I also dont get why adding 'utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me' somehow gels with his calculation it is 'an expression of digital etiquette: rather than dump a load of anonymous traffic on your doorstep, I reveal who’s linking'.
Theres no actual link to the referring website just some bunch of characters which look like someones name and some of which are in the actual referring URL.
replyAnd yeah I'm also thankful also to see that firefox setting.
I am totally sympathetic to the "this isn't a legible link for machines". After all, this utm_source implies that some human is looking at the logs manually (or at least, trying to decipher aggregated utm sources manually). However, we are well into a transition to a world where this isn't true, and 'utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me' is probably just as good as 'utm_source=robinsloan.com' for LLMs of 2026+.
reply> Honestly I don't understand why the EU focused on the stupid cookie law instead of referers which are clearly privacy-violating.
replyNeither the ePrivacy directive (commonly called the "cookie law") nor the later GDPR focus on cookies. They are "technology neutral", applying to e.g. URL parameters and HTTP headers too, but just widely misunderstood and badly enforced.
Or set network.http.referer.spoofSource to true.
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