Show HN: Snip.ly, the link shortener that drives conversion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Snip.ly, the link shortener that drives conversion

snip.ly

34 pointsmichaelcheng44 comments

X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking

I'm not seeing how encouraging end users to engage in behavior that sites specifically turn off for security reasons as a 'good idea' regardless of the marketing value..?

People see Airbnb as a good idea, this shouldn't be a surprise.

I'd be just as surprised if people posted AirBnb on a site for lawyers in NYC and the majority of lawyers thought it was a 'good idea'.

I fully expect the end users of this product to be oblivious to technical minutiae like clickjacking. I was just expecting a stronger reaction to the technical detail this relies on a tech-heavy start up site like Hacker News.

I'm a bit surprised at the amount of positive response. This impresses me as rather obnoxious, probably effective, but obnoxious. Something between the pop-over ad and the ever-present network TV promotional crawl brought to the masses.

I see your point, but I see it as providing context to the links. This is especially useful on Twitter where there is so little room for commentary.

The message is not showing up for no reason. You clicked a link from someone you follow, because you wanted to usually BECAUSE of how that content relates to them.

Sure, if you just change every link you send out to a link with an ad at the bottom that is bad. But I see no problem with adding context and commentary to a link someone is sharing on social media for that exact reason.

I'm not. Marketing has a purpose like anything else. I'm more surprised and concerned by how few people commented on the fact it is relying on sites being vulnerable to clickjacking to function.

Maybe I'm just overly paranoid?

Does anyone know what court precedents there are for a site owner O. suing companies C. that present altered versions of O's site to third parties T, without consent from O? Arguably C. is interfering in the relationship of O. to T., wrongfully appropriating O's content for profit, and possibly defaming O by making O. appear (to T.) to be associated with C.

If such actions are not legally ruled out, this service may invite them.

Are you trying to ask if this could be tortuous interference with a business relationship? Or if Snip.ly would be liable for libel/defamation of their users by SiteA whose page was Snip.ly'd?

The former, possibly depending on the ToS of the site and how creative your lawyers can be. The latter, probably not; see 17 U.S. Code § 512, aka Safe Harbor for online posts.

This is hardly the first site to frame another site. It's hardly the first link shortener to do so and add a message or ad in another frame or interstitial either. There's enough that "top 10 URL shorteners to make money" is an actual recurring blog post across the web.

I doubt it. About . com has been using a technique like this to put adsense ads on external links for years.

Related to your point, the snip.ly website has the following user testimonial:

    You can essentially advertise 
    on any website for free!
    --Lucille Danks ― Deloitte

I really like this as well. Sure it could be used for evil, but so can a zip tie if used for the wrong reasons.

Already thinking of a ton of ways this can be used. Don't love that you have to sign-up for this but I suppose it is necessary.

What are these "tons of ways" you're talking about?

I'm not sure about this. Mmm. My gut feeling is I wouldn't feel too cool about using it, and I'd guess that if you gave news sites the chance to opt-in to being framed, not many would take Snip.ly up on it.

But I might be missing the full picture, and perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

Good luck to Snip.ly, but for developers who would want to stop this kind of thing from happening on their own sites, OWASP has a clickjacking defense cheat sheet:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_S...

How a user is supposed to know what site is behind the snip.ly URL? This is a phishing heaven.

I'm all for being creative in marketing... but this kinda seems like link bait spam. Interested in seeing if/how companies use it, but hoping it doesn't turn into ads for weightloss and sex enhancing pills.

I really like it! You know one thing that's not great though?? I cannot get back to just snip.ly once I'm logged in! It keeps kicking me to the dashboard when I want to be on the homepage!

Also, I couldn't use Snip.ly on itself! But maybe that's on purpose :)

Last reply, but turns out that I did http://snip.ly and forgot the www! Amateur mistake :)

This is not good. Consumers will eventually recognize that snip.ly links offer annoying experiences and they would not click on them over time. Thus, your conversion might actually decrease.

I, for one, welcome our new branded linking overlords.

I am pretty sure, this service is not going to thrive, because people will never click snip.ly urls once they know what it is, and contains user-ad which hinders user-exprience on the linked article. Is this too hard to figure?

Sniply is going to start stuffing their own ads in that bar eventually. It's a shrewd move by sniply to collect advertising revenue from traffic of other sites.

Thanks. I can now use this instead of proxies to scrape Google </evil unintended use>

Neat, but I would worry using it would annoy people. What's the ideal use case you imagine?

Clearly can be good for advertisers, way to bypass having to buy an add inorder to advertise

This is a really great idea although slightly evil. Could be quite useful though. Nice job!

Nice work! The design is really clean and I really like the concept. Keep it up!

Cool idea. I saw betakit using this the other day.

I like this idea.

Is it really free to use?

That's really spammy and gross. You are what's wrong with the internet today.

Bill Hicks said it best, so I'll leave it to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Whenever HN "hivemind" thinks something is bad because they wouldn't personally use it, that's a good sign that it will be successful with consumers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com