Sometimes clicking on the title of a post on the main page takes you directly to an external website. I find this to be risky. I try to avoid clicking on these but don't always see the little "external link" icon. For this reason, I think clicking on a title should ALWAYS take you into the post. Or at least give users a setting to control this behavior for themselves. Until such a setting can be implemented, please, let's remove this direct external link behavior.
Also, generally speaking, when a post has a link (even if you aren't taken to it directly by clicking on the title), it would be nice if there was some indication that the post might be spam. For example, there could be a visible indication that the post has received downvotes...especially if the downvotes outnumber (and/or outweigh) the upvotes.
This is how reddit works, and I think the Steemit guys are trying to emulate that.
How about this as a compromise: A toggleable user option that will pop a box up stating the Steemit post you just clicked the title of will take you to an external link? Personally I would not want that but it would be good for those like you that do.
Other ideas would be to make the external link more obvious by using a different title color. Or perhaps putting the link icon to the left of the title, and making it more pronounced with size or color. Presently the external link domain name is displayed next to the title, like reddit does minus the parentheses. But the color and size of that text is not very different from the size and color of the title text. Maybe that could be changed to make an external link more obvious?
Instead of a pop-up box giving users the choice each and every time, it would make much more sense to have a user setting to turn off direct external links entirely. Actually, if I was designing this platform, I would want to keep users on the site and therefore more engaged with the content. For example, if the post contains a video, why take the user away from the site when they can watch and listen to the embedded video in place while checking out the post's votes, replies, $ amount earned, etc? Ok, I understand Reddit funnels people away from their site. If such functionality has to be made available on Steemit.com, I would highly recommend having it turned off by default and give users a setting to enable it.
I reported this bug few days ago:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@noaommerrr/posting-url-problem
Actually, you can read the content of a post even if it has a direct, external link. You just have to click on the "Responses" link at the far right. But still, it's very annoying that it's necessary to pay such careful attention to the "external link" icon and then click the "Responses" link if you want to avoid visiting spammy sites. You should always be able to click on the title because it should always take you into the post instead of directly to some external site.
Good idea, I agree.
Adding {link} or {external link} or a link icon after the post title would be cool and safer. Like this:
Subject of post links to post {link} <-link leads to somewhere else
Subject of post links to post {external link} <-link leads to somewhere else