this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 days ago (1 children)

For those of us living under a rock, what's Gumroad?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 days ago (2 children)

An online ecommerce platform.

It's similar to Etsy. Targets smaller creators, values individual-made goods, but focuses on digital content, like soundtracks, 3D assets, etc.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I remember reading about Gumroad it used to be mostly for NSFW art, but they did a Tumblr and banned it. Maybe this is related to the loss of revenue.

Edit: found the article

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/gumroad-no-longer-allows-most-nsfw-art-leaving-its-adult-creators-panicked/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Taking 30% off of physical goods sounds criminal to me.

[–] solrize 131 points 4 days ago (14 children)

We need browser extensions to kill those tags automatically.

[–] UnpopularCrow 106 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Firefox I believe does. If you right click on a link, it says something like “copy link without tracking”. It should do away with queries in the URL, but I’m not completely sure.

https://www.trishtech.com/2024/10/how-to-disable-copy-link-without-site-tracking-in-firefox/

[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 days ago (3 children)

This is definitely what it’s supposed to do (and a great feature) but unfortunately it doesn’t work that well. Have tried this many times, especially with Amazon links, and it seems to be a bit inconsistent in its effectiveness.

[–] UnpopularCrow 8 points 4 days ago

Good to know.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

You probably also need to clear your cookies as well. I can't really see this being done only via GET

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Yeah, I cannot imagine any reason they wouldn't use cookies to track this. The moment you arrive via an affiliate link they're going to know that that's how you got to the site for that session.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

That's not going to work for links sent by text or whatever.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

If a platform gets traction and is good at removing them, then links will be more obfuscated to deal with it.

[–] solrize 4 points 4 days ago

Oh nice, that is pretty new, but will have to see if it works on those gumroad links. I have an offline script (not a browser extension, I haven't bothered figuring out how to write those) that edits urls to remove tracking and it's quite a pain, since there are dozens of sites and tracking schemes it has to know about. Also, rather than creating a pasteable url, a suitable browser extension should just rewrite the link automatically before navitation when you click on it.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 4 days ago (1 children)

uBlock Origin filter or ClearURLs for example.

[–] tb_ 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

In the case of uBO, just search for "url" in the filter list and you should find it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

The URL tracking filter list is nice but it doesn't seems to include anything related to gumroad domain or parameters.

https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/ublock/filters/17.txt

You need to add it yourself.

[–] nieminen 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] solrize 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thanks, I have that too I think. It's great for sharing from my phone. On my laptop I have a python script that is a lot fancier that I'd like to rewrite as a browser extension someday.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

For your desktop, you can use https://linkcleaner.app

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[–] RagingRobot 29 points 3 days ago

These artists should switch platforms because the query string isn't the only way they can track attribution. If they see people doing this they will just switch to something else if they don't already use another method as well.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What a terrible platform, I knew they would get desperate after banning porn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They banned porn?? I used to follow Gumroad's founder on Twitter, he seemed like a good person.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Yep, there was a rush over at kemono party to try and archive gumroad stuff that artists sold there because it would be hidden/deleted.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'll just skip the whole place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

some of us have been ever since gumroad worked with st*netoss

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Never heard of that platform before, is it US only?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'm only familiar with Gumroad because a lot of artists use it to sell their VRChat avatars and 3D printing files. I wasn't keen on the fact that a few items I went to buy weren't actually still for sale and the only thing telling you this was after you attempted to make the purchase.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Lots of blender extensions are on gumroad, especially "pay what you want" ones.

[–] MashedTech 6 points 3 days ago

No, it's just one of many. I've purchased stuff from gum road before.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

I’m sorry to disappoint, but this will most likely not work. As soon as you make such a request, a session is created, which is stored in the cookie. And if they are real big asses, they only use the IP address to correlate the user to a session.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

OK, I think the real solution is that I'm never using Gumroad again. Sad, as some really good dnd stuff was there

[–] [email protected] 39 points 4 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/stargazerbird.pmd.social/post/3ld4tz3hllc2u

Based of that, it sounds like it’s affect people who had opted into the boosted discovery since that was already a thing and that was 30%+. The simplified wording doesn’t help but I’m feeling this got way blown out of proportion. Humanity does that nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago (2 children)

A dumb policy with perhaps an even dumber implementation. Basing profit sharing percentages off query parameters 🫨 ?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That’s how basically all affiliate links work.

This time it’s just the merchant getting more or less from the creator. vs doing the split with the linker and the merchant.

Also 10% is pretty low, normally merchants take like 30% cut by default so they have plenty to share.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (6 children)

The parameters are how you get to the store.

If the creator is driving the traffic, Gumroad takes 10%. If Gumroad is driving the traffic, they take a commission of 30%

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[–] LovableSidekick 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Are you sure a new tab is necessary? Simply removing the tracking data and hitting Enter should be enough.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Probably an abundance of caution. I'm pretty sure referrer headers wouldn't be sent if you modified the URL and that's the only concern I can think of.

*For a new tab that is. Cookies aren't going to care about a new tab unless you open a private one first.

[–] nieminen 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But did you try in this case? Because it doesn't seems to have a sanitizer handling gumroad, in fact the sanitizer list is quite limited.

[–] nieminen 1 points 3 days ago

Oh you're right. I thought you could add your own. Either way they push updates regularly, I bet if someone asked for a specific one, or maybe asked to be able to add their own, they would do it.

[–] whaleross 9 points 4 days ago

Enshittification seems damn inevitable these days.

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