The purpose is so that Twitter is seen as the source of the traffic. A lot of Twitter-sourced traffic comes from native apps, so when people click links from tweets, they usually don’t send referrer information.
If the redirects were server side (setting the Location header), a blank referrer remains blank. Client side redirects will set the referral value.
From Twitter’s POV, there’s value in more fully conveying how much traffic they send to sites, even if it minorly inconveniences users.
How does this inconvenience users? It sounds like you’re saying site owners will be able to distinguish between users with a blank referer and users whose “referer” was the desktop app. Ignoring the privacy angle, isn’t that a good thing?
Other than the privacy angle a meta redirect is always a bit slower than a location header. You need to send an html page (more bytes) that the browser needs to render and then act on (more work).
A location header is nearly unnoticeable, a meta refresh page gives you a flash of a blank interstitial screen.
(Not that I had the same annoyance, just explaining the difference to the end user of the two approaches)
With the amount of bloat we have on the modern web, I think sending an HTML meta tag rather than a Location header should be the least of our concerns, when it comes to performance.
If the whole purpose of it is to have browsers send a Referer header, I don't think it's that bad. Even from a privacy perspective, you can configure browsers to not send that header anyway.
It cost us ~$100k from a broker. I've always loved nice domain names and I had some cash because I sold my previous company to Airbnb so I was happy to spend it!
Haha, it's the usual market price for a nice one-word .com ; I don't see this as money thrown away like spending in ads for example, it's closer to a real estate investment in my opinion
I built a social media analytics API. At its peak, it brought in about $23k/mo, with server costs at about $3k/mo. When I got a job at Instagram, they decided it was a conflict of interest and told me to sell it, which I did for a very healthy six figure sum.
I know Meta pays a lot, but did you ever consider an alternate path where you didn't take that job and instead grew the service out further? $23k/month is good money.
I thought about it, but I hadn't originally built it to make money. It was a weekend hack project that I never expected to do that well, and suddenly the prospect of centering my life around a product I didn't really feel passionate about felt like a nightmare. I had a lot of anxiety about whether my external dependencies I'd built on top of would continue to work, and reached the point where a large payoff was worth it to de-risk myself from $23k/mo becoming $0/mo with no exit.
This unnecessary condescension is made all the funnier by the fact that the quote the expression alludes to wasn't actually written by Mark Twain, but in all likelihood by a French writer named Nicolas Chamfort.
(attempt to) being sarcastic ain't necessarily condescending. my take from the unedited parent comment was that it was patronizing towards the grandparent ("in english it is" so and so), but anyway thanks for clarification.
Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them.
Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city.
However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.
Queens isn’t a city, it’s a borough/county that used to be a bunch of little towns. It’s like asking for directions in Boston using Suffolk, MA.
Queens was like Long Island of the 1950s... the house I grew up in had been a 250 acre farm, with 50 acres left as late as 1898. There are also plenty of dupe street addresses in Queens, especially if you leave a hyphen out. The reference to “Flushing” is a legacy left over from the pre-zipcode era.
If the redirects were server side (setting the Location header), a blank referrer remains blank. Client side redirects will set the referral value.
From Twitter’s POV, there’s value in more fully conveying how much traffic they send to sites, even if it minorly inconveniences users.