There’s a little forum called Hacker News where I lurk because sometimes seeing a bunch of nerds arguing over something as meaningless as it is recondite is almost as hilarious as watching the Jerry Springer Show used to be. Sometimes I even find interesting articles and websites instead of reading the comments. But you know what they say: it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.
Unfortunately, Hacker News is also a fascist groupthink incubator (the fact that it’s run by Y Combinator should tell you everything you need to know) populated mainly by acolytes of Paul Graham and College Republicans who majored in computer science. They’re generally of a pseudointellectual bent, holding forth on topics outside their expertise as techies. They’re obsessed with making shitloads of money. They’re obsessed with economics despite having no better an understanding of the discipline than I do, and calling them Philistines gives them more credit for aesthetic sense than they generally deserve. Unfortunately, there’s also a substantial portion of the commentariat over there that is at least sympathetic to fascism and fascism-adjacent ideas such as eugenics.
And a lot of them are obsessed with transgender women who code. You’d think it was a fetish, but most fetishists are at least discreet about it. These people aren’t.
As Hector Martin observes a substantial part of the problem is the site’s main (and possibly only) administrator, dang. He is often all too reluctant to let abusive comments stand, and the “community” over at HN has become vile enough that many people will “punish” people who visit their sites if the referrer header indicates that they came from Hacker News.
One prominent example is Jamie Zawinski, a Netscape/Mozilla founder, the principal dev for Lucid Emacs, and the proprietor of DNA Lounge. He must have something in his website’s server-side config file that detects incoming visitor from Hacker News and shows them this charming image:
Apparently Hector Martin had asahilinux.org handling incoming links from HN a bit more gently; he’d simply redirect such people to Google.
And, naturally, the lusers on HN are upset by this and complain to the admin. Never mind that they should be grateful that HN isn’t being DDOSed into the ground by hactivists and that website operators aren’t redirecting visitors from HN to sites like goatse.cx. dang had the following to say.
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.
At no point does this sorry excuse for a forum adminstrator consider the possibility that attention from HN commenters might be unwelcome because many such commenters treat Hacker News as a slightly more respectable version of 4chan or Kiwi Farms.
And now, assuming dang implements the change described above, websites that go viral on Hacker News will be subject to traffic spikes of unknown origin because dang has decided that not providing referrer info is better than banning submissions from sites that have indicated that they do not want to be featured on Hacker News.
After all, if you don’t want to be found on the internet you shouldn’t have a website. You can still be found on Google, so what’s the big deal about HN, Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, Kiwi Farms, Gab, or Stormfront?
sarcasm, parody of the typical Hacker News commenter’s mentality
At least Google lets people opt out of having their sites indexed by means of a deny directive in robots.txt
. These other platforms are not so courteous. Nor is there a standard HTML <meta>
element by which website operators can indicate that they would rather not have their posts submitted to social media platforms and aggregators like HN and Reddit.
The problem with sites like Hacker News is that they are basically comment sections that you cannot moderate. Should you draw such a site’s attention because somebody posted a link to something you wrote, they might not only make your site inaccessible because of the sudden load spike (effectively a DDOS attack, but not necessarily malicious) but expose your work to people who might not engage with it in anything resembling good faith. While it can be useful to get exposure for your website on platforms like HN and Reddit, you also run the risk of being subjected to the same sort of abuse that browser plugins like Dissenter tended to enable, and you have no recourse.
In fairness to the people running such platforms, it isn’t necessarily easy to field requests to refuse submissions linking to certain sites; dealing with such requests manually would be time-consuming. However, we can automate this. Pinterest, for example, has a “nopin” meta tag that website operators can use to disable image pinning on entire pages. Perhaps this can be standardized as a “nolink” tag that all platforms can check for when validating submitted links. I would suggest something like the following:
<meta name="news.ycombinator.com"
content="nolink"
description="Hacker News is a fascist groupthink incubator.">
The name should simply be the domain of a site from which you don’t want traffic, content should be “nolink”, and description can be freeform text.
Of course, dang probably won’t implement something like this. He’d rather deny website operators diagnostic information than do a better job of babysitting HN’s commenters. He doesn’t seem to understand that platforms which tolerate the intolerant become platforms where intolerant users can plot coordinated harassment campaigns. Ideally, such forums would be subject to the internet death penalty and all network traffic from the offending domains would be blackholed by sites participating in the boycott.
It may be time to do this to Y Combinator and Hacker News, but this isn’t necessarily something individual website operators can do on their own, it might not even be technically possible, because the traffic isn’t coming directly from Hacker News, but from computers that have been there before.
I personally can’t do anything about traffic from that site yet, and the meta tag I described is an empty symbolic gesture if not adopted, standardized, and widely honored. Thus far nobody has bothered to post anything from this site to HN so it isn’t really an issue yet. Nevertheless, I mean to stop lurking on that site.
And if you found my site via Hacker News or Reddit, kindly spare me the knowledge. I don’t care to be associated with either platform any longer, especially HN.
It’s the sort of wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes Mos Eisley look classy.