Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks

by biafra • 16 years ago

357 113 16 years ago

alaithea4• 16 years ago

I haven't looked at their script. I'm curious whether they transmit selected text, as Daring Fireball seems to suggest, or only copied text. If the former, they're going to get a lot of false positives from those of us who neurotically select blocks of text on pages for no reason while reading.

eli2• 16 years ago

It's selected text. And they're trying to spin that as a feature (i.e. they can show you the section of text has the highest "user engagement" based on relative number of selections)

robryan• 16 years ago

That sounds like a better feature than the inserting of text into the copy. I would say that over a large same of people selecting text you could see engagement patterns.

what• 16 years ago

It seems to only report back when you actually copy the selection (either ctrl/cmd+c or right click+copy). Just looking at the headers, the JS is obfuscated and I'm too lazy to look at it.

masterj• 16 years ago

Indeed, I highlighted your comment at least a few times while reading it.

smokinn• 16 years ago

I guess at least now I know I'm not alone. I'm very OCD about clicking on random words, triple clicking on paragraphs to highlight them entirely while I'm reading or just dragging my mouse over random amounts of text on the page. I don't know why I do it but it drives pretty much everyone reading the same thing as me on the same computer insane.

yesbabyyes• 16 years ago

I do all of this, too. Especially selecting paragraphs. Actually, now that I think about it (which I do fairly often, tbh), this is one of the reasons I've stayed with Firefox. It only highlights the text of the paragraph. WebKit highlights to the end of the line, and some more, I think. It isn't as visually appealing, at all.

We had an intern at our company for a week, a smart guy who is graduating from high school, and he pointed out all of these things about me. I also manically tap caps lock with my left pinkie.

I'd rather not think about this part of me too much, especially when it comes to picking browser based on how it renders (manically) selected paragraphs.

Periodic• 16 years ago

My cousin does this as well. When she reads something online she highlights the half-line she's reading at the time. You can always tell when she's gotten distracted and started reading something because there's a constant clicking coming from her mouse.

harry• 16 years ago

I do this as well, more of a "track where I am when I'm reading" when I get distracted by something else, I quickly return to the spot.

I dislike it when something like WSJ puts those 'learn more' links after you highlight something right under the cursor.

MichaelGG• 16 years ago

That's fairly common (I do it too). I remember reading one of MS Office PM's blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/) and he mentioned they had to do work on the minibar in Office 2007 to not annoy people who select while reading.

po• 16 years ago

I do this too and I think its the same part of my brain that likes the bounce of the window on the iPhone after an inertia scroll. I pull the window down over and over when I'm bored. It's like bubble wrap.

krevis• 16 years ago

Everyone does this sort of thing! The first time I saw it named (as "One Free Interaction") was this blog post: http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/01/one_free_interaction.h...

bluemetal• 16 years ago

caught myself at it while reading your comment, always good to know you're not alone

phreeza2• 16 years ago

I also do this, but I think it is at least slightly correlated with what I am reading. So the false positives aren't really false, they might represent, to a degree, what people are spending time reading.

Also, this would be really to filter out, the amount of highlighted areas would just be ridiculously large.

jbarciauskas• 16 years ago

Just joining the chorus of "me toos"... Didn't think it was that prevalent, I wonder where the instinct comes from? Anyone have any fun pseudo-scientific theories?

hernan7• 16 years ago

Maybe it's the equivalent of sliding your finger under the line of text you are reading? Like they teach small kids in school.

alaithea4• 16 years ago

I think it's just that highlighting is neat. Some portion of my brain is pleased by the flashing/changing colors (different than a flashing ad, etc., since I'm controlling the action).

alanh3• 16 years ago

It’s not neurosis; it’s not OCD. It helps establish a line for your eyes to follow when flicking back to the left side of text. It’s just like the ruler or piece of paper that speed-reading and sight-reading teachers instruct students to use.

Notice that you will hardly or never do this on narrow columns of text.

alaithea4• 16 years ago

Not everybody highlights text in a functional way. In fact, what I'm highlighting usually has nothing to do with what I'm reading at the moment, and is more of a nervous habit/tic than anything else.

Volt• 16 years ago

The only name that I've seen for this is "impulsive highlighting". There used to be a Wikipedia article about it, but it was unfortunately deleted since it cited no sources.

http://awurl.com/C8uVAsoJN

(Yes, I know it looks like a questionable URL, but it's all I could find since, as I said, it was deleted).

adamhowell2• 16 years ago

I couldn't help but pronounce it "Taint" as I read this. What a terrible name.

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Why "taint" and not "tint"?

pierrefar• 16 years ago

It's making copy/paste worse, so definitely "taint".

javery• 16 years ago

Honestly it doesn't really bother me, it has been useful from time to time when copying something (saves me the next step of copying the URL).

It sounds like they should add an opt-out though.

mjijackson• 16 years ago

To suggest an opt-out is missing the point entirely. If anything, it should be opt-in.

Timothee• 16 years ago

It should be a browser feature/plug-in, or not be there at all.

WiseWeasel• 16 years ago

This "service" has bugged the hell out of me, making me delete the garbage at the end each time I copy some text. The worst is on sites that have user comments, when you're having conversations with people and quoting their text to reply to them. Tynt is now happily added to my Hosts file.

latch• 16 years ago

I ran into this today...it took me about 3 copy/paste attempts to realize what was going on. I could see some users never really figuring it out.

Changing the behavior of copy/paste seems quite silly.

wvenable• 16 years ago

I don't fault Tynt for creating this service; it's actually a bit clever. I reserve all my blame for the websites that actually use this service.

benmathes2• 16 years ago

Wait, what? There's plenty of blame to go around, here. Blame the websites that decide to screw their users, but also blame a company who makes a product that screws users.

probablycorey• 16 years ago

How is it screwing you? At most it is a minor inconvenience.

raganwald3• 16 years ago

Consider this bit of 'cleverness:" Encode music CDs with a Windows rootkit that prevents copying of unencrypted music from said CDs, phones home, and otherwise helps 'protect music owner's IP from piracy.'

Do we not fault the creator and instead fault the companies that buy it?

Here's a horse I have been beating for several decades: "Fault" or "Blame" does not obey the laws of conservation. Just because we blame Alice for failing to check her blind spot before making a lane change doesn't mean we absolve Bob of fault for ignoring her turn signal.

It's reprehensible to make and sell this stuff. It's also self-defeating to buy and deploy it.

cujo• 16 years ago

To the car analogy. That's exactly what it means. As a driver I have no obligation to honor your request to change lanes. It is your obligation to decide if moving sideways into my car is the right move.

In the above case, and in tynt's they aren't doing anything wrong. It is more analogous to gun control, without the dire consequences of misuse.

sacrilicious2• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm too old if I start identifying with corporations like this, but.... This actually seems like something Tumblr or Posterous should allow their customers, "aggregators" of choice quotations, to opt-in for. Then it would be in the hands of people who want the sites they are considering important enough to 're-broadcast' to know how their work is being excerpted, and when. Just an idea of a positive outcome of this practice being released on the world.

sacrilicious2• 16 years ago

To clarify, I'm not suggesting Tumblr use this service, or any other that refers to peoples work as "content". "Keep the corporations out of my clipboard!" is being a bit overreactive, as this is of dubious use to the market and obviously ineffective so it will probably go away of its own accord. I'm speaking for myself when I say it seems we should have better ways to bring writers into the dialog when we don't explicitly go through the steps of attributing their work, if a blogging engine like Tumblr doesn't already incorporate that to some extent.

bartl• 16 years ago

I've never seen this, not even on the page the article linked to as an example, but that may be due to NoScript.

Yet another example of why NoScript is a good idea.

DrSprout• 16 years ago

Tynt was the primary thing that drove me to install NoScript.

tumult2• 16 years ago

Yes, I hate these douchebags. I also hate the people who use them. I have a modified Chromium that specifically prevents this tampering with selection (null out the webkit javascript hooks for selection stuff) and an extension that will give a little blip whenever I land on a page that uses them or something like it.

It pisses me off. I can't believe people think this is a good idea. When the spammers/ad people start using HTML5 audio to blast annoying crap at you, HTML5 locations to figure out how to send junk mail to your house, and other crap that browser makers were too short-sighted to realize were a bad idea to give sites the power to control, then we're going to see a regression in browser features as "does less" becomes the default.

Right now, the sites you visit have way too much control over what they can do to your browser. It's naïve to think that these people will just 'play nice' and not abuse features. The SEO and ad people will take whatever length of thread you give them and completely unravel the shirt off of your back.

daleharvey4• 16 years ago

crippling the functionality of the browser isnt going to harm people developing these exploits, they will just use toolbars and plugins whatever.

all it does is hurt people who want to build real web applications, the complete lack of support for copy and paste is a major major pita in that regard.

tumult2• 16 years ago

Uh, you can tamper with the clipboard from JavaScript. That's why this works, and why it's a problem. You shouldn't be able to by default.

mrkurt• 16 years ago

They drive me nuts. There's an opt out here though: http://www.tynt.com/support/opt-inout/

I just block it at the home router. It feels more brutal. :)

minalecs• 16 years ago

Strange no matter what browser I try to copy and paste, can't seem to see this happening. Any ideas as to why I'm unable to see this script.. I guess its a good thing I'm not effected by it, but out of curiosity would like to see.

blhack• 16 years ago

I have a social bookmarking site and this drives me nuts. Lots of users just copy the articles headline, and this garbage comes with it... I suppose one way of fixing that would be to chop everything after \n...

Huffington post was the first one I noticed.

ekanes• 16 years ago

Before I clicked on the link, I thought "Tynt" was a new acronym I hadn't heard of since it didn't sound like a word. I figured it must be Thank You No Thanks... which kinda works. :)

pavel_lishin• 16 years ago

Not only does this break copy and paste, it's incredibly annoying when I want to paste a single line into my IRC client, and tinker with it before sending.

Instead, I end up pasting the thing, and the stupid URL, since the newlines send the message.

jamesshamenski• 16 years ago

I think tynt actually knows what was selected and copied even if it wasn't pasted. That nugget of data is captured and the content source can see what info people wanted a deeper dive on. ex: people commonly paste names and unfamiliar words. It's an indication of the lead generated by the article and helpful for editorial and advertising teams.

phreeza2• 16 years ago

The New York Times has something similar, where they look up any word you highlight in a dictionary. If I recall correctly, this used to be worse, but is still around in some form. Used to drive me nuts, because I neurotically highlight text all the time.

mattmanser• 16 years ago

The copy-paste thing bugs me, but what really drives me insane is the highlight 3-words or less functionality. When I spot a word or thing that I want to know more about, I usually highlight, right click, and choose search. This works in both Chrome and IE8+. Firefox may even do it too, I don't use it.

With Tynt, it cancels the right-click menu and pops up a search bubble.

Mucking around with browser behaviour is not cool. Usually I try 3 or 4 times in confusion until I realise and promptly close the website in disgust.

alanh3• 16 years ago

Similarly, the New York Times intrusively assumes I want to "define" anything I select, even it’s lines long, breaking my normal browser behavior.

Edit: I triple-click to select paragraphs (an OS X idiom); the define-word script prevents this, recognizing not a triple-click but rather a double-click (select word) followed by a single click (activate definition pop-up).

pjscott• 16 years ago

I checked on Chrome, and NY Times only tries to define single words for me -- but when I de-select any text, the embedded video player (if any) reloads. Buggy.

perokreco• 16 years ago

Triple clicking is not an OS X idiom, it works on Windows too.

wmeredith• 16 years ago

That's the end result of a content site trying to add value with features. Instead they get feature bloat.

ZachPruckowski• 16 years ago

It works in Safari too. On my Mac, I can search the word in Spotlight or in Google (obviously 99% of the time I pick Google)

malvosenior• 16 years ago

The New Yorker is a high caliber publication?

raganwald3• 16 years ago

This stinks of Enterprise Software, the alternate reality where a salesman sells something that doesn't work to an executive that doesn't really care because there is no objective metric of success applied to the purchase, just the question of whether it can be 'spun' into something that makes the purchaser look good.

I'd like to see any of Tynt's customers weigh in and explain how they are measuring Tynt's effectiveness. Are any of them using A/B testing or otherwise quantifying the costs and benefits?

GavinB• 16 years ago

I find it a bit odd that Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this: to get people to click on the links and increase their traffic. It's not about SEO black magic or increasing their ability to track links, it's including an attribution with copied material in order to increase page views and visibility.

Now, I don't like that they use javascript to break your copy-paste functionality. It's unexpected and unrequested, so we are annoyed and confused by it. I wouldn't use Tynt.

Still, it's worth remembering that citations are a good thing. How many times have we on HN lambasted a site for not including proper attribute to copy and pasted text? How many times have we complained when someone pasted a quote or data in a comment here with no citation?

As unsavory and anti-usability as it is, I can understand the motivations behind Techcrunch and NYT. They're tired of their material being spread around without the courtesy of a backlink, and hope that by making it easier to cite than not to cite, they can encourage links.

In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. Tynt isn't doing it right, but attribution and links are a good thing to encourage.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

Hmmm, an interesting idea. Context-sensitive addition to the right-click menu, perhaps, where I can choose to add the meta-data to my paste. I think I can get that going in Javascript.

alxp• 16 years ago

Meet Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/

tomlin2• 16 years ago

The solution is simple. Don't visit sites that employ Tynt.

mbateman• 16 years ago

Or do what Gruber suggests and block Tynt in /etc/hosts

tomlin2• 16 years ago

Not sure why I was downvoted. The premise to kill Flash by not visiting Flash sites gets me upvoted (trendy hate).

I am sure there will be a force-fitted reason coming.

I don't get the average HN user, I suppose.

garret• 16 years ago

Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind this.

Maybe because it's obvious. The point of the article is that breaking copy/paste, whatever the reason, doesn't work: "Who, when they paste such text and find this “Read more:” attribution line appended, doesn’t just delete it (and wonder how it got there)?"

Turing_Machine• 16 years ago

In Ted Nelson's original model for hypertext, the equivalent of a backlink happened automatically. Quoted material was "transcluded" rather than copied outright. It had several other nice features that go well beyond what we have with today's Web. Worse is better once again. :-)

trezor• 16 years ago

In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner.

If you copy something from a website (in for instance Firefox) and paste it into Microsoft OneNote (which is awesome, by the way), it will not only paste the content, but will also include a link to where it was copied from so you can easily locate it later.

I'm not sure how much metadata the clipboard contains in Windows, but I know (from clipnoard code I've written) that you can send the same content in several formats (plain-text, word-doc, html, etc) and it is up to the pastee to figure out which format to pick up and use.

I also know that the Linux clipboard-implementation is utterly fucked with X conflicting with KDE/Gnome and lots of things not behaving like you would expect from a unified implementation, and I wouldn't expect anything "sophisticated" like this to work. At least that was the state of affairs from the last time I attempted to use Linux as a desktop-OS, around 6 years ago. Maybe things have improved in the meantime, and in that case please let me know.

coverband• 16 years ago

Citations are good. Web analytics are good. Personalized service is good. This service doesn't bother me at all -- if you plan not to give attribution to your source ("you bad bad dog"), just remove the link they add. If you have difficulty copying something because of their JavaScript, just open the source and copy/paste from there.

Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint. Gruber should surf those sites on his iPad to get rid of the right-click hooks... Or use an older version of iPhone that doesn't offer copy/paste...

nocman• 16 years ago

"Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint."

Obviously not everyone here agrees with you that it is a stupid complaint.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

This is merely the Web2.0 version of the old image-protection script that pops up an indignant message from the webmaster upon right-click. It too will die out.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

I don't understand why people are complaining. Not only are these websites giving you free content (beggars can't be choosers), but this problem is ridiculously easy to fix; just add the EasyPrivacy filter to your AdBlock Plus installation from here: http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

Here's a direct link to subscribe: abp:subscribe?location=https%3A%2F%2Feasylist-downloads.adblockplus.org%2Feasyprivacy.txt&title=EasyPrivacy

mirkules• 16 years ago

Another easy way to block it if you're running NoScript is to disallow scripts from Tynt.

mfr• 16 years ago

If you don't understand why people are complaining, you may want to take a moment to understand why.

You have shown how to block it, but there is a larger discussion of why or why not it's bad, how it breaks copy/paste, attribution problems, and so on. You might do well to look outside the narrow technical bounds of fixing a specific technical problem to think about the greater issue.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

Which is exactly what I prefixed my technical solution with - beggars can't be choosers. You are getting to access all this content for free, content which people spend their precious time creating. I find it astonishing that people actually have the gall to complain about the content creators partaking in a little self-promotion.

jrockway• 16 years ago

To be fair, it's kind of like leaving your door open and sticking a sign on the side of your house saying "TV inside", and then complaining when someone steals your TV. Sure, they shouldn't have done it, but you would have never even thought about the problem if you just locked your door.

Locking your door on the Internet includes using AdBlock (with easylist and easyfilter), NoScript, Privoxy, Tor, and so on. (I skip Tor, but the other ones are quite non-invasive. Sometimes I accidentally browse the Internet without Adblock, and feel very confused as to why every site is all of a sudden so ugly.)

tamersalama• 16 years ago

This has been here here before (perhaps with milder tones) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491003

A relative comment is that this service is not for the "technically inclined".

Personally - I'm used to highlighting all the text I read (not sure why). I would prefer an opt-out option to remember my choices across tynt-enabled websites.

NathanKP• 16 years ago

This article doesn't even mention the biggest problem with Tynt: copying and pasting code snippets. I hate it when Tynt is installed on a website that has code snippets or tutorials. When I copy the code I have to delete the Tynt message. It wouldn't be so bad if it was smart enough to detect the coding language and insert the attribution within comments.

I suggested that feature months ago when I first discovered Tynt, but they never implemented it or even responded.

edanm• 16 years ago

That's actually a feature I wish existed in e.g. StackOverflow. They actually do know which language code is written in, so they should include a comment before the copied code which links to the question.

I do this myself with any snippets I copy from sites, since I always find myself going back to the site at least once.

kareemm• 16 years ago

Gruber's an edge case, and he admits it:

"Now, the nature of my work writing Daring Fireball involves copying and pasting many snippets of text from web sites every day. So this Tynt stuff probably annoys me more (or at least more frequently) than most people."

I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I pasted a passage from a Tynt-enabled website into an email and the URL showed up. I send these types of emails all the time and it saves me time.

irons• 16 years ago

I'd have thought there was a bright line between people like my parents who use the ubiquitous "share this link" site features, and people like me who send messages with links and excerpts tailored to the recipient. If I'm right, you're an edgier edge case than Mr. Gruber.

agentultra• 16 years ago

Or... block the .js in your browser.

Or use a text-based browser for browsing your text. I find that w3m actually works quite well. With a few extra programs it can even load images. Fancy that!

grogers• 16 years ago

Thankfully select + middle mouse button in X isn't affected by this.

DotSauce• 16 years ago

For those interested in the benefits of Tynt Insight for publishers, please read this article:

http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/03/09/website-data-social-shari...

"Email is used for 70% of all social sharing and accounts for 48% of new site traffic."

For comparison, Facebook only accounts for 25%.

I'm guessing Gruber didn't get a chance to review this report from Tynt.

pclark• 16 years ago

this must have recently been implemented on techcrunch. I just wanted to forward an article to a friend, i selected a paragraph and pasted it in the email - it was actually really handy having the read more snippet at the end of the paste.

but it'd be infuriating if you were doing this, for example, in IM and had to remove 5 lines every paste.

opt in, not out.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

Some Chinese websites do this, but they put their address after each paragraph. I think they do it the Web1.0 way though: white text on white background.

marcamillion• 16 years ago

The truth is, the first time I encountered this it was a little off-putting.

However, it actually turned out to be quite useful. Especially, given that when I quote I am usually doing attribution anyway, it saves me at least 3 or 4 steps (i.e. post paste of quote, go back to URL, copy URL, go to blog, insert link, etc.)

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

I've never noticed this, I guess because I almost always highlight and middle-click to copy things, which only works on Linux/X afaik.

alextingle2• 16 years ago

This reminds me of the arguments over Google's attempts to "fix" copying from their broken URL-bar in the latest versions of Chromium: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467

sscheper• 16 years ago

Gruber sounds like a whining teenager. It's the publishers' prerogative to (i) get attributed for their work, and (ii) get some SEO juice back to their site.

I suspect that he's just bored, suffering from writer's block, and needs and outlet to get it out. There, you've cried on the shoulder of a bunch of hacker news dudes. Feel better now?

metachris• 16 years ago

Wow, tynt recently raised $8m. What do they need all that money for? http://www.tynt.com/tynt-raises-8m-in-venture-capital-to-fue...

dkarl• 16 years ago

Being jerks.

Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

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