Okay, so my, I guess, talk is just a small little story that happened yesterday, which
I want to share with you.
First of all, I find it kind of funny, and at the end, there's also a very interesting
learning that, well, isn't too view-related, but I think can be very important.
Also, going into the whole design direction.
So, okay, a bit of background.
There used to be this URL shortener.
I believe you all know what a URL shortener is.
So, git.io.
Effectively, from GitHub, you could enter any git repository and get a shorter version
of that link, or of that repository URL, and have a shorter, more compact link to share.
That was a while ago discontinued, and you can't add any new links.
But then, a couple days ago, I'm not sure how familiar you all are with the whole tech
Twitter, sorry, tech X world, but there is this, I guess, newer URL shortener called
Dubb, and they added a sort of new URL prefix, git.new, and it's sort of the spiritual successor
to the whole git.io link.
Same idea, you can only enter a GitHub link and, well, then choose a custom suffix to
share your repository.
Now, then, a bit later on, yesterday, actually, the creator of that URL shortener announced
that there is now a leaderboard available.
And, well, and it's based on the amount of clicks that a link has got, that a link has
received.
And what is a click on a link?
Exactly.
Just an HTTP request.
And what is not hard to do?
Send thousands of HTTP requests.
So, therefore, I figured I have to get my own link on there.
And so I searched for the dumbest repository on GitHub.
After CheckGTT sort of rejected my request and said it would be unethical to call a repository
dumb, I went to Google and found this absolute masterpiece.
A library called pbis.js.
It's a comparison library.
And, therefore, I created a link, which is git.news.comparison.
And it goes to that repository.
Well, then, long story short, I...
You have to use a bit like things, right?
Exactly.
Well, then, long story short, I had to think a lot of how I could get my repository onto
the list, how I could get, what was it, thousands of clicks?
Well, actually, no.
It was just a simple command line script.
And I let this run in the background for a couple of hours.
And long story short, now, Penetrate is on.
Penetrate is on too.
Leading to, for example, this tweet.
Road watch.
Or, okay, that was not on my video card.
And by now, sort of, people are starting to click on this link by themselves, because
I guess the repository that's on the third place has to be sort of good.
I don't know how this got there.
Okay, well, now, to the actually serious part about this talk.
If you have something to offer, something of value that people are sort of interested
in, something that people want, something of prestige, you should be protecting it to
some degree.
For example, this isn't a new concept of any kind.
For example, Hacker News really relies on this concept of upvotes.
The more upvotes you get, the more attention your post will get.
And this is effectively what you want when you post something online.
You want to be seen by as many people as possible.
Or, for example, also Reddit, same concept.
The way that Hacker News sort of combats this, they just kindly ask you to not ask your friends
to just randomly upvote your post.
To be honest, I'm not sure how well this works, but that's their way of protecting what they
have to offer.
But they know that they need to protect their top spots on the Hacker News leaderboard,
so I guess they've sort of thought about it.
If you've ever launched something on Product Hunt, you will know that very quickly some
shady people will land in your DMs asking you or offering you to get you in the top
spots.
Not sure if it works, but they are out to gain the system.
And whatever you do, whenever you offer something of prestige, be that some virtual medal or
something, or of course visibility, people will inevitably try to gain the system and
try to find an easy way to get whatever you have to offer, just like I did.
And another example, last example, look at Google.
Google is, what they have to offer is high visibility through search, but they are taking
that fight against gaining the system really seriously with, for example, punishing you
for certain misconduct, like adding text to your website for keywords, but not actually
making that text visible.
So Google is, I guess, probably the best example of offering something that people want, but
not making it too easy to gain the system.
So, long story short, if you have something to offer that people want, figure out how
to actually, how to not make it easy for someone to just gain your way to the top.
And well, of course, there's an alternative.
Like, okay, with Duck, it could have been as simple as, oh, right, it's still going on.
Could have been as easy as maybe not counting clicks, link clicks, from user agents that
are curled.
But, well, again, depending on what you're doing, this might be different.
Now, yeah, okay.
I think this is basically it.
Oh, right, right, of course, of course.
You might just do this intentionally.
You might just leave a little loophole in your system and get people to abuse it, because
they might just fall for your little trap and end up talking about your product at a meetup.
So, oh, well.
So, last but not least, if you want to know if anything else funny is coming out of this,
I love, or I invite you to follow me, maybe follow my ex, and see where this is going.
But other than that, thanks a lot for your attention.
All right.
Any questions?
Yes, please.
One question.
Is it on the top of the library?
Not yet.
You should.
Well, now I guess I have sort of the obligation to fix the loophole.
Yeah.
It's also called a condom JS.
Condom JS.
It's a real class.
Yeah, that's a real class.
It's a wrapper for PhoenixJS.
That's what we are looking for.
Well, I guess they should invest in their protection a bit.
All right, then.
Thank you.