LikeBtn – ‘Like’ button for anonymous voting on websites | Hacker News Reader

LikeBtn – ‘Like’ button for anonymous voting on websites

likebtn.com

41 pointsnicolly26 comments

For something as simple as a like button, surely they could just include a unique image url wrapped in a link, and generate the image on demand to update numbers?

I do find this trend of including third party js on websites worrying. At present I've got twitter js for feeds on a few websites, and even that worries me, but it seems every website now wants me to include their js for a like button or any other service. It's simple for them to update, track users etc, and I see the attraction, but it's also incredibly dangerous if this practice proliferates. Soon we'll be including js for tens of sites, not all of which are perfectly secure, and if any one of them is hacked, it means you're serving malignant code on your domain to every user.

While js is sandboxed, it has full access to any data displayed or entered on a page, and can trigger silent transmission of that data to other servers. So by including the js you're trusting that website never to be hacked, and never to misuse your users' data. I'm waiting in trepidation for the big scandal when a large site with js served all over the web is hacked, and that js is used to silently record millions of logins and details over a few hours/days before it is discovered.

I find these two claims together a bit odd.

"It is well known, that social buttons effect your site’s overall loading time."

"Like Button is loaded asynchronously and does not slow down your website."

All popular services I know of also load their social buttons asynchronously, and just because it doesn't block rendering, doesn't mean it doesn't slow things down.

This is very confusing from a user experience point of view. Users will expect this to 'Like' the page on Facebook which will either put them off clicking it (if they don't want it to appear on Facebook) or not give them the result they expect (if they do want it shared on Facebook).

IMO very few will spot that it is an anonymous custom replica.

To me, putting like button on my website is only to spread the site/article on social network. A likes this -> friends of A will see that article's link as well..

Plus, as someone has already pointed out, "How do you ensure dis/likes are unique if it's anonymous?"

> How do you ensure dis/likes are unique if it's anonymous?

Does it really matter? Who is going to try and "game" your like count by deleting cookies or other such methods?

Yourself ?

If you are the only one to gain from gaming the system, you can ensure it's not gamed by not gaming it. If you can't resist that, nobody can help you xD

But what about vandalism and trolldom, right?

Sorry, I thought my answer was more self-explicit than it is. I just thought a lot of people would simulate a high number of "likes" on their articles for added credibility or whatever ("hey 3000 likes on this little button, a lot of people must think this guy is important")

It's your own website though, you can already put any lies you want on there.

I'm pretty sure (or rather, I hope) HN for example has mechanisms in place to spot accounts created solely for upvoting/downvoting submissions and/or comments though. If the content has anything to do at all with politics or music or movies or a lot of other things, or anyone has the slightest economic incentive, the answer to your question is, sadly, "enough". Depending on their energy, it really takes only one person.

I think this also applies to FB and G+... but I don't care, I want this to be better than FB and G+ likes, which I despise haha. And for a personal photo gallery it is probably perfect, and other such things. Small communities of nice people, which do exist. But for a site a la reddit or youtube or political blog aggregators? Hmm. But maybe that's okay, maybe huge sites can't have nice things, and that's fine.

I hate to sound like I'm dissing this. It's really not meant that way, to the contrary: I love how configurable and sexy it is, I upvoted the submission instantly, and then proceeded to ask questions.

And maybe it's really more a social than a technical problem. In an ideal world, we would use these as tools to make our opinion known, appreciate them as such and never ever fuck with them.

Imagine if someone made a script to send your like count to an outrageously high number. That would demean the value/purpose of having a like count.

Seeing that the 'Like' action is triggered with 'LikeBtn.vote(1, 0)', Python and Splinter/Mechanize/Selenium will get you a working 'Like' script in a minute or two. But hey, that's just a trade-off with anonymous features like this.

If this is anonymous and can have a high degree of reliability in uniqueness it's pretty awesome. Either way though it's still nice for those of us who want to use the Like mechanism without being hooked into FB/G+.

Nice idea, but who is behind this? What company, team or person?

good work. what is really annoying though is that the "would you like to share" popup stays open until I close it, especially when I hit multiple buttons on the page and these popups are all over the place. maybe think about a timer or close all the others when opening a new one.

You should buy yourself an SSL certificate and serve the widget using https as well.

Do you have a good suggestions for buy this certificates, I always struggle buying one that is acceptable (affoortable) for a startup.

http://www.startssl.com/ - one year free certificate (renewing is free, too) with a distance of one to the root CA.

It's worth noting that those free certificates are for non-commercial use.

Their commercial certs are pretty good value if you need one.

Namecheap offers an $8 and $10 certificate at https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates.aspx?aff=29535

(I included my affiliate link above, recently signed up to the program and figured why not, let me know if it is against any rules and I'll remove it.)

There is also a free cert authority but I've never used them. You have to put a link to their site somewhere on your site though.

https://cert.startcom.org/

Something to consider: instant bitcoin donation is both quite anonymous and can't be duplicated at will. And people can put their money where their mouth is. In fact, this already exists as "bitcoin tip" on Reddit.

How do you ensure dis/likes are unique if it's anonymous? Or is that simply a trade-off that can't be avoided?

You can't even ensure likes/dislikes are unique with FB and G+.

well at least it's harder if you were to do that with FB and G+. 1 like/article per Facebook account.

There's hundreds of people offering "like" services, so clearly you can't trust them for anything serious.

Yeah I know, and my question was kind of a brainfart... of course anonymity means you can't ensure two "entities" are not the same actual person. I didn't mean to imply anything wrong with that, I was just curious, because who knows, maybe there are ideas about this. But I guess anything that would keep bots or human spammers out would also at least decrease the convenience for genuine votes.

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