Don't change it, please.
HN is "tracking" you when it routes a comment or an upvote anywhere other than /dev/null. Following a link to a story would be a similar interaction with the application, which also sends you to the article.
I strongly disagree. I would be quite proud of myself for finding a hack to maintain expected functionality in that case. As a user of the web I constantly mouse over links to see where they will take me. It annoys me when that's broken.
(Bounces seem like they should be quick, but often seem not to be -- and if I'm sitting there with a bounce page open rather than the article I want to read when I've just run out of reception, it's super lame (in my mind: infinitely lame).)
From a statistics perspective, I often find an article elsewhere and then come here to vote for it (or submit it) -- so it's inaccurate from that perspective.
Ultimately: indifferent.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...
I know a few sites that do it (including Google and DDG); so I guess some people feel it's the best way to do it?
Edit: Ping doesn't look to be in the HTML5 spec anymore, maybe that's got something to do with it?
https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/single-page.ht...
Interesting, I didn't know that. And now that I look at it, ping is only supported in Chrome and Opera, which explains it even better. I would still expect there to be some other alternatives to bounce addresses, though.
Why do they do this? To somehow extract something from the associates of a Google user? I think it borders on scummy.
There is only one vote button, but there are (at least) two distinct things I use it for:
1) I've read the story. I'm upvoting the story because I think people would be interested.
2) I haven't read this particular story, but I've recently read about this topic elsewhere. I've looked thru the comments and the comments are interesting. I'm upvoting because I think people would be interested in the comments.
I often learn far more about a topic from the comments here than from the story itself.
It matters to me less that you know what I clicked, it matters to me more that your site is useful.
(FWIW, I often read something really interesting and then go "I wonder if this is on HN" and go over here to find the comments, so that would count as voting for a story or reading the comments without actually clicking on it. IDK if that's normal)
Would it gratify intellectual or voyeuristic curiosity?
I'm glad someone noticed it, though!
Genuine question, in case the tone comes across snarky.
As for things that drove me away, this Reddit-post sums it up pretty well: https://np.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_lik...
That would be stretching the definition of "valid".
You would get statistics about a group of "I don't care I'm being tracked" people, which is surely statistically different than the group of "I do care about being tracked" people. At the very least, they would have significantly different click rates (and involvement) with the subject like "how to disable web site tracking", but I suspect it's deeper than that -- e.g., they will have statistically significant involvement with security related subjects.
In-house solutions for analytics : makes sense.
If the implementation is lightweight, robust, and not leaky I'm not paranoid enough to care.
Edit: I suppose it's a dumb question because the answers can only be one-sided.