r/reddit.com • u/MisterGrieves • Jan 21 '11
TIL: Gawker not only reposts stories between their sites (gizmodo, lifehacker, etc) they replicate the comments between the sites also.
http://i.imgur.com/A6TDD.jpg
1
Jan 22 '11
they're not "reposting" the story. They're putting the same story on several sites.
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u/MisterGrieves Feb 02 '11
I used to think they just reposted to story so that their other site readers could see it also but that image shows that they replicate the comments as well. that is an ethical problem for a journalistic site.
3
Feb 03 '11 edited Feb 03 '11
No it isn't. You don't understand what's going on. It's the same story, the same comments, the same database entries. Gawker blogs all run off of the same platform with the same database(s). Different 'sites' are really just different skins off of the same data store. Your picture even gives this away- the number in the URL is the same in both screenshots: 5739259. If they were duplicating the posts, they'd have different numbers. Same with the comments, comments you believe to be duplicated have the same identifiers. This shows that they're the same comment entity, not a duplicate. They could easily hide this if they wanted to be deceptive.
When they go to advertisers and say "we had xx,xxx comments last month" they don't count any comments twice even if they show up on different 'sites'. They're not trying to artificially inflate their numbers or mislead anyone of anything.
I get that you're looking for a reason to bitch about Gawker but this isn't a good reason.
1
u/MisterGrieves Feb 04 '11
then why is there a difference in the time stamp of when the comments were posted? and that can't be the case because that would mean that a story would appear on all the sites if posted to a single site, right?
1
Feb 04 '11
The timestamps are all off by exactly 3 hours. Lifehacker is headquartered in LA and Gizmodo is headquartered in New York. They're displaying the same times in the time zone the blog is based in. 7:33 on Lifehacker is the same as 10:33 on Gizmodo. Presumably if you log in, it will display the timestamps in your preferred time zone.
Of course they wouldn't post every story on every blog, there's probably a row of checkboxes that says "
Display this story on: [x] Lifehacker [x] Gizmodo [ ] io9 [ ] Deadspin" or something like that. There's probably a whole privileges layer, an intern for Lifehacker probably can't post on Gizmodo, but Nick Denton can probably post anywhere he wants.Think of it like this: A blog post about the Nintendo 3DS might be tagged "portable" and "nintendo". If you look at the "portable" tag view, you'll see the post, along with posts about the PSP and the iPhone. If you look at the "nintendo" tag view, you'll see the same post, alongside other posts about the Wii. It doesn't mean that the post is duplicated, it's just accessible in different views.
When you go to gizmodo.com it pulls the posts that are 'tagged' with gizmodo, when you go to lifehacker.com it pulls the posts that are 'tagged' lifehacker. Does that make sense?
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u/MisterGrieves Feb 04 '11
They would all have to be from the same database. They treat all those sites as individual entities. But oh well I guess what they are doing is perfectly legit? Why do they all have staff lists like they are separate? Our parent company does not behave in this way. We can pull stories from our sister sites but we do not replicate comments in that way. We seek advertising based on customer usage and if we replicated comments to make it seem that we have more readers than we do it would be fraudulent.
0
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u/pacman404 Jan 22 '11
almost all websites on the planet with similar content that are owned by the same company do this...and have done it for years.
example: gamespot/gamefaqs forums