Permalinks to specific content redirecting to the home page? [on hold]
Sometimes, typically in email newsletters, there are hyperlinks to promoted content in their dynamic feeds. For instance "latest stories" where each link is a bookmarkable permalink.
While the news feed is updating with new content, the direct link will reliably take you to the specific content.
However, some newsletters redirect to the website's home page, which itself is a dynamically updating feed.
Since the web is stateless content displayed in the newsletter simply "disappears" when one refreshes the home page. It exists only in memory. Like an unsaved, open file.
On the surface this seems like terrible UX. A user receives an email with links of interest and is unable to directly access the information.
This problem is even worse on a smartphone. Smartphones clear their memory all the time.
Notable Example: Quora Weekly Digest
- On my iPhone, I opened 45 links from several Quora digest emails
- They opened in 45 separate Chrome browser tabs.
- When I went back to my mobile browser, every tab lost its state, and refreshed itself to the standard Quora home page.
- The same thing happened when opening the tabs on a laptop via Chrome sync.... once again, the URLs were all saved as “quora.com”.
Can anybody explain why there might be a good reason for this behavior?
Or is this definitely a 100% across the board UX mistake?