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Yahoo Faces Questions After Discovery Of Comment Replication

Posted by Soulskill on from the never-attribute-to-malice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Someone noticed that certain Associated Press stories on Yahoo seem to be appending old comments to new stories in a way that was highly misleading (suggesting new stories had a lot more interest than they really did). The initial theory was that this was some sort of nefarious scam, potentially by Yahoo and the AP. However, Mike Masnick at Techdirt dug into the details and found evidence that it's more about incompetence in the way Yahoo built its comment system, combined with the way that the AP pushes and rotates its articles to partner sites."

4 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. How does that saying go again? by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Never attribute to nefarious scams that which can be adequately explained by incompetence?

    Or something like that anyways

    1. Re:How does that saying go again? by marcello_dl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
      (attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, born 1769 - likely competently poisoned to death in 1812)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_I#Cause_of_death

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  2. Sloppy programming by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, in this case, they're treating the last path part as a unique identifier, which it obviously is not. I read the article half expecting it to be an integer overflow bug....

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    1. Re:Sloppy programming by Pollardito · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's unique for a specific day, but it also isn't. As they add more detail to a story, a new story comes across with the same slug (or even slightly changed). They're matching comments to slugs instead of to some sort of a story ID, because they want the comments to stay on the story as it's revised. Imagine a story on the World Trade Center attacks coming through 10+ times as more and more detail filters in, and every time a new version comes through all the comments get wiped.

      Unfortunately it looks like their attempt to fix a weakness in the underlying delivery is overcorrecting. These things are pieced together by human editors on some sites, but I'm sure Yahoo isn't the only one to botch an attempt at automating it.