Yahoo Faces Questions After Discovery Of Comment Replication 97
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."
How does that saying go again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to nefarious scams that which can be adequately explained by incompetence?
Or something like that anyways
Sloppy programming (Score:5, Insightful)
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:How does that saying go again? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sloppy programming (Score:3, Insightful)
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.