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."
I noticed the same on Amazon.com (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.