I find it a bit odd that Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this: to get people to click on the links and increase their traffic. It's not about SEO black magic or increasing their ability to track links, it's including an attribution with copied material in order to increase page views and visibility.
Now, I don't like that they use javascript to break your copy-paste functionality. It's unexpected and unrequested, so we are annoyed and confused by it. I wouldn't use Tynt.
Still, it's worth remembering that citations are a good thing. How many times have we on HN lambasted a site for not including proper attribute to copy and pasted text? How many times have we complained when someone pasted a quote or data in a comment here with no citation?
As unsavory and anti-usability as it is, I can understand the motivations behind Techcrunch and NYT. They're tired of their material being spread around without the courtesy of a backlink, and hope that by making it easier to cite than not to cite, they can encourage links.
In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. Tynt isn't doing it right, but attribution and links are a good thing to encourage.
Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this.
Maybe because it's obvious. The point of the article is that breaking copy/paste, whatever the reason, doesn't work: "Who, when they paste such text and find this “Read more:” attribution line appended, doesn’t just delete it (and wonder how it got there)?"
In Ted Nelson's original model for hypertext, the equivalent of a backlink happened automatically. Quoted material was "transcluded" rather than copied outright. It had several other nice features that go well beyond what we have with today's Web. Worse is better once again. :-)
Hmmm, an interesting idea. Context-sensitive addition to the right-click menu, perhaps, where I can choose to add the meta-data to my paste. I think I can get that going in Javascript.
Zotero seem to have the right idea, the behavior should be in the browser. Although they seem to want to do a lot more than that, an additional simple "Copy with annotation"-command in my Safari would be useful. Preferably with formatting settings, for me the newlines seem strange. If I do annotate, why wouldn't I want it right after the text?
I'm guessing you were downvoted because your suggestion was neither simple nor a solution. Since you can't easily predict which sites will use Tynt, it's not simple. Since you (presumably) still want to read the content on sites using Tynt, it's not a solution.
In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner.
If you copy something from a website (in for instance Firefox) and paste it into Microsoft OneNote (which is awesome, by the way), it will not only paste the content, but will also include a link to where it was copied from so you can easily locate it later.
I'm not sure how much metadata the clipboard contains in Windows, but I know (from clipnoard code I've written) that you can send the same content in several formats (plain-text, word-doc, html, etc) and it is up to the pastee to figure out which format to pick up and use.
I also know that the Linux clipboard-implementation is utterly fucked with X conflicting with KDE/Gnome and lots of things not behaving like you would expect from a unified implementation, and I wouldn't expect anything "sophisticated" like this to work. At least that was the state of affairs from the last time I attempted to use Linux as a desktop-OS, around 6 years ago. Maybe things have improved in the meantime, and in that case please let me know.
The copy-paste thing bugs me, but what really drives me insane is the highlight 3-words or less functionality. When I spot a word or thing that I want to know more about, I usually highlight, right click, and choose search. This works in both Chrome and IE8+. Firefox may even do it too, I don't use it.
With Tynt, it cancels the right-click menu and pops up a search bubble.
Mucking around with browser behaviour is not cool. Usually I try 3 or 4 times in confusion until I realise and promptly close the website in disgust.
Similarly, the New York Times intrusively assumes I want to "define" anything I select, even it’s lines long, breaking my normal browser behavior.
Edit: I triple-click to select paragraphs (an OS X idiom); the define-word script prevents this, recognizing not a triple-click but rather a double-click (select word) followed by a single click (activate definition pop-up).
I checked on Chrome, and NY Times only tries to define single words for me -- but when I de-select any text, the embedded video player (if any) reloads. Buggy.
I haven't looked at their script. I'm curious whether they transmit selected text, as Daring Fireball seems to suggest, or only copied text. If the former, they're going to get a lot of false positives from those of us who neurotically select blocks of text on pages for no reason while reading.
I guess at least now I know I'm not alone. I'm very OCD about clicking on random words, triple clicking on paragraphs to highlight them entirely while I'm reading or just dragging my mouse over random amounts of text on the page. I don't know why I do it but it drives pretty much everyone reading the same thing as me on the same computer insane.
I do all of this, too. Especially selecting paragraphs. Actually, now that I think about it (which I do fairly often, tbh), this is one of the reasons I've stayed with Firefox. It only highlights the text of the paragraph. WebKit highlights to the end of the line, and some more, I think. It isn't as visually appealing, at all.
We had an intern at our company for a week, a smart guy who is graduating from high school, and he pointed out all of these things about me. I also manically tap caps lock with my left pinkie.
I'd rather not think about this part of me too much, especially when it comes to picking browser based on how it renders (manically) selected paragraphs.
That's fairly common (I do it too). I remember reading one of MS Office PM's blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/) and he mentioned they had to do work on the minibar in Office 2007 to not annoy people who select while reading.
My cousin does this as well. When she reads something online she highlights the half-line she's reading at the time. You can always tell when she's gotten distracted and started reading something because there's a constant clicking coming from her mouse.
I do this too and I think its the same part of my brain that likes the bounce of the window on the iPhone after an inertia scroll. I pull the window down over and over when I'm bored. It's like bubble wrap.
It’s not neurosis; it’s not OCD. It helps establish a line for your eyes to follow when flicking back to the left side of text. It’s just like the ruler or piece of paper that speed-reading and sight-reading teachers instruct students to use.
Notice that you will hardly or never do this on narrow columns of text.
Not everybody highlights text in a functional way. In fact, what I'm highlighting usually has nothing to do with what I'm reading at the moment, and is more of a nervous habit/tic than anything else.
It's selected text. And they're trying to spin that as a feature (i.e. they can show you the section of text has the highest "user engagement" based on relative number of selections)
That sounds like a better feature than the inserting of text into the copy. I would say that over a large same of people selecting text you could see engagement patterns.
It sounds more reliable. I'm not sure about better, though - I can only see it helping to identify unclear writing and witty editorialism, and I only want more attention on one of those.
It seems to only report back when you actually copy the selection (either ctrl/cmd+c or right click+copy). Just looking at the headers, the JS is obfuscated and I'm too lazy to look at it.
Just joining the chorus of "me toos"... Didn't think it was that prevalent, I wonder where the instinct comes from? Anyone have any fun pseudo-scientific theories?
I think it's just that highlighting is neat. Some portion of my brain is pleased by the flashing/changing colors (different than a flashing ad, etc., since I'm controlling the action).
What if it's not to help follow the line for reading, but to "feel" the page as you read it? A proxy for dealing with immaterial bits on a screen instead of holding and feeling the paper of a book or magazine? Showing you have some sort of control over it.
The only name that I've seen for this is "impulsive highlighting". There used to be a Wikipedia article about it, but it was unfortunately deleted since it cited no sources.
I also do this, but I think it is at least slightly correlated with what I am reading. So the false positives aren't really false, they might represent, to a degree, what people are spending time reading.
Also, this would be really to filter out, the amount of highlighted areas would just be ridiculously large.
This stinks of Enterprise Software, the alternate reality where a salesman sells something that doesn't work to an executive that doesn't really care because there is no objective metric of success applied to the purchase, just the question of whether it can be 'spun' into something that makes the purchaser look good.
I'd like to see any of Tynt's customers weigh in and explain how they are measuring Tynt's effectiveness. Are any of them using A/B testing or otherwise quantifying the costs and benefits?
This article doesn't even mention the biggest problem with Tynt: copying and pasting code snippets. I hate it when Tynt is installed on a website that has code snippets or tutorials. When I copy the code I have to delete the Tynt message. It wouldn't be so bad if it was smart enough to detect the coding language and insert the attribution within comments.
I suggested that feature months ago when I first discovered Tynt, but they never implemented it or even responded.
That's actually a feature I wish existed in e.g. StackOverflow. They actually do know which language code is written in, so they should include a comment before the copied code which links to the question.
I do this myself with any snippets I copy from sites, since I always find myself going back to the site at least once.
Consider this bit of 'cleverness:" Encode music CDs with a Windows rootkit that prevents copying of unencrypted music from said CDs, phones home, and otherwise helps 'protect music owner's IP from piracy.'
Do we not fault the creator and instead fault the companies that buy it?
Here's a horse I have been beating for several decades: "Fault" or "Blame" does not obey the laws of conservation. Just because we blame Alice for failing to check her blind spot before making a lane change doesn't mean we absolve Bob of fault for ignoring her turn signal.
It's reprehensible to make and sell this stuff. It's also self-defeating to buy and deploy it.
To the car analogy. That's exactly what it means. As a driver I have no obligation to honor your request to change lanes. It is your obligation to decide if moving sideways into my car is the right move.
In the above case, and in tynt's they aren't doing anything wrong. It is more analogous to gun control, without the dire consequences of misuse.
> As a driver I have no obligation to honor your request to change lanes. It is your obligation to decide if moving sideways into my car is the right move.
Please don't stick to "the letter of the law" in Ontario. I respect your right to have an opinion about this, but would despair if such a choice resulted in injuries or death.
In Ontario we have no-fault insurance for exactly this reason. If you choose not to respect someone else's signal and an accident results, you are both getting dinged for the cost of repairs. Your failure to "drive defensively" is your fault, regardless of the official rules for right-of-way.
Fault is only of interest if the police end up laying certain types of criminal charges. You might escape fault if the other driver runs a red and hits you. You will not escape fault if you see another driver signal a lane change and you have time to slow down and allow them to change lanes.
If someone changes lanes into you and you had no reasonable chance to react, you're possibly off the hook. But there's really no reason to see someone signal a lane change and bull right through without being very certain that they know you're there and plan to wait for you to proceed.
Wait, what? There's plenty of blame to go around, here. Blame the websites that decide to screw their users, but also blame a company who makes a product that screws users.
That's a good point and I agree, but why then do browsers let this sort of crap happen?
Why do they allow JavaScript to modify what gets copied to the copy buffer, rather than just copying whatever you happen to select from the rendered page?
I can't think of any good reason why that functionality should be allowed. The copy buffer should be as off-limits to the JavaScript VM as the contents of my hard drive. So while the developers of this "feature" and the websites that implement it are partially to blame, I think there's a flaw in browsers that's allowing them to do it in the first place.
There aren't nearly enough fine-grained controls over JavaScript in modern browsers, given the really obnoxious shit that's beginning to be done with it (JS-based popups and popovers). Browser developers have left an opening for abuse and, particularly with the last decade-plus of WWW development in the rear-view mirror, we shouldn't be surprised when it gets abused in really user-hostile ways.
browsers dont have access to the clipboard, but they should do for the same reason word, spreadsheets, photoshop, ..., every other major desktop application do have access. This is a core piece of functionality that is a major part of building usable applications.
yes they can be abused, you can make red text on a green background, or phish someones bank about and steal thousands using this technology, banning it isnt the solution.
Why do operating systems let this crap happen? If a Web application mustn't put things on the clipboard, surely that applies to programs not written in Javascript as well.
The idea that Web browsers shouldn't allow Javascript to do hardly anything is a large reason why the Web's "open platform" is getting kicked around like an empty can by closed platforms.
"Now, the nature of my work writing Daring Fireball involves copying and pasting many snippets of text from web sites every day. So this Tynt stuff probably annoys me more (or at least more frequently) than most people."
I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I pasted a passage from a Tynt-enabled website into an email and the URL showed up. I send these types of emails all the time and it saves me time.
I'd have thought there was a bright line between people like my parents who use the ubiquitous "share this link" site features, and people like me who send messages with links and excerpts tailored to the recipient. If I'm right, you're an edgier edge case than Mr. Gruber.
Yes, I hate these douchebags. I also hate the people who use them. I have a modified Chromium that specifically prevents this tampering with selection (null out the webkit javascript hooks for selection stuff) and an extension that will give a little blip whenever I land on a page that uses them or something like it.
It pisses me off. I can't believe people think this is a good idea. When the spammers/ad people start using HTML5 audio to blast annoying crap at you, HTML5 locations to figure out how to send junk mail to your house, and other crap that browser makers were too short-sighted to realize were a bad idea to give sites the power to control, then we're going to see a regression in browser features as "does less" becomes the default.
Right now, the sites you visit have way too much control over what they can do to your browser. It's naïve to think that these people will just 'play nice' and not abuse features. The SEO and ad people will take whatever length of thread you give them and completely unravel the shirt off of your back.
crippling the functionality of the browser isnt going to harm people developing these exploits, they will just use toolbars and plugins whatever.
all it does is hurt people who want to build real web applications, the complete lack of support for copy and paste is a major major pita in that regard.
you cant, these things employ tricks like a hidden textarea that gets focused and selected when ctrl+c gets keyed down (safari does have a copy / paste events), the same can happen on paste, flash also has access to write to the clipboard, sometimes. its buggy and annoying though.
but it means 1. applications cant have copy paste buttons 2. if you have a special clipboard (googles cloud clipboard), you have 2 clipboards that can very easily become out of sync.
preventing abuse of the clipboard by completely killing its functionality is like banning apples because someone chocked on one once, there are much simpler solutions (like firefoxs geolocation permission dialog)
I don't see why JS code running on a page in the browser should have access to my computer's local clipboard. That's a misfeature at best, and it's ripe for abuse.
Web apps that really need access to the local clipboard should have to jump through some hoops in order to access it, just like they have to jump through hoops to access the local filesystem. Perhaps we could make those permissions persist, so that users wouldn't have to constantly authorize a particular site (like Google Docs) that they want to let access their clipboard, but it should definitely not be accessible to the world by default.
> That's a misfeature at best, and it's ripe for abuse.
I'm with the group that despises this behaviour (although I think I can't quite manage to work up to outrage), but I'm puzzled by this. Since the (mis)feature has already been abused, I assume you're referring to possible worse future abuses; but I can't think of any. Could you clarify?
>A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted...
At some point, someone must have thought that allowing JavaScript access to the clipboard would be a neat idea. And on a whiteboard, it does seem like a neat idea. But in the extremely hostile environment of the Internet, where every feature will be abused in the most user-hostile ways possible, it is a liability rather than an asset.
The Internet has a long history of such features: the ability of a page to spawn new windows, which led to popups, is the one of the most glaring to casual users, but Usenet's CANCEL messages and the ensuing Hipcrime debacle is IMO more to the point.
The prevailing attitude when developing desktop operating systems, which provide tools to developers under the assumption that they will be reasonably careful with them ('with great power comes great responsibility'), fails completely on the Internet. On the desktop, you can assume that obviously flawed, hostile software will get eliminated by the market -- a few people might get burned, but then nobody will install it, problem solved. On the Internet, this doesn't work; if you release a browser with a "feature" that can be exploited to take advantage of users or even to merely annoy them, it will be used, and it won't just be used a few times, it will be used over, and over, and over ... until the feature is hardened or removed (e.g. the BLINK tag, early ActiveX).
I am very concerned that the rush to provide desktop-application-like capabilities to web apps will open a huge can of worms in terms of the new avenues for abuse that it allows, and the overall effect of this -- when the abuse happens in spades, which it will -- will be to cause users to disable those features globally, and distrust web apps in general.
I explained above javascript does not have access to the clipboard, this abuse is possible because we can bind events to keypresses, should we ban that?
the idea that users should implicitly trust desktop applications more than web based programs is silly, desktop applications havent been abused? users should know what the difference between a desktop application and a web one is?
firefox geolocation / save password dialog, or chrome / iphone application install process are easy solutions to explicit permissions, the idea that the clipboard is off limits is silly.
This is merely the Web2.0 version of the old image-protection script that pops up an indignant message from the webmaster upon right-click. It too will die out.
I think tynt actually knows what was selected and copied even if it wasn't pasted. That nugget of data is captured and the content source can see what info people wanted a deeper dive on. ex: people commonly paste names and unfamiliar words. It's an indication of the lead generated by the article and helpful for editorial and advertising teams.
This "service" has bugged the hell out of me, making me delete the garbage at the end each time I copy some text. The worst is on sites that have user comments, when you're having conversations with people and quoting their text to reply to them. Tynt is now happily added to my Hosts file.
I have a social bookmarking site and this drives me nuts. Lots of users just copy the articles headline, and this garbage comes with it... I suppose one way of fixing that would be to chop everything after \n...
Before I clicked on the link, I thought "Tynt" was a new acronym I hadn't heard of since it didn't sound like a word. I figured it must be Thank You No Thanks... which kinda works. :)
A relative comment is that this service is not for the "technically inclined".
Personally - I'm used to highlighting all the text I read (not sure why). I would prefer an opt-out option to remember my choices across tynt-enabled websites.
Not only does this break copy and paste, it's incredibly annoying when I want to paste a single line into my IRC client, and tinker with it before sending.
Instead, I end up pasting the thing, and the stupid URL, since the newlines send the message.
Strange no matter what browser I try to copy and paste, can't seem to see this happening. Any ideas as to why I'm unable to see this script.. I guess its a good thing I'm not effected by it, but out of curiosity would like to see.
Citations are good. Web analytics are good. Personalized service is good. This service doesn't bother me at all -- if you plan not to give attribution to your source ("you bad bad dog"), just remove the link they add. If you have difficulty copying something because of their JavaScript, just open the source and copy/paste from there.
Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint. Gruber should surf those sites on his iPad to get rid of the right-click hooks... Or use an older version of iPhone that doesn't offer copy/paste...
Some Chinese websites do this, but they put their address after each paragraph. I think they do it the Web1.0 way though: white text on white background.
The truth is, the first time I encountered this it was a little off-putting.
However, it actually turned out to be quite useful. Especially, given that when I quote I am usually doing attribution anyway, it saves me at least 3 or 4 steps (i.e. post paste of quote, go back to URL, copy URL, go to blog, insert link, etc.)
The New York Times has something similar, where they look up any word you highlight in a dictionary.
If I recall correctly, this used to be worse, but is still around in some form.
Used to drive me nuts, because I neurotically highlight text all the time.
Or use a text-based browser for browsing your text. I find that w3m actually works quite well. With a few extra programs it can even load images. Fancy that!
Maybe I'm too old if I start identifying with corporations like this, but....
This actually seems like something Tumblr or Posterous should allow their customers, "aggregators" of choice quotations, to opt-in for. Then it would be in the hands of people who want the sites they are considering important enough to 're-broadcast' to know how their work is being excerpted, and when.
Just an idea of a positive outcome of this practice being released on the world.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting Tumblr use this service, or any other that refers to peoples work as "content". "Keep the corporations out of my clipboard!" is being a bit overreactive, as this is of dubious use to the market and obviously ineffective so it will probably go away of its own accord. I'm speaking for myself when I say it seems we should have better ways to bring writers into the dialog when we don't explicitly go through the steps of attributing their work, if a blogging engine like Tumblr doesn't already incorporate that to some extent.
this must have recently been implemented on techcrunch. I just wanted to forward an article to a friend, i selected a paragraph and pasted it in the email - it was actually really handy having the read more snippet at the end of the paste.
but it'd be infuriating if you were doing this, for example, in IM and had to remove 5 lines every paste.
Gruber sounds like a whining teenager. It's the publishers' prerogative to (i) get attributed for their work, and (ii) get some SEO juice back to their site.
I suspect that he's just bored, suffering from writer's block, and needs and outlet to get it out. There, you've cried on the shoulder of a bunch of hacker news dudes. Feel better now?
I don't understand why people are complaining. Not only are these websites giving you free content (beggars can't be choosers), but this problem is ridiculously easy to fix; just add the EasyPrivacy filter to your AdBlock Plus installation from here: http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
Here's a direct link to subscribe:
abp:subscribe?location=https%3A%2F%2Feasylist-downloads.adblockplus.org%2Feasyprivacy.txt&title=EasyPrivacy
If you don't understand why people are complaining, you may want to take a moment to understand why.
You have shown how to block it, but there is a larger discussion of why or why not it's bad, how it breaks copy/paste, attribution problems, and so on. You might do well to look outside the narrow technical bounds of fixing a specific technical problem to think about the greater issue.
To be fair, it's kind of like leaving your door open and sticking a sign on the side of your house saying "TV inside", and then complaining when someone steals your TV. Sure, they shouldn't have done it, but you would have never even thought about the problem if you just locked your door.
Locking your door on the Internet includes using AdBlock (with easylist and easyfilter), NoScript, Privoxy, Tor, and so on. (I skip Tor, but the other ones are quite non-invasive. Sometimes I accidentally browse the Internet without Adblock, and feel very confused as to why every site is all of a sudden so ugly.)
Which is exactly what I prefixed my technical solution with - beggars can't be choosers. You are getting to access all this content for free, content which people spend their precious time creating. I find it astonishing that people actually have the gall to complain about the content creators partaking in a little self-promotion.
Now, I don't like that they use javascript to break your copy-paste functionality. It's unexpected and unrequested, so we are annoyed and confused by it. I wouldn't use Tynt.
Still, it's worth remembering that citations are a good thing. How many times have we on HN lambasted a site for not including proper attribute to copy and pasted text? How many times have we complained when someone pasted a quote or data in a comment here with no citation?
As unsavory and anti-usability as it is, I can understand the motivations behind Techcrunch and NYT. They're tired of their material being spread around without the courtesy of a backlink, and hope that by making it easier to cite than not to cite, they can encourage links.
In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. Tynt isn't doing it right, but attribution and links are a good thing to encourage.