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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

> That was done specifically for SEO purposes.

As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.

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I agree; I wish JIRA did this. I actually asked for this feature in their support forum yers ago and got a chorus of "that's stupid, why would anyone want that?" in reply.

This is similar to when people create branches with just the Jira ID instead of using the ID and title slug as branch name. I’m often working on 3+ items at a time and need a quick way to know which branch is which; how do people that just use the ID as branch name know what the code changes are?

And then there's the other side, where some use very verbose branch names rapidly approaching 80 columns.

I do this and probably never break over 3 words or 32 chars, usually the literal ticket titles are overly verbose and poorly chosen anyways.

JIRA is what comes to mind when I think of software that does really stupid things nobody would ever want.

Want to middle click this one specific link to open it in a background tab? Instead of respecting default browser behavior the user is expecting, JIRA happily hijacks the mouse down event to open your background link in the foreground instead, which prevents you from opening multiple links in a convenient timely manor.

A deployment happened on December 29th. It's January 2th. Suddenly, you need to know if the deployment happened 1 week ago or 1 month ago. You remember the deployments page usually says useful information such as X days ago or X weeks ago. Based on the facts, a rational normal person is expecting something like 4 days ago. JIRA says "last year".

Nowadays reddit hides it, I use this to revert back to full url

    for (let value of document.querySelectorAll('.first a.bylink.comments')) {
     let href = value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href;
     if (href != value.href && (
      href.startsWith('https://www.reddit.com/') ||
      href.startsWith('https://v.redd.it'))
        ) {
      console.log (href, value.href);
      value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href = value.href;
     }
    }

What do you mean the hide it now? I still see it in the URL?

This is what I see https://v.redd.it/pzma14ni23vc1 for post titles, while comment link https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1c6h...

First one is also dynamic, so next ~day its different breaking one of the fundamental features of HTML - :visited link color.

Saying they hide it might be a bit of a stretch, that URL just 302's to the comment link with the title-in-url as usual. I guess you're referring to being able to right-click and copy the url directly?

The problem is you can't trust it: people can modify that part of the URL arbitrarily and so you think the URL has meaning, but it doesn't.

It depends how it is implemented. After extracting the ID and looking up the post you can then check that the "slug" matches. Return a 404 if it doesn't.

This may add a bit of complexity (if the slug data is mutable you need to allow any past versions or freeze it in creation) but isn't too hard if this is the approach that you want to take.

Ok, but we don't have to talk about this "depends" idea: that's not how reddit did it and I thought we were talking about reddit ;P.

I'd still rather be saved from a bad click 99% of the time, rather than the 0% of the time an unlabeled ID link will give you.

FWIW there was a good discussion of this on r/admin last month.

https://www.reddit.com/r/admin/comments/1c6lp0z/link_slug_po...

Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".

>SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans"

I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.

Please do! And please send me a picture if you actually do it. :)

I see. I suppose in a perfect world, devs would just follow general best practices and search engines would reward that, and nobody would be looking for evil voodoo to boost traffic. And I would have a pet unicorn!

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