Slashdot Mirror
Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell?
Ant snips from Royal Pingdom this excerpt: "Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web. And it has a price."
Funny just this morning I noticed that it took at least 5 redirects or more for Google to let me login to Analytics. It felt like my browser had a life of its own!
The real problem though are the link shorteners. I'd like to vote with my feet and never click on them, but for many, they are like drugs, because they let you track your influence (how many people clicked) in real-time. It's especially bad on slower connections such as smartphones. Not everyone has 1MB/s.
Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?
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Don't work on your startup project without a safety net
I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up. Thank you Slashdot and goatse.cx. If it's important enough to go visit, it's important enough to spell out properly. And thank you, but I don't live my life via SMS, so the few extra characters is worth my piece of mind.
For those of us who use things like NoScript, the price can be that we don't get there. Ever.
I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.
The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.
I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
... so they had to find yet another way to slow things down... so the web could live up to its reputation of "world wide wait" ;)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
The Optimize Google add-in for Firefox gets rid of some of their hellish redirects. Sadly, it doesn't update frequently and seems prone to breaking.
I want to create a redirect loop. Just imagine, google to tinyurl to bit.ly to dilv.it back to google.
Or you could always just make a really long way to get to someone who'll never give you up, never let you down.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Jeff Atwood hit on this issue in a blog post last year: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002.html
Insert Sig Here
Less fragile and less of an unnecessary intermediary on this Web 2.0 (or whatever) age would be to catch the click of a link with onclick, set a cookie, and open the original, intended link. When user would again come back to the site, this cookie would be dumped to the site that so much wanted the information it was clicked. Even if the user would have some sort of embedded resource from this site open somewhere else, it could harvest the information and send it back.
Instead, we seem to be ending up with endless chains of redirectors and opaque identifiers that are bound to organizations that don't necessarily exist in a year. What a joy to use technology which is driven by needs of utter morons and greed of those interested to press most information out of the morons...
and there is no useful (i.e. non-light-entertainment) content created primarily through advertising revenue. Slashdot developers who have made their money over the last decade producing tat by not overestimating the intelligence of the general public cannot bear to admit this, but you simply cannot produce high-calibre content when your primary aim is to suck in as many as possible of the kind of people who take notice of adverts.
Murdoch, often maligned for his lack of business sense but mysteriously still richer than all of us, seems to have tried and failed at pushing the subscription model. Obviously there are other viable models for producing information on the web such as government sponsorship (BBC, academia) and well organised groups of hobbyists (e.g. ham radio), but how will the sites who do not already have a dedicated subscription base through off-line heritage sustain themselves? Or maybe the answer is that they will not, the moment they take their eye off the advertiser as customer and start worrying directly about satisfying the desire for the reader to intellectually advance himself.
To play the devil's advocate - facebook's redirects started as a way to filter out all the spam links.
To be fair, that is nothing more than a workaround for several other major security issues:
1. The referrer header itself. This header serves no useful purpose, and leaks information that the destination website has no need to know. There is no way to use the referrer information securely, since it can be trivially forged, but it does serve as an invaluable tool for malicious attacks and unwanted tracking.
2. Session IDs should be validated to prevent hijacking. At the very least the session ID should be ignored if it comes from a different IP address than the one which created the session. It's not a perfect solution, given dynamic IPs, NAT, and proxies, but it would block most attacks without inconveniencing normal users.
3. No private information, including session IDs, should ever go in the URL. HTTP POST requests or cookies are a better solution here. (Naturally, cookies should be valid only until the end of the session unless the user explicitly indicates otherwise.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Personally, I find the trend of redirecting to innocent sites via shady URL's much more alarming: http://5z8.info/foodporn_e0g0l_taliban-meetup
(I promise I'll get modded "troll" by someone who glanced at the link and assumed the worst. Hard to blame them, but I do love using those links whenever possible...)