
The Truth About Digg’s DiggBar - muimui
http://www.3dogmedia.com/truth-about-diggs-diggbar/
======
GeneralMaximus
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.

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

Screw digg.

~~~
nuggien
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?

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

~~~
mikeyur
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.

------
mikeyur
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>

------
ojbyrne
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."

------
zacharypinter
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.

------
snprbob86
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.

------
rms
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.

~~~
jonknee
Or just use 301 redirects...

~~~
thorax
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.

------
jrockway
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
jamiequint
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.)

~~~
jrockway
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.)

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

~~~
jrockway
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?

~~~
Hexstream
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.

~~~
jrockway
_Best of both worlds._

You should really be reading Reddit, not HN.

