How to deal with links to commerce?

Personal opinion, not speaking for the team:

I don't think we need a blanket ban on links, but we should make sure such links are actually necessary when used. Sometimes a link to a product listing (whether the original manufacturer or a third-party vendor) is useful; often it is not. It sounds like it wasn't needed in the case in question, and your inclination to edit was correct (or would have been if the author had not deleted the post).

If the linked information is relevant context, then "here's a link that proves this price (as of this date)" is more useful than "I saw it listed for this price" -- think of it as a citation. Better would be to archive that link and link to the archive, which is more durable and will still match the post a year from now, but I don't think we need to require, network-wide, that product links never be used.

Individual communities are welcome to set stricter policies, and the community can edit where the links don't add to the post or where archive links would be better.

Spam should be nuked from orbit, but links like what are described here aren't spam. I think we need to evaluate individual cases.

posted 13 days ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Monica Cellio‭ staff

64 377 2269 838

Please don't use/allow links like this

It's fundamentally still advertising

Notwithstanding what manufacturers or retailers are suggested, and regardless of apparent intent, links like these still fundamentally serve the purpose of advertising a product or service. If this answer had come from a new user, I would have flagged it as spam. Ignoring such links sets a terrible precedent by discouraging vigilance against spammers. It's worth noting here especially that undisclosed affiliate links aren't always trivial to detect.

It's really not necessary

Considering the purpose in context, simply stating that SSD storage can be obtained relatively cheaply is more than enough. If we're going to be doing subjective comparisons, it would be more interesting in practical terms to talk about, say, the relative size of low-end storage devices vs. a typical Linux installation.

Ideas like this are perfectly well expressed by giving rough ranges and speaking in general terms. If the community really feels that evidence is necessary, it would be better to use a secondary source, e.g. a link to an editorial on a hardware review site.

Temporal concerns

Storage is likely to continue getting cheaper. The numbers provided here will go out of date soon enough. Does it benefit anyone to keep them up to date? Are the numbers necessary to convey what they're intended to convey (which doesn't actually appear to be all that objective)?

More interesting, anyway, is the cost ratio between SSDs and HDDs, byte for byte.

Cultural and personal concerns

"Cheap" is relative - considering both the local economy and personal preferences. Also, individual demands for storage space vary greatly. Putting numbers on the storage cost doesn't really change the fact that this is putting forward an opinion. It could be useful to put forward a reality check, but frame-challenging "do you need HDD storage at all?" isn't going to work well in a vacuum, especially not when the frame challenge isn't actually described as such.

posted 6 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

23 36 149 28

Leaving my personal judgement of Amazon apart, I would nonetheless remove the links as the prices are what is substantial to the answer, not the exact products in sale.

If you remove the links, that would reduce the proposed solution to a baseless claim. Without links, I would advocate for removing the bit about buying a bigger drive entirely because without evidence the price claims are useless, and the whole "solution" falls apart.

The common thread here is that the question is asking for a DIY solution, but the effort of the DIY is actually not worth it compared to simply buying a cheap product. Of course, that only works if the product is actually cheap - you can't have a discussion of that if you can't put a price. And the price is useless if it can't be verified.

We do have a tradition on QA sites that contents of links should be reproduced in the post, in case the link dies later. Would it be better if instead of linking to Amazon, I provided detailed specs of the drives I was thinking of and stated that I can currently find them on sale for a certain price?

Leaving my personal judgement of Amazon apart

I suspect many people would feel very differently about posting links to small, ethical, specialty retailers vs. large and controversial companies like Amazon. But that's irrelevant if you want to indiscriminately ban all product links.

It's probably worth a mention that in my opinion, the best option would be to quarantine all product linking to one site like my proposal where the exact manner of product referencing can be moderated to extract some common good out of it. Meanwhile, other sites can ban any hint of product-purchase-related discussion with no downside, because those things can still be discussed in the quarantine. That said, the proposal I made has not attracted interest, so maybe that's just me.

posted 6 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

6mo ago

matthewsnyder‭

31 17 117 42