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."

Re:How does that saying go again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org]

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.

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

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.