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Digg Backs Down On DiggBar
Barence writes "Social news website Digg.com has made key changes to its recently introduced DiggBar. The browser add-on had been much criticised for its use of frames to 'host' third-party websites within the digg.com domain using an obfuscating short URL, thereby boosting its own traffic figures to the detriment of those third parties. After many major sites ran negative articles on the DiggBar, and even changed their code to block it, Digg has relented and announced two changes to ease concerns."
Remember: music starting automatically when you open a website, animated pictures, and of course, frames. What's the next, the unreadable background pattern
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
They do the same thing, I'm wondering why there isn't similar backlash. I hate them both, framing is such a 90's thing.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'm really just getting sick of Browser Bars and add ins to "help your browser". I think it is very ironic that Google Chrome's excellent interface is just one souped up text box that you type stuff into, with a smattering of buttons for favorites. Browser bars are just stupid.... unless someone pays me to write one.
This is my sig.
... why is nobody screaming at Facebook about this, since they do the exact same thing that Digg was doing?
Seriously -- use the "Share" feature in Facebook to share a URL with your friends. Then click the link to read the shared story. The link will be framed with an obnoxious Facebook bar under a Facebook URL, just like stories shared via Digg were defaced, and with all the negative consequences that were associated with the DiggBar.
And yet while bloggers and SEO experts were up in arms over the DiggBar, I have yet to see a single story calling Facebook to account for this.
So if it's not OK for Digg to do this stuff, why is it ok for Facebook? Why the double standard?
Read my blog.
This, the Facebook TOS, and I am sure there are several other examples of how new technology, (ironically) such as Twitter and Facebook, have allowed people and companies to voice their concerns with a product and produce results. I am willing to bet that 10 years ago if some company wanted to screw you over (even if they sent a letter to all customers) there would not have been a way to get that info out to the world in a quick and efficient manner as to get said company to change it's policy.
There were no marches, no organized rallies; just a bunch of people complaining in a way that is heard by millions, including those they are complaining about and other users/customers of that company. This is the power of information.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Didn't about.com or somebody like them try this stunt back in the .com days? Remember having to add that "break out of some assholes frame" javascript on every page? I guess nobody does that anymore, but back then it used to be standard issue. Course, back in those days people used frames, so it was probably easy to break out. Looks like digg is using an iframe to host the content. This begs a couple questions:
1) What does something like AdSense think about pages served in iframes? Will it throw off their targeting?
2) What does this mean in terms of SEO? Will google get pissy about you being in some jerk's iframe?
3) How the hell do you break out of an iframe in a cross-browser way?
I gotta say one thing though--how they have the comments "fold down" from the "Diggbar" is pretty neat. Course, the posters on Digg are all 12 year olds who find poo-poo, pee-pee jokes funny thus negating everything.
Digg is a weird place, it is like some kind of flash-crowd groupthink that is enabled by the unlimited ability to vote anything down. Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic. Here, you can make a post that goes against the general "view" of the site and still get "+5 insightful" provided you are eloquent. On Digg, you could write the most insightful damn thing in the world but if it goes even a tiny bit against the bias of the article you will be buried into the floor with zero chance of getting read.
This is the ongoing joke
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
with their image search. Where is the outrage there, like Facebook others have mentioned?
Don't get me wrong, I hated the diggbar, and havent been to digg since they implemented it.
Actually, google very clearly puts the original URL on the top frame, as well as on the main results search page. Did you miss the part where one of the major complaints is URL obfuscation? RTFS!
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
Okay, I'll start:
Requirement #1: Don't even think about releasing yet another stupid toolbar.
Yet another reason not to use Digg
Summation 2
Also Google's image frame serves the purpose of providing the image directly, so you don't have to search through an entire webpage to find it. It's great for random image browsing.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't like the diggbar, but it also has the actual url in the bar as a clickable link
What we need is a "uber-bar" that puts all of the various other bars into a frame to help us out.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I quite looking at Digg when they wouldn't let the Pifts.exe story reach the front page. Norton had a possible back door into their software for big brother and it phoned home to a server in Africa. Pretty important story if you ask me. All accounts that questioned the Pifts.exe file on Norton's site were deleted. A back door can be exploited by all not just the one who puts it in their software!!
The summary is wrong. It's not a browser add-on. It's a frame, loaded via HTML, like any other frame. It loads when you click a link on Digg.
In that case, I amend my post to "frames really make me puke.", followed by, "web sites that use frames to hijack other web sites really, really make me puke." I thought framejacking went out with the early 90s?
This is my sig.
I am pretty sure the only reason people are not opt-out in larger numbers is, because digg has not made it easy to do or advertised that you can turn it off at all. They need to turn it off for everyone and let them opt-in and then see what their numbers look like before spewing them like they show diggbar in a positive light.
If your content filter is fooled by the Digg bar, then it's a really, really bad content filter.
The URL of the site is still loaded on your computer whether it's inside the Digg bar or not.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
They don't care what we think. They know we hate Slash 2.0. They know we hate the new user pages. They know we hate idle. They just don't care.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...but reading the consistently and utterly ridiculous comments on Digg or Reddit stories has given me a new appreciation for the commenters on Slashdot. The toolbar was just the icing on the cake.
Overall I find Reddit's comments are better and certainly more entertaining than Slashdot these days. The first 20 posts top level posts here are always a mixture of Off Topic, Troll, or +5 Funnies that aren't actually funny.
It has given me a new appreciation for slashdot moderation!
I acquired a new appreciation of /. moderation a couple days back when I replied to a very very helpful post and stated 'Mod parent informative'. I figured that having karma of excellent would make theirs (a 1 default) more visible and useful.
People did so and that post was boosted to a 5
Later in the day, someone saw my reply, and it got modded -2 redundant.
Reply to That ||
This is a common pattern. A comment arguing that its parent should be modded up will often achieve the desired effect, at the cost of whomever posted the "mod parent up" comment.
I had a similar thing happen when I posted a comment that initially got modded "redundant". I had then replied to my own comment, elaborating on what I meant, and claiming that the original post was making a valid point. This achieved two things:
A) the original post got upped to 5
B) the reply to the post got modded -1 offtopic
In its own funny way it works, but you need to keep in mind that the system has its quirks.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I hate to use this phrase, but "who's we?"... I don't completely agree with every design/structural decision on the site, but I think that if there was an outcry of enough volume, it would lead to eventual change.
Slash 2.0 has its upsides, though it's still quite buggy (and I mean technical, obviously-an-error-and-not-the-designer's-intention bugs).
Idle? Ignore them if you dislike them so much.
I don't really have a strong opinion about the user pages one way or the other.
I very much doubt, however, that "they don't care". If you want to see "don't care", check out digg, and the topic of this thread.
Possibly one thing that could be done is polling that takes into account the user's karma, but that too would have its problems.
Also, for better or worse, the website isn't a democracy (though arguably the comments are). This site is "private property" and anyone's free to leave if they so choose. Clearly, anyone posting here hasn't chosen to leave yet.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
For me, the Digg bar was very obtrusive. I'm forced to use IE6 at work, and when the Digg bar shows up on that browser on my work system (Win XP SP2), it causes unacceptable graphical tearing and glitches in the page it's wrapping. If I scroll down, I had better not scroll back up because I wanted to see something at the top of the page.
Furthermore, when I first noticed the Digg bar showing up on sites I visited via Digg, it was pretty easy to get rid of the bar -- one click to an obvious-looking close button widget and it was gone. A few days ago, I seemed to no longer have the ability to even get rid of the bar, which (combined with the aforementioned graphical problems) is what made it so annoying to me.
As a developer who slings a lot of web-based applications, I have been operating for years with the understanding that it's considered bad form to use frames and iframes, and especially bad form to wrap someone else's content in one of your frames. Most web sites (and the entities that operate them) don't like it when you include their site contents inside yours using frames -- there are legal concerns, concerns about obfuscating the URL so the end user is confused, concerns over the mis-appropriation of others' copyrighted material, concerns over the appearance vs. reality of content ownership (i.e., making someone else's work appear to be yours), and technical considerations, among other issues.
One such technical consideration is that most sites are authored assuming that they pretty much own the root of the DOM, and things like the Digg bar break that assumption. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make, especially since it simplifies your JavaScript and navigation logic. I recall testing out free WiFi at several airports, including Denver International. The Denver system would intercept your HTTP requests and decorate the page you were trying to load with their own ad-laden HTML, which would then wrap your desired site inside a frame. Their stuff mostly worked, but occasionally would bork my browser or cause multiple instances of ad bars and other detritus to be loaded around the page I wanted to see. In some cases, the web site I was viewing came up completely scrambled. (This was on a MacBook Pro running both Safari and Firefox 2.x. I did try both.)