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> Which pages were featured and on which social media platforms?

This was the “killer feature” of the Google Analytics replacement I built for myself a few years back. I would grab referrers for social and scrape them to give a more useful report of the source of traffic.

Unfortunately this is challenging or impossible for many social platforms due to HTTPS everywhere, the prevalence of outbound link scrubbing, and app-driven embedded web views.

I still think it would be a killer feature to know who tweeted you out or which subreddit you are trending on but it’s just not feasible to do based on a website pixel alone.



How does https stop this? I understand many websites will redirect before loading a link to clear the referrer data which is a good thing since the referrer header has been abused far too much.

I imagine originally its intent was for website owners to see what other websites linked to them but now it gets used to track the users




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