Not sure if this kind of meta-comment is appropriate, but I find it difficult to follow a link like this because of the lack of human readable information contained in the URL.
If the story was hosted on a personal blog I recognised (like Julia Evans to take a random example), then perhaps the domain would be enough for me to choose to read the article to see if the content is interesting.
If the link was to a broader domain that hosts many writers, I might use the parts after the domain to filter my interest: example.com/news-opinion vs example.com/science-blog gives me more information that might not be clear from the post title.
With a site like Facebook, which hosts so much different value levels of content, it is harder for me to visit facebook.com/233555323 rather than facebook.com/ffmpeg-interest-group/post6665443. For whatever reason, the URL remains something I use to filter my internet consumption.
Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of scams or other general reasons not to trust non-human readable URLs, or perhaps it is more due to my distrust of article titles (sensationalism) and seeking a second source to verify my interest. Perhaps I simply bias against Facebook - I don't know.
Regardless, I visited the story after thinking about this, and was very surprised to see it was an article by John Carmack - an author I certainly respect. It is a shame for me that both the URL and the title don't reflect that.
Oh wow, you really have to hope these are not the canonical links. If so, they are doing themselves an incredible disservice and the fact that no one has brought it to management's attention speaks gravely to the workplace culture there.
Not only does the full URL not show in my browser (Safari), the full URL doesn't even show on this forum (for me it is cut off after "content"). When you receive a URL via chat or on social networks, it is in the form of a preview and might not even show the domain name. The user also isn't typing these URLs in, with or without human readable text in the path. Essentially all of the arguments for making URLs more brittle (which is what you are doing by adding human readable text) are obsolete in a world where URLs have been relegated back to what they were always supposed to be: permanent identifiers to a semantically stable unit of content.
This technique (which I almost commented on in my original comment, but didn't) is brittle in a different way (making it so that attempts to search for the URL have no well-known canonical representation), and quite simply totally undermines the entire argument being made (which is why I didn't comment on it) that someone can use the slug of a URL to decide whether or not they want to click on the content: you can change the URL to say anything you want. At this point, there is no value in bothering with having done this: it is just extra text in the URL for no concrete benefit.
> very surprised to see it was an article by John Carmack
John Carmack works for Oculus/Facebook, so that's probably part of the reason he posts on Facebook, but you might mean you were surprised because the URL gave no indication.
Stackoverflow solves this issue like so: stackoverflow.com/questions/<question_id>/<readable_slug>, ex: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56340579/i-could-not-set... Interestingly, you can change the slug and still end up on the same page, which just shows how simple a system it is. I'm sure there are trade offs but I always thought it was a clever idea (for its simplicity).
If the story was hosted on a personal blog I recognised (like Julia Evans to take a random example), then perhaps the domain would be enough for me to choose to read the article to see if the content is interesting.
If the link was to a broader domain that hosts many writers, I might use the parts after the domain to filter my interest: example.com/news-opinion vs example.com/science-blog gives me more information that might not be clear from the post title.
With a site like Facebook, which hosts so much different value levels of content, it is harder for me to visit facebook.com/233555323 rather than facebook.com/ffmpeg-interest-group/post6665443. For whatever reason, the URL remains something I use to filter my internet consumption.
Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of scams or other general reasons not to trust non-human readable URLs, or perhaps it is more due to my distrust of article titles (sensationalism) and seeking a second source to verify my interest. Perhaps I simply bias against Facebook - I don't know.
Regardless, I visited the story after thinking about this, and was very surprised to see it was an article by John Carmack - an author I certainly respect. It is a shame for me that both the URL and the title don't reflect that.