- 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"
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.
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)".
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.'
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.
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).
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
HN is absolutely not doing close to enough to chase away racists, bigots and transphobes. I've had minorities confide in me that they feel unable to participate on HN, one of the most influential sites in our industry, because of the level of bigotry tolerated here. This is one of the many ways in which inequality in our field perpetuates.
This is not good! There are many things Dan could do to make this place more welcoming, from simple things like marking June as pride month/February as Black history month (as many tech communities already do) to loudly banning and making an example out of bigots, making it clear that transphobia, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment (including the open anti-H1B racism so prevalent here) won't be tolerated.
Everyone makes their own decisions, but it is completely reasonable for sites to boycott HN and reject its traffic until this is addressed.
Do you have specific examples of content that you believe should be removed but is not?
I'm asking because it's really hard to have a meaningful constructive conversation about these sort of topics without concrete examples, IMHO. I could respond with some generic comments, but they may not apply at all to the examples you have in mind.
For what it's worth, I wrote a little extension to completely hide posts from certain users (and all subthreads to their posts) that I had negative interactions with; from my perspective these people just don't exist on HN. I usually add people to this list after 2 or 3 profoundly negative encounters, or if one encounter is particularly egregious.
I can definitely underscore that HN can be an unfriendly place at times, although in my personal subjective experience I found that the "unpleasantness" is not really isolated to a particular ideology or "side", or even limited to politics (the conversation that made me write this extension in a fit of anger was about devops stuff, after someone was just being a complete ass and I decided I never want to talk to them again).
This is really hard to moderate, because usually it's not "you idiot are you mentally deficient?!" type of stuff – that's easy and obvious, but it's usually more low-key: extremely uncharitable interpretations, wildly off-base straw men, spectacularly off-topic tangents about $pet_peeve, aggressive "I am a singularity of pure rationality, intelligence, and genius" attitudes, put-downs like "after 20 years GIMP still not as good as photoshop, ridiculous", boring and annoying "but akshually" pedantry, conspiratorial nonsense, and stuff like that. Everyone can have a bad day – and that's okay – there's a limit to how "bad" your day can reasonably get, IMHO, and if half your days are bad days....
Even as someone who really tries to keep a cool head about things and typically just "steps away from the computer" if things get too heated it has made my HN experience significantly better.
Maybe I'm just too sensitive; I don't know. I try to be forgiving of people's faults (being forgiving of them is also part of being kind), but I can't control my emotions, so shrug.
> simple things like marking June as pride month/February as Black history month
These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest. And the US-specific black history month seems a bit inappropriate for an international site like HN, IMHO. I'm not opposed to it or anything (other than being US-specific, as there is already enough US-centrism going on).
As a concrete example, the person who posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231243 should have been immediately banned and made an example out of, and the people who challenged them should be unflagged.
> These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest.
They're not meaningless gestures! Thry stake out a clear position on controversial topics with all the attendant effects.
But it is moderated away, via user flags, and you can't even see it unless showdead is on. You can't really judge things based on this IMHO, because you're essentially judging a community based on posts it removed.
Whether or not they should be banned just for this: I don't know – maybe? It's not a new account and I didn't check their history, who knows what they meant with "colored"? I'm guessing dang never even saw it; there are hundreds if not thousands of posts every day!
Killing the entire thread was probably a good thing though; there is nothing productive there.
I had a conversation with someone who was religiously homophobic on HN recently.
Their mind probably wasn't changed, but having civil discourse about intolerance is important.
I'd much rather see a racist post with thoughtful dissent (which the OP can then read, and is pretty much guaranteed on HN) than for racists to just get excluded, and have no cause to change their mind.
They then go to a more extreme forum, with people who only agree with them. The hate gets amplified instead of dissuaded.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who is regularly falling victim to the rightward lurch (for having committed the dastardly crime of the wrong hormone activating in-utero), the only reason I don't actively block Hacker News readers is that I make ad money off of them. That is the only reason it's worth the abuse vector to me.
dang, if you are reading this, please take a moment to seriously consider the actions you have taken today. I understand your desire for the community that Hacker News could be, but that is so far away from what it is today that it's almost laughable. Yes, this is a no-win situation but that's bascially how it is globally when trying to be centerist about any issue. I use Hacker News referers to change the page slightly (mostly to add a deserved "hey, can you please not be an asshole, thanks" via this code: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/686cc58fb6fc8f2e3bf0197e9b38...) and I would be very frustrated if that went away. Maybe even to the point of having a worker process figure out if my articles are posted to hacker news and making them go dark if they are on the front page. I know you value the articles I post (as our email threads have contained), but really it's an abuse vector that I need to keep metrics of.
Website administrators should be allowed to block Hacker News referers. Yes this is a thing that is not desirable for you as an administrator, but at some level something's got to give. The enshittening of Hacker News is something that is very undesirable for me too. I've gone over this in our emails. This was going to be another one of those emails, but I really would prefer this one to be out in the open.
Hi, I like your blog. There are some really great articles.
As far as i can tell the problem you have with HN is that if one of your blog posts makes the front page you get idiots making shitty comments about you in the HN comments, right?
Do your posts get discussed anywhere else (reddit?), and if so how how does it compare?
It's against the guidelines to point out moderation decisions.
But it's relevant to the point I'm making.
This is a thoughtful, carefully-worded argument that has been repeatedly upvoted and downvoted (the downvotes seem to come in pairs -- admin action?)
The moderation of this comment allows anonymous people, lurking in the shadows, to make decisions about what other people read, with no accountability or consequence.
It is forbidden to talk about the moderation decisions, yet the moderation game mechanic is, in 2023, no longer fit-for-purpose, given the new realities of the political climate. The moderation mechanic is the story, and is no longer able to provide fair, reasonable, accountable crowdsourced moderation. A relic of less polarized times.
Prophecy: Hacker News will either change, or perish. The usual deal, presented to organisms and organizations alike.
Preserving its heirloom-varietal forum interface into the coming decade will be popular (in a decade increasingly stricken with nostalgia,) but also lethal.
Thus, I predict the demise of Hacker News.
The website will of course persist for as long as it remains useful to Y Combinator, but as the natural center-of-gravity for all of tech culture? Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei.
It's far more likely the majority of users just are interested in these comments and don't want to see them, so don't, than the moderators are actively downvoting your comments, and many others, throughout the day. Those that are interested, for whatever reason, tend to have showdead enabled (I do). It's a bit of a "opt to what you want to see" system, not a "you only get our filter" system. The hard part is convincing others what you want to say is what they want to see here.
I think you flipped a right/left handed towards the end, but I follow what you're trying to say. The thing is most don't believe in a right where everyone has to listen to anything said with equal opportunity. It definitely is a tyranny of the majority, but that doesn't mean a tyranny of the minority, where anything said should get equal exposure regardless of how unpopular it is, is inherently more correct, or necessarily better.
That's why "The hard part is convincing others what you want to say is what they want to see here." It's not that they need to read everything, it's that they need to see those things they typically want to ignore as something worth them spending time on. No amount of moderation will make people spend time reading things they aren't interested in reading. Part of this is you end up with communities with different focus, and that's usually the way these kinds of differences co-exist in the same world at scale. Once the communities get large enough, they are in some way forced to find neutral ways to interact. Typically this happens more in the real world than on the internet.
The only time this really breaks is when the divider isn't related to content, rather some arbitrary attribute unrelated to it. E.g. if a conversation about the best quality paints ignores someone because of their handedness. The content of what they were saying had nothing to do with the exclusion so people want to protect against those kind of exclusions. The same feeling does not extend to those that want to bring a content reason for exclusion into the conversation, e.g. someone that constantly talks about how paint is a conspiracy by $BigCorp and can't talk about paint without always bringing it up. In that case the person needs to find people interested in talking about $BigCorp paint conspiracies, or a better way to engage others, not a moderator to force people to listen to them. If they do get the latter, people will just stop showing up... not suddenly start listening.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are no real "HN mods", this isn't reddit. There is basically one admin, dang, who does not do this.
What is actually happening is enough regular users who have been on the site long enough (myself included) just disagree that some particular piece of content belongs on this site, so they flag it.
What people really have a problem with is not understanding that lots of other people just disagree with them.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen the mods remove anything like that, plenty of user flags do that all the time though. The worst I’ve seen the mods here do is focus on the most pendantic, barely rule breaking comments while allowing explicitly off topic flamebait to simmer.
Dan, you can avoid all this by fixing your moderation. Start banning the transparent bigots (like the "colored flag" person here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231243) right away. Care about what the actual hackers like marcan have to say. Even do a little thing like put a little pride flag on HN during June. (People are going to complain about it. Ban them!)
This isn't that hard, it just requires a clear commitment.
So your solution is to ban everyone who disagrees with you? In fact, your solution is to ask HN to take an explicitly political position of no relevance to its intended purpose, and then ban everyone who objects to that?
HN should start by aggressively banning clear bigotry before we start getting into more complex cases. To the extent that that is a political position, yes, HN should take a political position.
To put it more politely, these people are expressing attitudes that, if they were ever widely put into practice, would destroy the liberal democratic foundations on which our society is built, including the protections that give them the liberty to express such foolish opinions without consequence. That seems insane to me, so I stand by my previous comment: these people are fucking insane.
It would have been fine to post that without the name-calling. Internet denunciation always feels justified, and maybe it sometimes is, but it really dumbs down the threads (e.g. it evokes worse from others), and we have to moderate for the effects of these things.
As it should. Personally speaking, I flagged this thread, and I hope others do as well. There's nothing productive to be accomplished here, nor anything intellectually stimulating to discuss. So yeah, I'm totally for deleting/killing this entire post.
I think a public review of what to do by Dang (responded to this thread) is not only productive, but highly valuable. It's unreasonable to sit around and wait for a neutral version of this discussion to pop up, it likely never will and the issue is only going to get worse.
I respectfully disagree. IMO, this is all just a lot of pointless meta navel-gazing which is of no value whatsoever. But I'm just one guy, and we all know what they say about opinions. shrug
Well I’m still wondering how they are showing a text only to people who submitted something to HN and nobody seems to know either in the thread so at least there’s that…
It's probably not being done here , but it's possible to do. The CSS rule is processed in your browser, so it doesn't actually tell the server if you've been to the link, but in theory a website could have some javascript that tries to detect if the CSS rule was activated.
I think this is about as “productive” as the threads regarding the Rust foundation debacle(s). Did you believe those should be flagged too? I don’t think they were.
Personally I believe the communication from Asahi’s leadership regarding the users of HN to be relevant. And as others have pointed out in this thread, especially when HN users have supported development of Asahi.
Looking at the HTML for the blog post section of the site, it's not what's advertised, or they haven't implemented it yet as it's just the Google redirect.
<script>document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")&&(console.log("Hacker News is becoming worse than 4chan. Do better."),document.___location="https://google.com")</script>
Asahi Linux is exploiting a browser vulnerability with that CSS trick, specifically the one that https://varun.ch/history shows off. Firefox has a mitigation for that vulnerability by turning off layout.css.visited_links_enabled.
Whatever they did doesn't seem to work here on my Firefox. I click the link from Hacker News and I get the blog post exactly as if I typed in the URL myself.
> everyone who has ever submitted to Hacker News gets to see this banner on our website until they clear their browser history and stop contributing to HN
Wow, that is even more insane. They are actively going to show an ugly banner, to every user they can determine has contributed to HN, telling them to stop contributing to HN?
Does your Linux distro actively try and push you into specific social media patterns?? Me neither.
Does your Linux distro actively try and push you into specific social media patterns?? Me neither.
I've also never seen that from an OS maintainer. I've only seen that in small semi-private forums that are trying to stay somewhat below the radar and even then it is rather silly. Those sites should just make themselves private, password protected and invite-only. OS distributions should be welcoming and inclusive for all assuming they care at all about adoption of their work
It doesn't look like it is active on their site but I would assume it is a link to the submit page with some conditional CSS based on whether the user has visited the site. Changing the display setting and text color.
I don't think the flagrantly flagged stuff counts. Nor should it, otherwise I could intentionally tank any community I didn't like with 30 minutes of spare time. I think they are upset about things that weren't explicitly downvoted/flagged, like comments on the identity of Lina.
- 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"