You don't need a 3rd party or anything having remotely to do with advertising to implement this; there is no reason Ghostery would know.

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.

Following a link is, by default, an interaction with the target of the link rather than the source. Hacker News is fundamentally an application that gives you a HTML document, which contains instructions for your browser to request further content from linked sources. Actually getting the content from the linked source goes to that source directly, unless HN implements some non-standard tracking system.

The non-standard tracking system is super simple. That's the point of the comment you responded to. It's not a proprietary ad-tracker. It's 30 minutes of hacking on HN's source-code. Instead of linking you to the story directly you would be linked to an HN endpoint and then redirected. That way they would know when/what you clicked. The HN server would be the only machine that knew this information. No 3rd parties. HN would still pass Privacy Badger and Ghostery.

The reddit outbound link rewrote something so that when you mouse-over the link the browser (at least FF) shows the expected link. But then clicking on it you instead are sent back through reddit.com. This is intentionally deceptive.

> This is intentionally deceptive.

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.

"expected functionality", as the other poster said, is telling you accurately where the link goes. If the link goes to an internal tracker, then that's what it should say. What document your browser requests after that is a separate issue.

No it's not. You're being overly technical. A typical user expects to see where they're going to end up. Not the first link in a chain of transparent redirects. Even if you disagree it as at the very least controvertible. I can see how a web developer would have assumed it was expected. And in that case, it wouldn't have been intentionally deceptive. That's all I'm trying to say.

Well put. This is the internet I'd like.

If you're already running those, why not?