Quit hijacking my cut and paste
I first noticed this a month or so ago when I went to copy something from another blog to use as a quote. The copy went fine but when I pasted the section of text into the post that I was working there was suddenly a couple of blank lines and then this honkin’ huge assed link attached to what I had copied. The link had a nifty little message included telling the reader where the section of text had been copied from – like I was stealing it or something.
Look you idiots using this piece of crap service not only are you irritating the hell out of me by doing this (thereby making it less likely I will use you as a reference) but you are insinuating that I’m not intelligent enough to give proper attribution for your words.
Here’s a hint. Stop.It.
I understand that you might be a little upset with some doofuses out there who don’t honor this attribution thing that is pounded into the head of any decent blogger out there, but they are a minority. By using this service from some company called Tynt you are insulting those bloggers out there who do care about doing things the right way.
And if you think that I’m being a little over board on this well .. I’m not the only one who is feeling this way. both John Gruber from Daring Fireball and Mike Masnick from Techdirt have said much the same thing – albeit a little politer, but then I’m not in the mood to be polite about this.
As Gruber says in his post (see proper attribution at work):
It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.
Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.
The pitch from Tynt to publishers is that their clipboard jiggery-pokery allows publishers to track where text copied from their website is being used, on the assumption that whoever is pasting the text is leaving the Tynt-inserted attribution URL, with its gibberish-looking tracking ID. This is, I believe, a dubious assumption. 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)?
As someone who does a fair bit of copying and pasting in writing this blog, I agree with Gruber that this is a bit of a nuisance. It’s not a hugely annoying thing, but it is annoying. If I’m copying and pasting from your website, I know what your website is, and I am already planning to link back to it. Adding that superfluous text is just annoying and basically forcing my computer to do something I did not ask it to do.
This isn’t happening on just small blogs either that are doing this but rather big name blogs like Wired, SFGate, New Yorker and TechCrunch (which by the way though an error every time).
