markmccraw

Some online ads are just general brand awareness ads, in the way that the big Pepsi sign at a baseball stadium isn't talking about a new product or trying to get you to buy a Pepsi right now.

Given that it costs less than $20 million to run Wikipedia (cite: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL_...), that seems completely attainable without needing to change the nature of Wikipedia by introducing advertising.

A lone rich donor could cover the budget for an entire year, and many people who could afford that wouldn't even be mentioned in Wikipedia, so there would be little opportunity for any conflict of interest. Even if someone high profile donated a large sum that would only be one profile to monitor for any potential bias.

Here's why I think ads would be a terrible idea:

_________

ADVERTISING

Pros:

More Money

Cons:

Integrity possibly compromised

Contributors might leave

Readers might trust Wikipedia less

-----------------

DONORS

Pros:

Maintains editorial independence

Maintains trust of readers and contributors

Cons:

Harder to raise money

__________

Ads are a lazy solution. I can't think of a single benefit to Wikipedia or its users other than "it would be so easy to meet the budget."

Yeah, I don't really get the big deal either. If the quality is so bad, people will stop crowdsourcing and if the pay is so low for designers, they will stop doing spec work. It seems like there's a lot of designers who want to make a cartel to keep prices higher and prevent direct competition between designers.

I suspect (but have no proof) that crowdsourcing appeals to designers who might have more trouble working on regular projects with obligations such as younger people, busy parents with day jobs and third-worlders who lack the English skills to effectively market and communicate otherwise. Which makes things better for the customer, but introduces new competition into the design world.

IANAL, but depending on state law, running the poker games on your campus might be illegal (not a law I'd agree with, but possibly illegal).

In a regulated online poker scene in the US, botting would likely be illegal, just like using a computer to aid your play in a live casino is.

While I understand the value of rakeback and low rakes and poker sites not treating their customers poorly, I don't think it is relevant to whether creating a bunch of fake accounts to receive affiliate commission is okay.

Anyhow, seems like it's all in the past, so all of this shouldn't matter much.

Disclaimer: I'm a poker player and small time affiliate.

The poker related ones seem to venture well into the unethical or illegal category. That doesn't take away from the difficulty or cleverness of the hacks, but unlike the candy theft story, there is no acknowledgment that some of those things might have been unethical or illegal.

Edit: I now see the conclusion that notes the potential for illegality, but I feel like the body comes off as way too proud about aiding a scam of a business (the affiliate "arbitrage")

I bet some of them find alternative ways to get visitors and that a decent number of people use the bookmark feature. Now, how valuable a visitor is to a page like that is another matter.

Well, a lot of those webapps fall in the "feature, not a product category" and were pretty clearly living life on the edge.

I await the day I can anagram via the search bar.

Note that the biggest accusation of them all is not addressed: that grouper is a lie, and is just old fashioned human matchmaking.

See http://gizmodo.com/5845467/how-i-was-nearly-seduced-by-group...

If you go through the posts in the google link from marco's post, many of the scraped summaries are <2 paragraphs, (such as http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-02/strategy/3001...) and that would continue to happen regardless of licensure.

The HuffPo which has both significant reach and assets, takes/quotes liberally from other writers and has had mixed responses to public shamings. See http://gawker.com/5820099 . I'm sure other aggregators do similar stuff, Newser comes to mind, although they tend to rewrite and condense, which may be better or worse, depending on the original writer's objectives.

Given the permissiveness of fair use laws and the low probability that random bloggers will engage in costly and lengthy lawsuits, I imagine that CC license or not, Marco's stuff would get scraped.

FWIW, the language comes from the DOJ attorney, so I don't think you can blame the headline writers.

Affiliates (no longer?) don't get paid based on a straight up deposit, but instead need to have their signups play through to earn a certain amount of FTP points, which are correlated to rake paid. The CPA rates start at ~$75 and go up for those who drive volume. Rakeback affiliates make only 3% of gross rake.

See http://www.pokeraffiliatesolutions.com/full-tilt-affiliate-p... for more

just to clarify, that would mean triple their revenue compared to if those players played normal poker, not an overall measure.

also, for the pros who would normally be 16 tabling, there is only a small uptick in hands per hour in NL rush compared to standard 6 max tables.

Not speaking from personal experience, but the difference between the kids who go to a community college and a school with a respected <insert field here> program is going to be massive. I'd be figuring out how to transfer to somewhere better in a hurry. Even if it takes you time to save up money or whatever.

The quality of the article is not the issue. It's just that if everyone behaved the way you did, HN would merely be a contest of who can call in the most favors/have the most accounts under their control.

It seems that this post may have been artificially upvoted by the author of this post.

The oldest comments are all at the bottom and are short, trivial and grayed out comments. One of those comments appears to be legit and another appears to be from a fellow Brazilian entrepreneur. However the rest are suspect.

The submitter/author of the post created his account 23 days ago.

The following accounts were all created 22 and 23 days ago and have only commented on everwrite related posts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mateusbicalho http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bgrossi http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucasarruda

These accounts were created shortly after this was submitted and have only posted on this submission with the same short, positive comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpresende http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eusouomatt

These all do have real name formats, so perhaps these are all employees of everwrite and were asked to come vote this up? I'm not sure what the official rules are here, but it certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth to send five associates here to vote this up and comment on the article in the early stages of the post, where five upvotes likely makes a large difference. And if it's straight up sock puppeting, it's simply unacceptable.

EDIT: I take back that one of the early comments seems legit, this account http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucianot is also associated with everwrite in some way. http://twitter.com/#!/lucianot/status/114152173767639042

I hate to be the one who makes the drama, but the whole thing seems disingenuous to make all these fluff comments without disclosure and is not beneficial for the community. Imagine if a company with 2000 employees sent an army this way!

If it is the kind of thing where people vote up stories, you are going to have to fight very hard to avoid the influx of low calorie news (same goes for crappy comments). Unless that's what you want of course, but people already get that from digg/reddit/gawker/fark.

From one of PG's essays: "Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

It would be nice to see a social news site that ends up with an intellectual feel instead of the polemic vibe that a lot of places give off.

If I were expedia, orbitz, priceline, travelocity, kayak, hipmunk. etc. I'd be very very afraid. Sure, google won't actually do the sales, but they are linking direct to airline websites for now. Also this doesn't exist for hotels. Yet. The odds that in 1 year that any of those sites have a better UI or superior search capabilities than Google is low. So, what will they bring to the table?

Also, what's up with all these people saying that it's so limited because it doesn't do international and such. It seems very obvious that this thing will get better and better and like others have said, eventually end up on top of the search page. This is assuming it gains traction quickly and doesn't get nuked.

I kind of get that feel too, and I think it might be related to the fact that many spammy/scraper news sites and amateur operations use designs off of themeforest or popular free WP themes, which tend to be fairly minimalist and white space heavy. Whereas pretty much all high end news outlets have extremely busy designs, and we have been conditioned to associate that with trustworthiness.

Just another guy selling hopes and dreams to people who won't achieve them. I'm all for "lifestyle design" and think that it's not unreasonable that some people will be able to willingly create a lifestyle that allows for lots of free time, traveling or other desirable things.

However, the idea that just anyone is going to be able to sell shitty diet supplements online and work four hours a week while banking tens of thousands of bucks a month is highly improbable. Also, anyone want to bet that Tim Ferris is a workaholic who just classifies 95% of his business as stuff he enjoys so much it isn't work?

If it's actually a PR plant, being in the top results (or ad I suppose) in Google for related queries might be enough. Unlike the suits example from the essay, people looking for standing desks probably aren't going to go to a local store and instead will use the Internet to look up brands/models and where to buy. Sure, you are sharing with your competitor, but if it's the difference between the story getting published or not it would still be worth it.

I know the creator acknowledges this, but the news sites aren't even close to (or trying to) fixing the news. Maybe someday down the road they will morph, but in fact there has been very little to be done to create an online news organization that both provides original reporting and is substantially better than the web adaptations that traditional media provides. If all we get is better aggregators, the orgnaizations generating the news to be aggregated might still fail.

Personally, I think the best prospect for something awesome to happen in the news sector is that a profitable aggregator similar to HuffPo (but probably not them for a lot of reason), Techmeme or Google News, really makes a run at becoming a media organization. This would require investing in setting up real live bureaus and paying for boots on the ground journalism, but at the rate the current guardians of media move (AP just added links into their stores), it might have some traction.

That would be fine if someone posted an article about those things, or even a "Did anyone's server crash due to the earthquake?" But the thread is 95% "I felt it in XX"

edit: Thing I was responding to got deleted, but I'll leave this here anyway.

Not to spoil the fun, but isn't this the sort of stuff that leads down the slippery slope to reddit's front page? I understand that this affects large numbers of HN users, but so do lots of things that are very far from the tech/business/coding core of this site. Besides, there are a million places to go for this info.

although this probably wouldn't be true for dnacafe.com, if the reg fees were like 25 bucks a year instead of like 7 or whatever people with reseller accounts pay you'd see a lot less of people trying to own every single combination of two dictionary words. and the increased prices wouldn't be much of a burden on very many people/business.

it seems like it has happened very briefly, http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/12/facebook-app-uses-exploit...

Top of my list is -3.7312181, bottom is 1.237559. 11 negative numbers, 108 positive. A friends was skewed more to negative numbers, so I'm guessing that maybe you just aren't a heavy/frequent user?

It seems like there is a lag time between clicking stuff and the value changing, because I'm not getting my dummy to show up at all.

Well I changed my privacy settings to visible to all, made a dummy account and click raped my profile and my dummy account didn't show up. I'll add the accounts as friends and then make note of the number, then do clicking from the dummy and see if it changes. There could be some privacy implications behind the initial coolness of this.

Also, if you make an account and do nothing your value for yourself is 0.939565, which I guess is some sort of baseline of 0 interaction? Although I don't understand how they are modeling your interaction with yourself, tbh.

I'm curious whether these numbers factor in people who are looking for you/interacting with your profile. My list has some people I don't recognize as well people who I definitely have not clicked anything of recently, which is why it might.