Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

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This site makes a great case-study of many things gone wrong.

I inadvertently started a second debate by posting the content of the article here. I felt I had little choice. I'd rather skip the whole thing than send someone to that site. But I wanted to discuss the content, which was excellent.

If it wasn't for that excellent content, I would have never struggled with this horrendous site. It was as if they are daring you to finish the article. Some of the other horrors:

  - embedded video ads (incredibly distracting)
  - way too many words of the article were underlined links
  - many other underlined links that were *not* content and hard to differentiate
  - tool tips everywhere, that were a huge problem because
  - you need to mouse so much just to scroll the content
  - less than 10% of screen real estate used for content, which
  - brings up a new acronym, WTFA *Where's* the fucking article?

There aren't any tooltips on this site. And there is a Next Page link on the bottom of every page. The underlined links take you mainly to other articles on the site, which is pretty standard practice for news websites. Take another look.

Yes the site has a lot of issues. It's a terribly design - long and skinny, so you have to scroll to read it.

But the article is good and by ripping off the content and posting here, you impact the traffic to the site and the quality of the site too. The less traffic, the more the publisher has to rely on advertising, the less chance of their being enough budget for a redesign. And, the more likely fall guy will be the writer that could face losing their job as a result of cutbacks.

I am generally a fan of YCombinator and the community so I was surprised and disappointed to see this flagrant disregard for IP.

I think this logic is fundamentally flawed.

If you don't present your ideas well, they will be missed. If your content is wrapped up in junk, your audience will move to another content provider.

This is the law of the land. Any tiptoeing just delays progress.

As my friend's grandpa used to say: "shit + ice cream = shit"

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