Yeah, it’s literally the second step of enshittification, where platforms stop allocating value to users and start allocating them to publishers. This is still Bluesky expanding out its surveillance apparatus, something it will have every incentive to abuse later on like other platforms before it.
The user can also block your tracking scripts. Besides, the user can share the link with friends, and you won’t be able to track them this way. I’m sure there are many other reasons why having a middleware is de-facto the industry standard.
There is a legitimate reason for this: it’s the only way to provide content creators with evidence of how many people actually clicked on the link.
The downside is that there is so many ways that a feature like this can be abused by BlueSky in ways that can hurt users.
Yeah, it’s literally the second step of enshittification, where platforms stop allocating value to users and start allocating them to publishers. This is still Bluesky expanding out its surveillance apparatus, something it will have every incentive to abuse later on like other platforms before it.
The content creators themselves could use a link that goes through a counter if they really need it, no?
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No, it’s not the only way. You could track the click with JavaScript.
The user can also block your tracking scripts. Besides, the user can share the link with friends, and you won’t be able to track them this way. I’m sure there are many other reasons why having a middleware is de-facto the industry standard.
The user can also block the URL target rewriting. Not sure what’s your point though, I said it’s not the only way, not that there are better ways.
Trust me bro, we are not tracking you. Please trust me bro!
If the purpose of this feature was tracking, they could just use a JavaScript onclick handler.
lol. Citations needed. Pretty sure this is JavaScript 101.