In fact, the example seems to suggest the opposite: a 17+ year successful paid subscription business – to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer! – receives enough "business value" from the practice, despite its failure modes, they don't want to stop. Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.

Seemingly, the practice works often enough, pleasing more destination sites than it angers, that "referral tracking" is not something "so minor".

Most sites don't mind or break, some sites get value from the behavior in ways hard to replicate in other ways – and those sites that don't like such additions can easily ignore them. And a few lines of code will work better than ineffectually appealing to manners, when the freedom of the web's form of hypertext, and protocols, gives the outlink authors full freedom to craft URLs (and thus requests) however they like.

Ensuring both sides of a hyperlink agree/consent was a design flaw that limited the uptake of pre-web hypertext systems. The web's laissez-faire approach demonstrated a looser coupling was far better for users, despite all the new failure modes.

Of course any site/server has the practical power free to treat inbound requests as rigorously (or harshly) as they want. But by the web's essential nature, it is equally part of the inherent range-of-freedom of outlink authors to craft their URLs (and thus the resulting requests) however they want. URLs are permissionless hyperlanguage, not the intellectual property of entities named therein.

Plenty of sites welcome such extra info, and those that don't want it can ignore it easily enough – including by just not caring enough about the undefined behavior/failures to do nothing.

Though, when a web publisher has naively deployed a system that's fragile with respect to unexpected query-string values, they should want to upgrade their thinking for robustness, via either conscious strictness or conscious permissiveness. Thereafter, their work will be ready for the real web, not a just some idealized sandbox where scolding unwanted behavior makes sense.

* readers can request reviews from certain perspectives: "new discovery", "historic reinterpretation", etc. The reviews specifically search for related sibling articles, and seek to create ever-larger areas of consistency. (The same prompt admonition against "nothing actually true" could be paired with "but other Halupedia articles are diegetically true"

* a background process clusters articles, and picks pairs within some neighborhood for dual-harmonization - where they avoid contradictions & adopt meaningful (& deep-anchor) cross-links to each others' sections. Repeated, or to the extent contexts allow expansion of synchronized revision to N-tuples of articles, this creates a tropism towards a shared (un)reality.

(If not already familiar with Borges, definitely check out his 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and 'Library of Babel' as inspiration.)

While "each article written once" an interesting & useful constraint, a Hallucipedia that evolves like Wikipedia, with revisions "towards" some level of inter-article agreement, or even shows scars from edit wars between competing schools of thought, might also be fun.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042594

In particular, someone who was seeking training-set pollution likely wouldn't make the fanciful fabrications so blatant, nor open-source their prompt:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038257

One hint – check out its prompt, and how it makes its articles so different than those of your project: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48042306

As an entertaining way to highlight the importance of upgrading our ways of knowing, playful (& open-source!) projects like this are likely to strengthen the web.

> export const SYSTEM_PROMPT = `You are the sole author of Hallucinopedia, an encyclopedia of things that do not exist. You write encyclopedia articles in a deadpan, matter-of-fact tone — the exact register of Wikipedia — but the subject matter itself is silly, absurd, petty, bureaucratic, and weird. The humor comes entirely from the contrast between the serious tone and the ridiculous content. You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented.

RULES: - Output ONLY valid HTML. Begin immediately with

TITLE