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As predicted… And people piled on me here when I question why they were falling head over heels over bluesky when it was yet another techo bro platform
I thought about it but lemmy seems more genuine.
No karma. No nothing. Just info.
This was more a Twitter vs BlueSky comparison… not against Lemmy, not sure I understand your comment
They’re against themselves. Lemmy is the closest thing. I heard there might be a similar choice being built but I don’t give too much of a shit because I never used any of that twatter shit.
Fucking same! It baffles me how dumb people can be over and over again
I noped out the second I heard Dorsey was involved. Don’t care he isn’t anymore, it got the Techbro ick! Eurgh 🤢
There is a legitimate reason for this: it’s the only way to provide content creators with evidence of how many people actually clicked on the link.
The downside is that there is so many ways that a feature like this can be abused by BlueSky in ways that can hurt users.
No, it’s not the only way. You could track the click with JavaScript.
The user can also block your tracking scripts. Besides, the user can share the link with friends, and you won’t be able to track them this way. I’m sure there are many other reasons why having a middleware is de-facto the industry standard.
The user can also block the URL target rewriting. Not sure what’s your point though, I said it’s not the only way, not that there are better ways.
Yeah, it’s literally the second step of enshittification, where platforms stop allocating value to users and start allocating them to publishers. This is still Bluesky expanding out its surveillance apparatus, something it will have every incentive to abuse later on like other platforms before it.
Why do content creators need to see how many clicks they get?
It’s how a number of them get paid.
I think I would like to go back to social media before people were getting paid for it
Thats the fediverse!
I would like to go back to the 90s and 00s where the internet wasn’t being monetised at every fucking opportunity.
I don’t know. I’m happy that some very talented and knowledgeable people create content that makes my life a little better, and that they are able to do that thanks to the various forms of monetization.
There is no way it isn’t already being abused, there are zero guard rails on it
Fucking typical, a move that hurts the platform long-term is being cheered for by ignorant idealists while the makers of its demise are already salivating and cartoonishly rubbing their hands in glee
The content creators themselves could use a link that goes through a counter if they really need it, no?
it’s the only way
lol. Citations needed. Pretty sure this is JavaScript 101.
That’s incorrect.
BlueSky relies on JavaScript to run (try turning it off and loading their site, it won’t even render). Click-through traffic is almost exclusively measured by JavaScript (e.g. Google ad “events”). This is the same as measuring other stats, like whether you lingered on a post before scrolling past it, or whether you opened another tab, or whatever.
Proxy links are absolutely a method of measuring traffic, and they’re a method that works even when the site has JavaScript disabled - but since that’s not how Bsky works, it’s not relevant.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. There’s a bunch of ways to track what users are doing without needing to use referral links.
Seems to me the referral links are there to prevent honey cookie shenanigans.
Trust me bro, we are not tracking you. Please trust me bro!
If the purpose of this feature was tracking, they could just use a JavaScript onclick handler.
Removed by mod
This is for publishers. They announced this openly.
This is not enshittification. Many other knowledgeable users who actually know what they’re talking about have explained why.
I’m very curious what these knowledgeable users say.
Rule 1 of the internet is “check the link before you click” and these man in the middle forwarding systems make that impossible.
I have a different association with “enshittification” but I definitely don’t support this change because it’s a security problem, you’re totally dependent on their moderation to keep you from clicking sketchy links.
they’re in this very thread cmon man
I read that comment, but I know for a fact that’s not the only way to log clicks.
It’s not for bsky to log clicks…??? They can already do that without doing this bounce link because you’re using their app??? Like folks are we really doing this?
It’s for external websites to know that the click came from bsky. (E.g. if you click the link from the bsky app, without this trick it would like you just typed the URL in, since apps don’t provide a referral header)
“check the link before you click” and these man in the middle forwarding systems make that impossible.
generally not true… the link href (the thing the browser shows to the user) would be the original link… bsky hijacks the link with an onclick (or similar) handler so you can see where you’ll be taken before clicking
It’s not exactly enshittification yet. The service still mostly works. But it is an attempt to build a wall around the garden.
Fuck walled gardens. That shit got old years ago. At least with FB you could pretend you didn’t expect it. Maybe. If you’re oblivious, at least.
I don’t really see how. Other AppViews and custom clients don’t do this. Its just a few lines of javascript in the frontend.
Funny how people keep saying it’s not enshittification right up until the point where they choke to death on shit.
What is wrong wth a fucking discount code to show where you hot the referral.
I refuse all cookies everywhere and the internet works just fine.
I’ve given up trying to save people from obvious traps. They refuse to listen and they refuse all data.
Bluesky has been doing enshitification since it didn’t mind having that transphobic man on their platform, as far as I’m concerned.
which one?
Guessing we’re talking about Jesse Singal. The man who was banned and then allowed back in after negotiating directly with bsky staff.
That’s the one. It’s a while back I left now.
Jesse Singal. The other person that replied reminded me. When I left his being allowed to be on the platform was a bit of thing.
For reference you can disable this with unlock origin https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/pull/27500
fuck it’s almost like the world runs on capitalism
Yeah, we need to do something about that.
state funded internet service and social media?
Ideally people funded.
Honestly not much of a functional difference between modern states and corporations.
States just do their best to pretend to be democratic while also being mechanisms of control and furthering the siphoning of all material wealth to the rich.
Yes even the social democratic states work like that, and it’ll get way more obvious soon.
The state is publicly funded, but yeah, it is better if the public can solve a problem without the state or without oligarchs like Elon involved.
Yeah, this is why BlueSky’s openness is always only to a point. I will say it’s probably not as bad as some are making it out to be, but it’s definitely not something you want to see from a platform purporting to be open. Fortunately this is only a BlueSky thing and not the entire AT Protocol… but at this point, the AT Protocol and BlueSky are inseperable. I mean, are there even any other AT Protocol sites?
As someone who ran a popular link shortening platform let me tell you how difficult it is to curtail spam links.
This is likely a way to warn users before being forwarded to fraudulent websites that a link has been marked as spam.
There are many other use cases for this redirect as well but this is the most obvious for user safety.
Doesn’t sound plausible to me—If they can detect spam links like you’re suggesting, why not just mask those links as bsky short links?
Its easier to do this, so they don’t have to go through every post to check if it has a bad link, and if so, to edit it.
but that’s what indexes are for
That wasn’t the reason they gave anyway – they added it so publishers could track outgoing links.
Bluesky never felt quite right.
Wolves in sheep’s clothing.
lemmy too, it’s shit everywhere
Isn’t that what honey did in their app?
Are you talking about coupons? Then no, very different things.
It’s a switcheroo, but not the same switcheroo
That didn’t take long
I’m using duckduckgo. Yes, it shows bluesky has trackers. lemmy shows NO trackers…
