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Comment by debugnik | Hacker News Reader

This site redirects to HN when it notices HN in the referrer.

The fact sites do evil things with these headers is why I configure Firefox with

  network.http.referer.XOriginTrimmingPolicy

set to 2. It "breaks" sites, but often in good ways (such as the site in TFA).

Referrer links are a dumb idea. Why the hell do you want to know where I'm coming from other than to track me

For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.

Businesses survived just fine before this. Do personalised ads earn more money? Maybe. But they're invasive and if the governments bowed down to the people instead of corporations they'd be just as illegal as stalking a potential customer to harass them when they're most likely to see you

Got same issue with Edge, but works with Firefox :)

Wow, I didn't even notice because I have extensions that strip the referrer header. Excellent.

If you have JavaScript enabled, that is. JWZ at least does the redirect on the server side.

The following is pulled in from `https://soc.me/assets/js/turnBack.js`:

    const undesirables = [
      "news.ycombinator.com/",
      // "reddit.com/", // disable temporaily
      "lobste.rs/"
    ] ;

    if (undesirables.find(site => document.referrer.includes(site))) {
      window.location.replace(document.referrer);
    }

I wonder why Reddit is "temporarily not undesirable".

Why are they undesirable though

Git history doesn't explain it unfortunately

https://github.com/soc/soc.me/blame/main/assets/js/turnBack....

Although, when we inspect author's profile on lobste.rs, we'll see that he's banned:

https://lobste.rs/~soc [Banned 4 years ago by pushcx: Troll.]

Maybe he's banned from HN as well. And this 'undesirables' is a method of taking some kind of revenge.

Last comment was just over 5 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=soc

Author has said that development is moved to codeberg, but github version was good enough for the "turnBack.js" analysis.

Uh, before I wrote my sibling comment I read 'comment' as 'commit' and because of it I somehow assumed it was a github link... not sure how that happened.

Anyway, the user named 'soc' on HN has "listbite" in the description. I saw this profile, but I think it's not the same guy. But also I wasn't sure so I didn't paste the link to HN at all.

This is an interesting way to prevent the hug of death. I wonder what the author's reasoning is, also would it really be effective?

I doubt it, the redirect is client-side, I got a flash of the page before the redirect.

If anything, it's going to at least double its traffic this way when people click again assuming they hit back somehow.

I thought I was losing my mind for a second. What a strange script to run...

Copy the URL and manually paste it into a new tab, no referrer then.

open in new tab

That doesn't seem to clear the referrer, at least on Firefox. Gotta go a step further and outright copy/paste the URL into an already-created tab.

Open in private works

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