Ask HN: Should we have links in HN profiles now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should we have links in HN profiles now?

14 pointsjaphyr12 comments

I value HN for the discussion as much as the articles - actually, I value the discussion more than the articles. HN has its issues, but overall the quality of discourse in the comments is higher than any other online community I'm part of.

When I read particularly interesting comments, I often look at the author's profile. When they have a blog or github repo listed, or twitter feed, I often look at those links to find out more about their work. I can't count how many times I've copy and pasted links from someone's profile to a new tab.

Is there any good reasons we don't allow links on user profile pages? HN has been undergoing some recent UI changes recently, and I wonder if this issue has been reconsidered at all.

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URL are already allowed in HN profiles, the only problem is that they're not surrounded by the '<a>' tag. Crawlers wouldn't have a problem if it did if it's accompanied with the rel='nofollow' https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

Are you suggesting HN include rel='nofollow' for URLs in user profiles?

In the age of equal access, how does one discern meaningful connections on a free platform?

Imagine if every time someone wrote a comment on Facebook, Instagram they had to answer a simple math question before it's posted. A lot less online bullying will happen and the poster's mind will be sharpened.

With the lack of linked content in HN profiles, you're 100% sure the person who visits any given link you have via the Right Click or Copy/Paste is a meaningful connection that has gone out of their way.

My suggestion - Build a Chrome plugin to scrape the page to discover content that passes a link litmus and programatically link it on the fly.

Personally I think a lot of the value in HN is its simplicity. I don't see clickable links to be worth the benefit, especially given the spam it would attract (yes, even with nofollow, spammers will target profile links).

I think the worse problem would be users adding a ton of spam links to their own profiles.

That said, I think it should be allowed. You should be able to add whatever basic markdown you want (text, formatting, images, links.) Perhaps, similar to what sarciszewski mentions below, you could have part of your profile be visible only to logged users, which should theoretically make crawling not an issue.

Not to undermine the point, because I do agree, but 'select - right click - go to address' is marginally quicker, unless you're keyboard shortcutting with 'ctrl-c, ctrl-l, ctrl-v'...

Thanks, that will work slightly better for urls that are on their own line where I can triple-click and select the url. But many links are not on their own line, and I have to use the mouse to select the link.

I forget if there's a valid reason not to have links. Was it about minimizing spam?

Even if it is, I would like to see an option for authenticated users to be able to turn on links in others' profiles. Google won't see them as hyperlinks so the incentive to spam won't be there.

I think I'll email the HN admins and point them here.

In what ways would this improve:

  1. Behavior?
  2. Comments?
  3. Stories?

> Comments

There's certainly a base element of comments that should be independent of who you're replying to - you should reply to the comment, not the person. But one of the joys of HN is getting to interact with really interesting people. When you know a person's background, you can reply to them a little more fully.

This plays out all the time around well-known HN members. When people reply to patio11's comments, for example, you can often see that some people know who he is and some don't. Sure, we know him to a large degree from his comments, but we also know him from the work he does.

I'd love to be able to click on links in profiles because it would make it a little easier to check out people's work. I only visit profiles of people who make interesting comments; interesting comments tend to be made by people who are unlikely to include spam links in their profiles -> I'm not too worried about spammy links in profiles.

But I don't run HN, and I trust them to make decisions like this with the best interests of the community in mind.

My gut feeling is that slowing the process down may be beneficial. It's hard to think of cases where speeding up the 'whois' improves interaction. It's easy to think of cases where it clearly won't.

From a moderation standpoint, my gut tells me that allowing outbound links in profiles makes creating bot and spam accounts more attractive.

It's slightly annoying to have to copy and paste a URL out of a document written in HyperText Markup Language.

That shouldn't really need to be justified any more than being able to use italics should - it's an essential part of the medium, arguably critical to the way communication on the web is intended to take place. And URLs are linked in comments already, so it wouldn't even be that great a change.

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