I'm glad that ycombinator isn't listed as the source, at least. I think it would be fairly interesting to see what kind of data they have about various social medias and link propagation.
And also, a slight sickening sensation that marketers are doing this. Not that I'm surprised, it's just that I'm sure they have papers written saying that "Twitter has a 64% link click rate if you write your post like X, whereas Facebook can achieve as high as 70% if you do Y."
I know it has been going on for years on the web, and decades for other marketing, but here it's plain to see. It fills me with unease, like I'm no longer in control and what I like in life is already planned out.
This is a pretty standard Google Analytics Tracking URL [1] - setting aside the Googleness of it (which raises a different set of issues) I look at it like the modern equivalent of an Apache Access Log.
Also, not sure if this will make you feel better, but most places that are doing this type of in-depth analytics, etc. are much more often trying to bend themselves to your will ("what feature, benefit or product that people will get value out of") than to trick you into liking something you otherwise wouldn't.
One way of interpreting that query string is as the answer to an implicit survey question of "How would you like to get the stories we write?" the answer in this case being: "Twitter" [2].
Incidentally, this is why I recommend rewriting URLs to hide UTM strings on load: http://esd.io/blog/stripping-utm-strings.html This way they 1) look cleaner to the user (of a modern browser) and 2) if they are reshared it doens't come with a inaccurate tracking code.
those are standard google analytics campaign tags, they probably (automatically?) built the link that way before they originally shared it on twitter, and then someone cut & pasted that link to share on HN.
There's a fix for this that the HTTPS site can add to <meta>, which works with newish browsers: the "meta referer" header: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Meta_referrer
?utm_content=bufferc2fec&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
I'm glad that ycombinator isn't listed as the source, at least. I think it would be fairly interesting to see what kind of data they have about various social medias and link propagation.
And also, a slight sickening sensation that marketers are doing this. Not that I'm surprised, it's just that I'm sure they have papers written saying that "Twitter has a 64% link click rate if you write your post like X, whereas Facebook can achieve as high as 70% if you do Y."
I know it has been going on for years on the web, and decades for other marketing, but here it's plain to see. It fills me with unease, like I'm no longer in control and what I like in life is already planned out.