As far as I’m concerned, personal websites are for personal use, especially my personal website. I don’t consent to commercial use of my work without payment, and as far as I’m concerned, if a link to my website shows up on HN, Reddit, or even Google that’s a commercial use to which I didn’t consent. I think I’d be within my rights to 403 (or worse) anybody referred to my site by commercial platforms/search engines.
Of course, HN commenters whinge when website operators do this, but I’ll not burden people here with my opinions on such people or their entitlement.
I’m not talking commercial, i’m talking personal. Let’s imagine you publish a few more books, you become stupid famous and your site starts to get, I don’t know, 50k users a day.
It’s possible that you linking someone else’s site, can result in that site to be hugged to death.
I’m wondering if at that point it becomes your responsibility to be careful what you link to. Or should you just keep linking and whatever happens it’s not your fault?
Yeah, I misunderstood. I think in that case I might be wise to consider snapshotting the site via the Wayback Machine and using an archive link. Either that, or email the operator ahead of time and ask them if I can copy a particular page and self-host it rather than linking directly to them.
It’s a sad testament to American culture (and I’m sorry for the timing, given your post today), but the first thought that I had was about guns.
If someone irresponsibly fires a gun, who’s responsible? The shooter, the gun manufacturer, the circumstances that allowed said person to acquire said gun?
Transposing this back to web traffic:
If an internet user sends a bunch of traffic over that negatively affects a site owner (DDOS unavailability, immense bill, etc.), who’s responsible? The internet user? The site owner for not being better prepared? The internet for not being more resilient to this kind of mechanic?
Actually, I think the internet variation is a bit more obvious than my attempt at analogue. Why should an internet user be wary of link-sharing things? That seems antithetical to the spirit of the internet as I imagine it.
Why should an internet user be wary of sharing things?
So, my first reaction to this problem is that I should not care about what happens on the other side from a technical point of view. This obviously assumes good intentions (so me linking to you because I think your link is interesting/useful/relevant).
It’s not up to me to figure out how you set up your site and if yor site goes down, you get a stupid bill because you run on a weird hosting that overcharges or what not, that should be your responsibility.
But again that’s my first reaction. I’m not entirely sure it’s a good one though.
My reaction is the same. Fundamentally, I believe in an internet that observes the following:
As a user, I should be able to freely link interesting public URLs to others. (I’m leaving some space here for privacy, but it’s really a non-issue IMHO).
As a personal site operator, I should be able to host my content at a reasonable cost without fear of being bankrupted.
Now, if the site is poorly implemented in such a way that it is somehow unscalable, then that’s the fault of the site operator and whatever mechanisms (or people) led to that implementation. I’m thinking of something like the site self-hosting large creative media as well as more technical things like LAMP overruns. I mentioned “reasonable cost” because I think that should be feasible, but I don’t want to derail the conversation too much with the excesses of corporate Capitalism.
In any case, I don’t believe that an individual linking to a URL should be on the hook for being a good steward of consequences that frankly are beyond their control.