ycombinator1.com
Consumer and social
link previews
SHOW HN2022
How HN took it
6 positive, 25 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 7 critical, out of 39 comments about the project. Thread score +0.02.
Idea: 5 for, 1 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstDocs: 1 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 2 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Handy fix for missing HN link previews in chat
From 3 comments
Super handy! You solved a pain point I had. I sometimes want to drop HN links in Slack, but the lack of preview makes me hesitate or forces me to go an extra step and set a name…
fouc on HNI wouldn’t mind having this as an official feature, TBH. It’s just a few meta tags and makes it a lot easier to figure out if the link is worth following in Slack/Teams/etc.
rcarmo on HNPretty clever. Thanks for posting the source too - I learned something new about how these social previews are implemented!
pininja on HN
Objections
Redirect breaks for users without JavaScript and scrapers that follow redirects
From 3 comments
To those confused: It looks like this only adds social graph info but is otherwise a redirect. The resulting page looks like ``` <!doctype html> <html> <head> <title>…</title>…
lilyball on HNA better option would be using the HTML meta tag to perform the redirect, since HN has a bunch of JS-avoidant users: ``` <meta http-equiv="refresh"…
spiffytech on HNIt'll depend on the system doing the scraping. If it's just fetching the HTML with curl or similar, using the meta tag shouldn't be any different. I'm not familiar with HTML…
spiffytech on HN
Unclear what it does without explanation
From 3 comments
Would have been helpful for OP to mention that in the summary. I also couldn't figure out what it did. I just clicked the links and they redirected. No clue what a "fancy social…
ryandrake on HNI don't get it, can somebody explain it?
mongua on HNdoesn't work anymore as it just redirects. assuming author was told to take site down.
caffed on HN
Trademark and domain ownership concerns
From 2 comments
Ah, the other comments implied that it was their staging environment for testing new features or something, but that appears incorrect. Now that I'm matching HN names up with…
jrockway on HNfor now. I'm pretty sure they will want to protect their trademark.
bestnameever on HN
Requests
Add OG tags to news.ycombinator.com directly
From 2 comments
HN Team - could ya'all just add the OG tags? Geez that would be swell...
dstroot on HNI wouldn’t mind having this as an official feature, TBH. It’s just a few meta tags and makes it a lot easier to figure out if the link is worth following in Slack/Teams/etc.
rcarmo on HN
Add oEmbed endpoint
From 1 comment
Shame that there's no oEmbed endpoint.
throwaway889900 on HN
Questions
Whether the redirect affects link scrapers
From 2 comments
A better option would be using the HTML meta tag to perform the redirect, since HN has a bunch of JS-avoidant users: ``` <meta http-equiv="refresh"…
spiffytech on HNHappy to add this. Do you happen to know if this affects systems doing the scraping for social previews, which are already parsing meta tags?
statico on HN
Alternatives named
socialsharepreview.com
From 1 comment
Sure thing! Also check out https://socialsharepreview.com/ which is great for larger social previews. I chose to go the more compact route for these previews because a giant…
statico on HN
Plain meta tag pages built by others
From 2 comments
I built a version with open graph meta tags - https://presbot.com/feed/
tumidpandora on HNBeen using metatags which has few more supported services.
klohto on HN