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."

Comments

How does that saying go again?

[Monkeedude1212]

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

Or something like that anyways

Re:How does that saying go again?

[SilverHatHacker]

You pulled this exact post, word for word, out of my head, at the exact instant I thought of it. You've got to teach me how to do that!

Re:How does that saying go again?

[Michael Kristopeit]

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

if this sentiment was universal, all truly nefarious people would simply hide behind the protection of incompetence.

i'm attributing this to orchestrated incompetence.

Re:How does that saying go again?

[Monkeedude1212]

You have to purchase my 10 DVD Box set on how to read minds through the internet. 11 small payments of 30 dollars + shipping and handling*

*dvd's shipped seperately

Re:How does that saying go again?

[marcello_dl]

"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

Re:How does that saying go again?

[techoi]

I am thinking of my address and credit card number right now. Please send me qty 2

Sloppy programming

[dgatwood]

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....

Re:Sloppy programming

[Lazlo Woodbine]

It's pretty common in newspapers (and AP) to recycle slugs. A slug is the internal identifier that's used for a story since the title is often the last thing written. The slug is typically only unique for a specific day. Also, Yahoo is fairly incompetent when it comes to technology for a company its size.

Re:Sloppy programming

[Pollardito]

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.

Yahoo Answers

[Itninja]

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.'

Re:Yahoo Answers

[nurb432]

So you are the bastard that got the black vans to my house when i had that wireless problem !!!!! potus my ass!!!

timeline of Yahoo quality

[blair1q]

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

plausibly deniability

[subanark]

Getting a cue right from The underhanded C contest
</tinfoilhat>

I noticed the same on Amazon.com

[rolfwind]

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.

If you ever think that Slashdot's system is bad

[CityZen]

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.

Re:That's nothing

[gront]

Different content on the same subject or a completely different subject? Often the AP or whoever is doing the article will update and change it around a bit over time, especially on breaking news. Sometimes it is difficult to determine how and when it was changed, sometimes they tell you.