[osobo]

Ah, the digital naiveté of the nineties. Nowadays, cool URLS get changed on purpose so you have to enter the platform through the front instead of bouncing off your destination.

[gary_0]

And they get loaded down with query string fields for analytics. I kill those with https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

[BeFlatXIII]

I wonder if there is a similar extension that leaves in the UTM parameters but fills them with curse words and other sophomoric junk data.

[jraph]

Good idea, but risky if not done right or not adopted by many people. You'd be increasing your specificity and therefore the ability to track you.

[BeFlatXIII]

Good point. If you’re the only user with utm_origin=boogers&utm_medium=poop, it’ll be trivial to connect you between websites. It’s all automated, so there’s slim to no chance of making a server admin chuckle while checking the logs, unfortunately.

[toastal]

I keep checking to see when this add-on will get approved to Firefox Android's anointed list

[ronyclau]

If you are using Firefox Nightly, you can install arbitrary add-ons (though quite a number of them don't work due to UI difference, container doesn't work too) now after going though some steps: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

[pwdisswordfish8]

Good thing I still keep the version pinned at 68!

[TremendousJudge]

What's happening with this project? The rules repo hasn't been updated for months even with several PRs

[slver]

I'm not aware of anyone doing this on purpose. It's bad for bookmarks, it's bad for SEO, bad for internal linking, and external linking.

URLs change because systems change.

[gruffusgruffus]

A proposed solution to this: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

[chrisweekly]

Characterizing TBL as naive is absurd. He was right. And the URLs you describe are anything but cool.

[jimlikeslimes]

I'm fairly sure the parent was joking and in full agreement with you. Just so this isn't a point out the joke post, a few years ago I saw a HN post from a bunch of people who used print to PDF, and pdfgrep as a bookmarking solution. It doesn't solve the original problem, but it does act a a coping strategy for when content goes missing. I've been using it for a good while now and it's been real useful already.

[jaimex2]

Fantastic way to lose your traffic though.

Someone follows a link, gets a 404 or main page and they're gone.

[bojan]

It's not traffic they are after, but monetization. The traffic that does not monetize only costs money.

[ninkendo]

Sigh. I remember when people used to put up websites for fun.

[antifa]

Also when example.com/2010/10/10/article-title redirects to the homepage m.example.com

[npteljes]

Up there with the Netiquette. I'd love a timeline where this matters, but this ship has sailed long, long ago.