Dug deeper. It's called link cloaking... using javascript to intercepts clicks and redirect to a website that at the least has an affiliate code.
Many companies got blowback for it back in the day:
LiveJournal has done something stupid again. Let me rephrase that: LiveJournal has done something REALLY fukking stupid. Links to about 150 e-commerce sites that users post to their LiveJournals are being redirected through a 3rd party website. These redirected links also open in a new window.…
vichan.livejournal.com
news.ycombinator.com
We wrote about 180Solutions back in March when the company stunned most people by raising $40 million. The issue wasn’t so much that the company had raised so much money, but that their inves…
www.techdirt.com
Inserting JavaScript into clean links means I literally can't verify any outgoing links across the entire website. The intrusive pop ups were never an issue for me due to ad blockers, but now it's veering into privacy territory imo.
Even all the links in this post have trackers in them smh. I tried right clicking and pasting in a new tab, as well as using the clearURLs extension but neither work.
@bnew let me know if you know anything that strips this bullsh1t or if I should start winding down and looking for greener pastures.