The purpose is so that Twitter is seen as the source of the traffic. A lot of Twitter-sourced traffic comes from native apps, so when people click links from tweets, they usually don’t send referrer information.
If the redirects were server side (setting the Location header), a blank referrer remains blank. Client side redirects will set the referral value.
From Twitter’s POV, there’s value in more fully conveying how much traffic they send to sites, even if it minorly inconveniences users.
I thought about it, but I hadn't originally built it to make money. It was a weekend hack project that I never expected to do that well, and suddenly the prospect of centering my life around a product I didn't really feel passionate about felt like a nightmare. I had a lot of anxiety about whether my external dependencies I'd built on top of would continue to work, and reached the point where a large payoff was worth it to de-risk myself from $23k/mo becoming $0/mo with no exit.
I built a social media analytics API. At its peak, it brought in about $23k/mo, with server costs at about $3k/mo. When I got a job at Instagram, they decided it was a conflict of interest and told me to sell it, which I did for a very healthy six figure sum.
This unnecessary condescension is made all the funnier by the fact that the quote the expression alludes to wasn't actually written by Mark Twain, but in all likelihood by a French writer named Nicolas Chamfort.
Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them.
Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city.
However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.
> Workers have also started to replace faulty signals that trigger a train’s emergency brakes at low speeds, a problem investigated by The New York Times and The Village Voice that has also led to slower service.
Interesting that String padding made it in -- sort of jumps out as the simplest of these additions. I wonder how much of that had to do with negative PR for JS-land due to left-pad-gate.
The HackerNews repo is gone (and thus the issue), but at one point this was a Github issue I successfully filed to get HN to add it so their referral data for non-SSL pages wouldn't be lost:
Voter files being public data depends on which state you're talking about -- you're looking at ~50 different sets of laws and regulations. Some states restrict access to only political parties using it for political uses and prohibit distribution to non-parties/candidates. Some states (Florida, for example) will let anyone just apply to get it.
To your latter question, some states, like California, do include email addresses on their voter file, but the coverage tends to be poor.
You can probably assume that, if you're a registered voter in the United States, you're on this dataset, as is your age, gender, party affiliation if applicable, and race/ethnicity info if your state collects that, as well as modeled information projecting things like party support, race, age, and likelihood to turnout.
If the redirects were server side (setting the Location header), a blank referrer remains blank. Client side redirects will set the referral value.
From Twitter’s POV, there’s value in more fully conveying how much traffic they send to sites, even if it minorly inconveniences users.