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Yahoo Faces Questions After Discovery Of Comment Replication
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."
Never attribute to nefarious scams that which can be adequately explained by incompetence?
Or something like that anyways
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....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In other words, Nothing To See Here, Slow News Day, and so on... NEXT!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Kind of OT, but Yahoo Answers comment system is wonked out too. My favorite part is how I can edit my answer after it's been modded up (or down). I can say something like 'To fix your WAP you need to reset to factory defaults and reconfigure', and get modded very high. Questions come in very fast and most are off the main page withing a few minutes, so I can go back 10 minutes later and change my answer to something like 'Call the company at 202-456-1414 and complain. they will give you the runaround, but the secret word is 'potus'. Demand to talk to potus and you will be fine.'
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
What you see is not information, it's not even data, it's "news" and rarely related to anything important in the real world.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Department of Redundancy Department?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I don't know who the drunks are that write and edit the Yahoo and CNN "news" stories, but they usually have more spelling and grammar errors than a 2nd grade book report.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
Kinda lame, but useful
Still lame, not as useful
Somewhat better presented, less useful compared to competitors
Kinda flashy and a little more useful than before
Crufty and deliberately defeatured
Kinda buggy and simplistic compared to competitors
Definitely suffering bit-rot, not any more useful
Total crap with pockets of new development of script-kiddie webdev showoff crap that makes it no more useful and often worse than useless
You'd think an Internet company that has been around as long as Yahoo! would understand how to code a proper CMS by now. IMO this is just further evidence that they will be joining the likes of Netscape and AOL in the dustbin of Internet has-beens sooner rather than later...
Because the comments of new stories on Yahoo are all the same to start with!
Half will directly hold the current sitting President responsible for the article's topic. Some will hold the political party with majority in Congress (yes, this includes articles about Acts of God -- see articles about Hurrican Katrina blaming the Right Wing). Then there will be all the responses to the first two groups that instead blame the other party or previous President. There will be a few that comment on terrorism. And there will be a few hardcore environmentalist-written ones.
Getting a cue right from The underhanded C contest
</tinfoilhat>
On some movies, like the DVD of a certain franchise, Amazon now includes reviews from all the other seasons or even completely different titles, going so far as to calculate the star ratings based on these seperate products.
This doesn't seem to be across the board and may be up to the individual seller of the product, but it has turned movies that were rated 2 stars 2 years later into 5 star products -- without having an additional actual reviews pertinent to the title added, rather than reviews of better movies in the franchise lumped together into it.
Really destroys their credibility.
We know it's something like that already. The real interesting part is Yahoo hasn't been able to fix such an obvious bug for all these years.
Has Yahoo stumbled upon the Holy Grail of dupes? Have they unwittingly produced the mother of all duping systems? We must know, is there anything slashdot can learn from this to ensure more efficiently duped articles? Why stop at duped stories when we can have duped comments?! This would save so much time.
adjective
(typically of an action or activity) wicked or criminal
adjective
flagrantly wicked or impious
Ever since it was used in Raiders of the Lost Ark it seems.
So, did Yahoo have a wicked or criminal scam, or was was it something less. Maybe just a scam?
You just need to take a look at Yahoo's comment system to see how much incredibly worse things can be.
I'm not even talking about the quality of the comments themselves, which make your average Slashdot troll look like a PhD in comparison.
Still, though, I think comment systems in general need lots of improvement. One idea I have is weighted tags: allow tags to be added to comments, along with +/- buttons to allow others to alter the weight of the tags. Then, design the display system to let you filter or arrange content based on tag weights that you care about.
Of course, there's always lots of details to work out, such as how to keep the taggers/raters honest (or at least prevent too much abuse).
Once such a system is made, it needs to become viral and replace all the lame comment systems out there.
Well, to be technical, Yahoo! really isn't a news site. They are more of a web portal, and I'm sure if you pressed them, they would say the purpose of their existence is to entertain visitors with interesting content, not be a news organization. I mean, it's not like this is cnn.com... if comments keep people entertained (read some of them, they ARE entertaining) and coming back to the site then they are going to have comments and discussion.
On a side note though, I do take issue with your statement that there is no room for discussion on a news website. Maybe if there was more discussion of the story we would start getting both sides more reliably, and that's always a good thing.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
It's a FEATURE!!!!
rewriting history since 2109
I've found that yahoo routinely changes the links to their articles. After sharing on one facebook I clicked it to show it to someone else on MSN the next day and found that the story at the page was drastically different than the one that I had posted. in fact it was an entirely different article.
In Yahoo news, old comments append you!
I always figured it was on purpose, the better to keep conversations about the same topic together. Seemed a bit ham-handed but I figured they had a reason. I mean there's no way they could not have known about it is there? All you would have to do would be to glance at one of the major stories and it would be obvious that the comments do not pertain to it directly and are old with thousands of responses.