Show HN: Like The Onion, But Real

by slifty • 13 years ago

127 90 13 years ago

slifty19• 13 years ago

As a quick backstory: This is a mashup between /r/nottheonion, google image search, and The Onion's CSS. Pretty crazy what a little styling can do to the way your brain interprets information!

chewxy• 13 years ago

I was going to suggest /r/nottheonion but it seems OP is already using it. Not bad though, I kinda like it.

EDIT: oops, you're OP. Ever thought of suggesting this CSS to reddit?

slifty19• 13 years ago

Not a bad idea ;)

Worth noting that I have reached out to the mods of /nottheonion to let them know about it and ask if they would like anything else done (since the only reason this doesn't suck is because of their community)

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

CSS? Reddit? Ha.

sp3323• 13 years ago

Um, are you seriously hotlinking to resources hosted by theonion.com? That is a terrible, terrible idea.

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.theonion.com/static/CACHE/css/2903347c3113.css" type="text/css" media="all">

slifty19• 13 years ago

Can't argue with ya' there.

marssaxman6• 13 years ago

Why is it a terrible idea?

pinoceros• 13 years ago

This adds another DNS lookup, which will slow down your page load times. Also, it is essentially leaching the bandwidth from theonion.com. However, if your users are already readers of theonion.com, the static files may be cached.

rcfox• 13 years ago

Remember that copyright applies to CSS too.

slifty19• 13 years ago

Absolutely! We have some contacts at the organization and are hoping they will lean towards finding this amusing rather than finding this offensive (although what a story that would be ;) ) || if they don't like it they will let us know!

jere• 13 years ago

When brainstorming website ideas lately, I find myself often thinking "well shit, that could just as well be a subreddit." Probably not a very productive attitude.

philsalesses• 13 years ago

So this is this like the onion, only true? Manually curated by you or do you have some magic code to do it?

slifty19• 13 years ago

Yep! real headlines -- curation is done by redditors (why re-invent something that already kicks ass)

jaredsohn• 13 years ago

You should fix the top links (Video, Politics, Sports, Business, Science, Tech, Entertainment, and Breaking) so that they don't take you to the real Onion.

slifty19• 13 years ago

Taking suggestions on places to link to! We've swapped out a few of them, but were waiting for inspiration to strike for the others.

rajivm2• 13 years ago

Having a site that 50% links to the real onion, and otherwise is a real site branded like the Onion makes this very confusing for the user. It could be easily mistaken as the real Onion rather than being obviously a joke.

benatkin• 13 years ago

Your site is bad and you should feel bad. ;)

duggieawesome• 13 years ago

The Science/Tech header tab is great.

jaysonelliot• 13 years ago

This seems childish and a little bit reactionary. Oh, I see, the content is chosen by Reddit. That makes sense.

mehrzad2• 13 years ago

Insulting the Reddit community on HN? We can finally do it without being downvoted? That's somewhat pleasing.

meritt• 13 years ago

Pleasing? So you prefer for the HN community to be outwardly elitist and can look down at other online communities?

Or are you just saying being able to voice ones opinion without a torrent of downvotes is a step in the right direction?

prawn4• 13 years ago

How is it childish and reactionary? They're headlines you can imagine seeing on The Onion, but are legit; it's harmless and a touch amusing. It's just riffing off The Onion's style of presenting content.

I post on HN but don't have an account on Reddit, but I think pigeon-holing an entire community is more likely to be considered childish and reactionary. This isn't "our site vs your site" and some sort of tribal war. What about this site or its content has irritated you?

(Main parts of Reddit I do read are AskScience and AskHistorians and they are, for the most part, excellent. Anything but juvenile.)

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Looks like trademark infringement to me. Come up with your own identity.

muppetman• 13 years ago

This comment seems childish and a little bit over-reactionary. Oh, I see, you feel superior to people that post on Reddit. That makes sense.

lurkinggrue• 13 years ago

That's a bit childish and a little bit reactionary of you.

mikk0j• 13 years ago

This is such troll-fodder. I'm not even a militant atheist, and still just looking at the front page pisses me off. That and the design, which jars my brain and hurts my eyes.

huhsamovar• 13 years ago

It's not a high school essay. Calm yo teat.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

A visual nottheonion is a great idea. I suggest changing the name to something that's not going to violate their trademark.

Also, a quick way to avoid hot-linking the images is to use a service like Cloudinary, it will proxy them for you with little code change.

There's also http://www.ruddl.com/ as a Pinterest-Reddit mashup, but they only have a few subreddits.

slifty19• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, and great tip on the images!

snoonan• 13 years ago

I'm not ok with this. Watch the trademark. I'm not even talking about litigation -- just not ok with people willing to trade on another company's name.

UnFleshedOne• 13 years ago

Doesn't this count as parody and thus fair use? Or does parody of parody completes the circle and the site is not a parody anymore?

rajivm2• 13 years ago

He's not making a parody of the trademark. He's making a parody of their site, and representing it with their trademark. As a random visitor of the site, I could easily mistake this as the 'real onion'.

And it's also questionable whether this is a parody of 'The Onion'. It seems to be a parody of world news, branded with The Onion.

stevenleeg• 13 years ago

You may want to rid of those sharing links:

http://i.imgur.com/3EYKseY.jpg

Generally those are more harm than they're worth, as nobody uses them and they annoy the user (especially since they're in the way of what I'm actually trying to read).

slifty19• 13 years ago

Noted, and removed in the next push.

cpdean• 13 years ago

Cool. It's like http://www.fark.com/ but with a more attractive layout.

networked• 13 years ago

I'm not sure the I'd go with the name "The On1on". It seems too close to trademark infringement. An alternative off the top of my head is "The Un-ion" (as in "un-" + "Onion") but it's hard to distinguish from "union" (as in "trade union"). "The Garlic", anyone?

Edit: I'd better let you judge what sounds nice.

Edit 2: Hmm. Let's try my Rebrand-O-Matic:

On1on — On-1-on — 1-on-1 — Ioni — iOni.

You can illustrate it with a sleek iPhone-like icon of an oni (a Japanese demon) holding an onion.

http://ioni.io is available for $50, which may or may not be too much for this project.

More seriously, though, http://allium.org is available for $10.69 from NameCheap. "Allium" is the Latin name of the genus to which onion and garlic belong.

prawn4• 13 years ago

Just go with The Garlic if available. Needs to be more obviously than Allium, and should be a .com to mimic The Onion.

throwaway420• 13 years ago

This is a reasonably decent idea.

But copying the name and look and feel of an existing site in so casual a manner seems very lazy and is off-putting.

slifty19• 13 years ago

The point of this project is the blunt comparison to The Onion -- it is using reality to create a parody of a parody of reality. In other words, the copying of the name, look, and feel of a well known and well recognized satirical publication is actually a vital part of the statement about our world and the media.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

I think it's mindblowingly effective. The eye just really wants to interpret those headlines as funny... and manages to fail, but just barely.

wilfra• 13 years ago

Hopefully theonion appreciates the homage, this is fairly textbook trademark infringement and they can take this domain away.

scott_s• 13 years ago

I have a feeling The Onion staff appreciates satire.

jdolitsky• 13 years ago

haha yes

hansy• 13 years ago

Hmm I was confused when I saw actual articles from The Onion on there, but that's because the top navigation links point to pages on The Onion.

Aside from that minor confusion, the site's purpose is absolutely hilarious and I applaud the tongue-in-cheek approach.

rckrd• 13 years ago

Why do the links take me to the actual onion site? Let's say I visit your site. Then I am viewing real news that looks fake (i.e. just poor and sensationalist journalism). But once I click an article at the top, I'm taken to the real onion site - with fake news that looks real. With the sites looking the same, I might not notice I've changed to the real onion...

Very confusing.

Also, as said before, hotlinking to another site's resources is not a good idea. At all.

Execution aside, I don't like the idea. The Onion provides well written fake news. The content that you're linking to is a poor excuse for news; its the low-hanging fruit of the internet. I couldn't see myself browsing this stuff. In fact, the reason I browse HN is to not have to deal with content like this.

a_p2• 13 years ago

The Video, Politics, Sports, Business and Entertainment links point to theonion.com. I suggest that you change this. An Onion dev already posted that he had considered screwing with your site when it was using the Onion's CSS. If they did want to screw with your site (or its visitors) it would be easy for them to redirect anyone that clicked one of those links (giving them a referer from your site) to someplace unexpected.

slifty19• 13 years ago

But... that would be amazing...

a_p2• 13 years ago

The threat of changing their CSS to mess with your site reminded me of something a Web 1.0 trolling site did to people who linked to images on their site, causing an unnecessary load on their server. The images that were linked to were usually put in (a third party's) forum signatures. So the site owners would replace the original image with a copy that had a different file name, and change the image at the original uri to something obscene. This would usually lead to the bandwidth leech being banned from his forum for linking to obscene images.

tlogan• 13 years ago

Excellent! This reminds me of "Daily Rotten News".

greenyoda• 13 years ago

This site reminds me of "News of the Weird":

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html

Show HN: Like The Onion, But Real

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