Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Presumably to disable that hot linking from other websites/apps. Especially if they use scrapers.
But yeah, bad ux.
It's almost like Pinterest. Ugh.
Obfuscating the image file like that is usually completely transparent to scrapers actually, as the image URL is almost always in the HTML. You can find the direct image link yourself if you poke around in the element inspector for a bit.
It's just to make it harder to copy and increase to amount of people that link the full site URL (with the tracking and analytics ofc) instead of the image directly.
I'm not on desktop so can't inspect to see the img src.
But it's possible for a url in img src to have a different response (ie, html) when it's a direct navigation (ie new tab).