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Comment by Kerrick | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, you totally psychologically hijacked me for a kudo. :-P

I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted that as a kudo from me to you!

That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so, and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-style nearly-ubiquitous service.

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That happened to me too the first time I saw a link to this blog on HN. But now I'm wiser. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me, can't get fooled again.

fwiw, this functionality is part of the blogging platform I am using: http://svbtle.com

Yes, and it's dishonest. It happened to me once too.

Agreed, although I periodically "give" a kudo just to see if the platform has improved to allow one to revoke a kudo. It hasn't. It's a shame actual "kudos" get conflated with "what's this thing do" over and over. Was the design aspect overlooked or intentional? Either way It's a disrespectful UX error.

If not intentional originally, defiantly intentional now: http://dcurt.is/unkudo/

Wow, he's not fooling me with his rationalisations:

Here’s what it actually does: when you hover over the button, a CSS transform animation is activated which fills the circle. After 1 second (the length of the animation), it fires a request to the server which increments an otherwise meaningless number by exactly one.

Simple response: If that number is meaningless, why give it a fancy animation, why name it 'Kudos' (which even a non-techie would agree is equivalent to a +1, Like whatever) and then why place such a meaningless element next to every meaningful blogpost? If he just wants to amuse himself, may I propose random() in whatever prog. language he uses to update some meaningless local variable. I do like Dustin's blog, but it's sad to see the self-deception going on here from an otherwise smart guy with loads of reputation to lose.

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