The Truth About Digg’s DiggBar | Hacker News Reader

The Truth About Digg’s DiggBar

3dogmedia.com

48 pointsmuimui28 comments

The Digg bar is not just unethical, it's plain annoying. What happens if I want to bookmark the page? What happens when I want to copy-paste the actual URL into an email? What happens if I'm using a text-only browser? What about a mobile browser? What if I wish to scrape my Twitter stream for links and I can't get to the actual URL (this is actually something I'm playing with)?

Frankly, I don't see the point of this. This will just confuse and annoy users and steal valuable link-love from content producers.

If I had a content site I would most certainly put frame busting code on it. To not do so seems foolish.

Screw digg.

doesn't frame busting code get invoked too late? i.e. digg already got the search engine love by the time you bust out of the frame?

It does to a certain extent. However anyone re-sharing it will not share the digg URL.

Furthermore they're not prompted at the top of the page before your content to leave your site.

Digg even sticks ads on the bar when you click on something. Very un-cool.

Others copy and paste the url and send it around - or just use the bar to send it, which does the same.

Frame-breaking code redirects the user to the proper url. So traffic may still go to the digg.com/whatever page but it will redirect to the original site.

The thing that really pisses me off is that Digg struck a deal with Twhirl/Seesmic - Digg.com is the DEFAULT url shortener in the latest version of Twhirl.

I'm adding some frame killing code to any of my content sites that have been on digg before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller

Just a random prediction. It'll be gone, or non-framing in 2 weeks. Digg is dependent on all those sites out there with "digg this" widgets for its page rank, all it will take is a significant proportion of those sites to say "bye digg" and digg will say "bye frames."

The bar is definitely a shady, unneeded annoyance. However, I wouldn't worry too much about it hijacking the SEO for your site by not using a 301 redirect.

That might certainly be the case right now, but with Digg's size I doubt Google will let the lack of a 301 prevent them from recognizing what's going on.

I find it funny that no one freaked out when facebook did this exact same thing: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130

Is it because posted items are used too infrequently for anyone to care? Is facebook's bar somehow useful? There is a curious distinction between reactions.

Instead of a frame, why don't they stick the DiggBar at the top of the page but then have it scroll off? Seems like a good compromise to me.

Or just use 301 redirects...

Actually, Digg is probably big enough to avoid any penalties for doing a different redirect based on user-agent. I.e. 301 redirects for non-human useragents instead of forcing them to go through their framejacked page.

We're actually experimenting with this on tinyarrows, using a full 301 redirect for bots but we test for the preview cookie for other useragents and give them a javascript redirect in that case. We kind of have to do the latter since we support so many different incoming domains, we need a way to test the cookie through a central domain, but don't want to eat SEO juice.

What's the difference between browser chrome and the digg bar? Firefox "brands" every page with its logo. (It doesn't use its own URL-space, but it could. What would you do about that.)

Anyway, I see why people are upset, but I don't see what they can do about it. It's like ad-blocking... you can't control peoples' experience when viewing your site, it's just not how the web works.

Could someone reply to this instead of downmodding me? This happened in the last article about the Digg bar too.

I really don't understand why everyone is upset.

Everyone is upset because Digg is stealing SEO juice by jacking the link to your site and making it point to them (and additionally running ads on your site through the diggbar). I think people are downvoting you because this was clearly explained in the article.

e.g. if people on Twitter start linking using digg instead of tinyurl (et. al) the person loses all the SEO juice because while tinyurl does a 301 redirect (search engines don't index the tinyurl but instead index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.) Digg does not.

I don't understand why they think they're entitled to that in the first place, though. It's how the web has worked, sure, but times change. (This reminds me a lot about how VHS tapes killed the movie industry. Yeah.)

Wow, for a second I thought I was reading HN... but then I realized that Reddit just changed their CSS today.

(Downmod me some more. I can lose at most 8 karma points per post, and I have almost 5000 karma. You aren't hurting my feelings, but you are hurting the community by taking a Reddit-like approach to suppressing opinions you don't want to hear. I mean, seriously? I am having trouble making sense of this, as I've never seen it happen before here.)

What's really troubling is the fact that you don't see how bad this diggbar truly is. Forget the fact that it steals link love (which in the long run will result in stolen revenue), it changes how my site looks to everyone following through the link.

For some odd reason, you seem to think that people should 'not' be getting mad because they aren't 'entitled' to how their site looks to everyone.

What?

P.S. Please don't spout that ignorant bullshit about firefox doing the same thing. It does NOT. If firefox hid site URLs by giving them all new short URLs like www.firefox.com/d1hyfg, people would dump firefox a lot faster than they're dumping the diggbar.

You've singlehandedly made me reconsider the appropriateness of the -8 karma loss limit.

There's nothing more tragic than someone who disagrees with you.

Let's say I lost all my karma. What is the real loss for me anyway?

You're gloating about being too cool to care about karma?

I'd be perfectly fine with having no limit on negative karma on messages but with a limit on the impact it has on your global karma. So let's say you have 5000 karma and then make a message that gets downmodded to -34, you'd still have 4992 karma left. Best of both worlds. I'm more concerned about the loss of information than anything else.

edit: You know things about Reddit and I don't. Good for you, good for me. Please choose another "nemesis". You're really annoying. If you could at least contradict me in constructive ways that would be great.

Best of both worlds.

You should really be reading Reddit, not HN.

Would you please stop baiting people like this?

VHS spawned a whole new industry called "Home Entertainment" (almost 3x bigger than box office sales) from which entertainment companies have reaped countless extra billions (www.mpaa.org/USEntertainmentIndustryMarketStats.pdf)

Do you realize that you are suggesting that it may be better if you were to search google and the top link went to digg for each search, instead of the content creators' site. At scale if this were to be in effect (which I highly doubt would ever happen) this would undemocratize the web by piping everything through one massive content provider.

Would you be fine with this scenario?

One day, google decides that all links on google result pages no longer go to the destination site, they now go to a google.com page with the destination in a frame. Above the destination frame are some google adverts.

You don't seem to have read or understood the issues here and that's why you're getting downmodded.

Mostly:

* They have the top branding on your site, users know if they are using a browser, they may not know why Digg is in the URL and on the top of the site

* They get all the search engine love. No browser in the world steals pagerank.

>> " It's like ad-blocking... you can't control peoples' experience when viewing your site, it's just not how the web works."

Detecting people who ad-block is very simple. You could then degrade their user experience, or put up a donate link etc.

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