Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Ars republishes good SE articles from time to time. It is not about link spam, but rather about promoting SE on Ars, and vice versa. I think this approach is quite reasonable.

I don't think they give a f*ck that someone on hackernews happens to notice it on Ars rather than SE.

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It really is pretty much spam. It's pageview-bait at its finest. (And that's one of the main reasons I've filtered Ars's non-forum stuff, I've been a subscriber there for years but I'm not giving them pageviews for bad articles anymore.)

Ars writers have been very honest about their use of pagination. Sometimes, I guess it is to get more hits, often its just a way of breaking up the story and to reduce page load time. If you are a subscriber, don't you get access to PDF or something like that?

I find Ars to be one of the better web publications out there. Until theverge came along, I would say they were bar none the best.

often its just a way of breaking up the story and to reduce page load time

It's 2013. Articles are text. This is silly.

Articles are text with huge images. Believe it or not, a page still loads slowly for those of us in 2nd world countries behind great firewalls. Also, I think pagerank still takes page load times into account, so putting everything into one giant long page would actually hurt their google rankings.

I say SO on Ars is not blogspam because unlike, say, most everything on Lifehacker, the content on Ars is not a thin veneer of bullshit/fluff designed to position an ad between the user and actual content.

How is it different from hackernews? They are using content from another website to create traffic and content on their own, pretty much the same thing hacker news is doing.

It's not about promoting SE on Ars, it's about free content that pulls from social sites.

Social sites including HN matter so much to these sites that many of them (not Ars) including media giants have been caught spamming them many, many, many, many times to pull the traffic, the SEO link juice and the viral spread of their shitty rewrites, rewordings, and repostings.

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