very tame compared to the same material placed on say Reddit (to me).

This, then, was the issue for me: obviously if vile comments frequently come with an HN referrer, a site admin who reads the vile comments will think poorly of HN - but I don't think those comments reflect the actual commenting HN population, leading to the confusion.

Cesspool? I don't know that I would go that far, but take for example a recent thread I was involved in that was... unpleasant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35010229

HN often can be a great place to seek interesting and varied discussion on purely technical topics. When discussions veer anywhere close to topics that may touch on how people want to view themselves and their relationship to the world, PEOPLE can be somewhat lazy, tribal, and narrow-minded and PEOPLE are bad at respecting other people's value systems that differ from their own: because commenters on HN are people, this includes discussion on this site. Intersectionality is poorly understood, "hurt people hurt people", displacement[2] is rampant and that can lead to some pretty toxic interactions. It takes a very low proportion of badly-behaved people to produce an overwhelming number of negative, hateful comments. I overall like the community here, but that doesn't mean that it can't produce bad behavior that is beyond the scale of an individual to cope with reasonably, and I can sympathize with an individual seeking to cut off ties with a source of such conflict. As a society, we still haven't really adopted to the scale of contact that the internet creates.

The [insert social networking site here] effect is real and can cause enormous traffic spikes, which have real bandwidth costs and in this case potential emotional costs; removing a tool to deal with that spike isn't exactly a neighborly thing for HN to do, even if I can understand other arguments promoting less tracking, the realities of the internet etc. that people may want to make.

[1] Displacement: an immature defense mechanism in which a person acts out their frustration and negative feelings on a target that is not responsible for the situation evoking those negative feelings. Typically that target is less powerful and less able to retaliate within a given setting. Colloquially "punching down". The specific populations that are marginalized/less powerful are very context-dependent. Classic example is Person A getting a bad review from their boss and yelling at their domestic partner. Punching down at that individual/population puts Person A in a position of power, gives them a feeling of agency and control, and provides a feeling of moral/commercial/etc superiority that they feel is lacking in other aspects of their life, but it comes at the expense of others.

> obviously if vile comments frequently come with an HN referrer, a site admin who reads the vile comments will think poorly of HN

You can hate the site and the moderation team without believing that everyone on the site is bad. You can recognize when a referrer is generating a lot of stress and heartache and take steps to reduce that, and you can be upset when your attempts to reduce that are circumvented by site ownership, all without believing that the majority of the folks using the site are bad.

I have been in HN since many of the current users could even type on a keyboard, and allow me to chip in.

* They have the right to block by referral

* HN has the right to set up that attribute to the links

* I don't think they are arguing about HN doing it, but to do it silently or covertly by someone in the moderation staff

I wont argue about legality or morals. It looks like they have an issue with the current dynamics of comments in here, and it's an honest way of protesting about it.

If the moderation staff does edit the link, title or attributes it should be reflected at least. Like when they add a date to specify that it's from a few years ago.

Of course, HN users could always choose to protest by protesting and sharing and discussing about the articles anyway. But that doesn't make their point any less valid.

ps Sure, there are a lot of technical methods to circumvent any block. Users in here share archive[.]today links that break paywalls all the time.

Ok, I've finally had a chance to look at this properly. It's clear that putting noreferrer on sites selectively was bad, and I'm sorry. This should have been obvious beforehand, and I just missed that.

The OP is incorrect that we did this for just one site. We did it for several sites—all the sites we knew about which were punishing HN referrers and which users had complained to us about.

The consensus in the current thread, as well as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249414 and emails, is that a better approach is simply to put noreferrer on outgoing links in general. I've made that change now.

Even though what you ended up doing wasn't my first choice, I'm way happier with it than I would have been with removing noreferrer from the abusive sites.

Most times I found out that one of my articles was on the HN frontpage was because I got a spike in traffic and news.ycombinator.com was the most common referrer; now it's "spike in traffic, maybe it's HN?" which isn't really an improvement. This applies even more to other authors who won't think "maybe it's HN?" and will never show up here as a result, which would be a loss IMO.

The Asahi people still won't be able to "soft block" HN, so nothing changes for them. It's punishing everyone because some people threw a hissy fit.

Lobsters has a "compromise approach", where it sends referrers for the first hour after posting and then stops sending them [1] (not sure if it really helps to "disincentivize content marketers" as the comment says; they generally don't seem to care as long as they can spam out their links), but that may be a more complex change to make. This is how I discovered that Lobsters exists a few years ago: somone people posted my article and I "found" it in the refers, so I asked for an invite and replied to some comments.

[1]: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/2981689c26a1bd2461...

It's true that some people discover HN through referers. In fact, one of the best contributors I know found Hacker News that way.

Perhaps we should go back to the status quo ante. To be honest I'm not sure what to do.

It seems to me that:

1. Don't send referrers at all because some sites pick up on them.

2. Don't send referrers for specific sites because we know they pick up on them.

Are essentially the same, except that with (1) you're also losing all the benefits.

Or maybe HN just shouldn't muck about with referrers at all. IMHO the entire thing seems petty and childish from the Asahi people (and also jwz and others), but they have a right to be that. Then again, you'll end up with lots of confusion in the comments and the work-arounds are trivial (see: all the archive links to bypass paywalls).

The Lobsters "compromise solution" will result in links working for some and then not for others, which would be very confusing.

I don't envy your position, but but adding noreferrer to everything seems like the worst option.

FWIW, I had a hard time determining the source of a spike of traffic today because it had no referrer. It ended up being from HN, coming from some auxiliary discussion happening on a run-of-the-mill comment I made. I saw the rel=noreferrer on my link and was curious if it was new (because I had always remembered seeing HN referrals), and it was.

I personally like the referrer. People will always complain, and you shouldn't feel too inclined to please or slight people like this who are openly hostile to the HN community.

But you do what you think is best for HN, of course. Just my $0.2.

I get around this problem by blogging on dev.to, which is shadowbanned by HN.

What, why?

dev.to content has a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

I really miss the days when you just battled it out with some eggdrops and a well timed netsplit.

I think it's worth a little self-reflection on the part of the rest of the commentariat here about why someone would ask that we leave them alone. It's hard for me to see this as anything other than spite, in a situation that needs a little bit of grace.

It seems they are the ones who want to avoid criticism.

The “no, you” of discourse and debate.

I thought HN puts noreferrer in every new link. Could there be a whitelist of links that do not include noreferrer?

HN puts nofollow on every link for SEO reasons, which is different. They're adding noreferrer to this domain specifically so that Asahi Linux isn't able to tell whether people are coming from HN or not.

Okay, now I understand. Thank you for clarifying.

I'm happy that some of the reflection Hector is asking for is happening in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231051

I don't get it, can someone explain what is going on here?

By default, when following `<a>` links from site FOO to site BAR, the browser will tell site BAR in the Referrer header[1], that you're coming from the site FOO.

If you add attribute `rel=noreferrer`[2] to the `<a>` tag, the browser will not attach such a header.

It looks like the guys from asahilinux dot org somehow altered the behaviour of their website in cases when Referrer was set to hackernews, so hn added the `rel=noreferrer` to those links.

No idea about the context of the drama though.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

why are they so angry at HN?

Because they get abuse from the vocal transphobe subset of the HN population. (https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388)

This is hilariously awesome

Not really because I don’t think dang is a “scumbag” as Hector put it. That is quite harsh, right? And like it seems like a misunderstanding turned into a spat for no good reason.

Amusingly their solution[1] will likely get them delisted from Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/5c...

Amusingly for who? At least use your primary account for this BS...

If you abuse the privileges of being sent a referer header then they can be taken away.

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