

Show HN: Like The Onion, But Real - slifty
http://theon1on.com

======
networked
I'm not sure the I'd go with the name "The On1on". It seems too close to
trademark infringement. An alternative off the top of my head is "The Un-ion"
(as in "un-" + "Onion") but it's hard to distinguish from "union" (as in
"trade union"). "The Garlic", anyone?

Edit: I'd better let you judge what sounds nice.

Edit 2: Hmm. Let's try my Rebrand-O-Matic:

On1on — On-1-on — 1-on-1 — Ioni — iOni.

You can illustrate it with a sleek iPhone-like icon of an oni (a Japanese
demon) holding an onion.

<http://ioni.io> is available for $50, which may or may not be too much for
this project.

More seriously, though, <http://allium.org> is available for $10.69 from
NameCheap. "Allium" is the Latin name of the genus to which onion and garlic
belong.

~~~
prawn
Just go with The Garlic if available. Needs to be more obviously than Allium,
and should be a .com to mimic The Onion.

------
slifty
As a quick backstory: This is a mashup between /r/nottheonion, google image
search, and The Onion's CSS. Pretty crazy what a little styling can do to the
way your brain interprets information!

~~~
sp332
Um, are you seriously hotlinking to resources hosted by theonion.com? That is
a terrible, terrible idea.

    
    
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.theonion.com/static/CACHE/css/2903347c3113.css" type="text/css" media="all">

~~~
marssaxman
Why is it a terrible idea?

~~~
slifty
For the record this was an oversight in the rush to get this out ASAP -- I'm
correcting it now (thanks for calling it out!)

~~~
slifty
Baby steps people baby steps!

~~~
slifty
Don't worry -- we're in their circles ;)

But regardless! As I mention in another place on this thread: The point of
this project is the blunt comparison to The Onion -- the copying of the name,
look, and feel of a well known and well recognized satirical publication is
actually a vital part of the statement about our world and the media.

~~~
slifty
Oh snap!

Sorry I missed the boat on letting you have fun with the CSS (I'd be glad to
point it back if you would enjoy it!) But yes, this was built in a few hours
and most of that time was spent playing with caching and deployment. Not so
much "lazy" as "rushed." (considering this is for the lulz, I'm OK with it
being called rushed.)

So yes, to be clear, this was a "lets have quick fun and make a satirical
mashup" not a "lets spend a week designing a web site that looks like The
Onion." Not sure where scum comes into play given that fact, but I'm sorry if
the project pissed anyone off over there. In my experience different people
react to détournement in different ways when they are the ones being shifted
around.

As for the circles, you're right about not us being in touch with the dev
teams over there.

Regarding fonts, noted; I'll wait and see if there is a formal response from
The Onion on these fronts but you clearly know the first-hand vibe -- if
that's upsetting people I can remove them.

As for the other media we're aware of that and will be making a move soon,
THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY FINGERS ON A HAND!

~~~
csinchok
I get that this was rushed, etc. But it's not like you did a soft launch to
test this thing out, or that you're on some kind of deadline here. You built
the site lazily and rudely (in my opinion), and then immediately began
promotion of it.

Also, you state that you only spent a few hours, and that "most of that time
was spent playing with caching and deployment". If you were spending time
making sure that the site was cached and performant, it seems less like the
hotlinking was an oversight, and more like it was something you just didn't
care about.

If you would have taken another few hours, made sure that your ducks were in a
row, and THEN began promoting it, you'd be in much better shape right now, and
I wouldn't be commenting here.

As for the circles, if you don't know anyone on the dev team, why are you
repeatedly claiming to have a tacit OK from us?

As to the fonts, I want to be clear: your current use of the fonts is
infringement. We have paid to license those fonts for use on our site. You
have not done this, and so you're now infringing--not against us, but against
the owners of those fonts. We're not going to come after you, I'd bet that
someone will (eventually).

To summarize my position again: I'm not at all a fan of how you went about
doing this, but it's honestly not a huge deal—just a bit rude.

~~~
slifty
Well it sounds like at this point an apology is the best I can offer, as what
is done is done -- Sorry! If you or anyone on your team is ever in Boston I'll
gladly buy you a beer!

~~~
deelowe
You might want to at least fix the font thing. Sounds like you could get in a
lot of trouble.

~~~
slifty
I'll be looking into it -- if it is copyright infringement I believe this is
fair use (parody, non-profit, academic, etc.). If it isn't fair use than this
is actually a really interesting part of copyright law (e.g. using a premium
font will make it more difficult for others to perform satire on your work).

~~~
deelowe
I'm not a lawyer but I think it only would be parody if you were parodying the
font itself. As the onion guys said, they had to license it.

~~~
slifty
It is totally possible! Anyway, fonts have been removed in the name of being
on the safe side.

------
benatkin
Your site is bad and you should feel bad. ;)

------
rckrd
Why do the links take me to the actual onion site? Let's say I visit your
site. Then I am viewing real news that looks fake (i.e. just poor and
sensationalist journalism). But once I click an article at the top, I'm taken
to the real onion site - with fake news that looks real. With the sites
looking the same, I might not notice I've changed to the real onion...

Very confusing.

Also, as said before, hotlinking to another site's resources is not a good
idea. At all.

Execution aside, I don't like the idea. The Onion provides well written fake
news. The content that you're linking to is a poor excuse for news; its the
low-hanging fruit of the internet. I couldn't see myself browsing this stuff.
In fact, the reason I browse HN is to not have to deal with content like this.

------
snoonan
I'm not ok with this. Watch the trademark. I'm not even talking about
litigation -- just not ok with people willing to trade on another company's
name.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Doesn't this count as parody and thus fair use? Or does parody of parody
completes the circle and the site is not a parody anymore?

~~~
rajivm
He's not making a parody of the trademark. He's making a parody of their site,
and representing it with their trademark. As a random visitor of the site, I
could easily mistake this as the 'real onion'.

And it's also questionable whether this is a parody of 'The Onion'. It seems
to be a parody of world news, branded with The Onion.

------
mikk0j
This is such troll-fodder. I'm not even a militant atheist, and still just
looking at the front page pisses me off. That and the design, which jars my
brain and hurts my eyes.

~~~
huhsamovar
It's not a high school essay. Calm yo teat.

------
a_p
The Video, Politics, Sports, Business and Entertainment links point to
theonion.com. I suggest that you change this. An Onion dev already posted that
he had considered screwing with your site when it was using the Onion's CSS.
If they did want to screw with your site (or its visitors) it would be easy
for them to redirect anyone that clicked one of those links (giving them a
referer from your site) to someplace unexpected.

~~~
slifty
But... that would be amazing...

~~~
a_p
The threat of changing their CSS to mess with your site reminded me of
something a Web 1.0 trolling site did to people who linked to images on their
site, causing an unnecessary load on their server. The images that were linked
to were usually put in (a third party's) forum signatures. So the site owners
would replace the original image with a copy that had a different file name,
and change the image at the original uri to something obscene. This would
usually lead to the bandwidth leech being banned from his forum for linking to
obscene images.

------
mmahemoff
A visual nottheonion is a great idea. I suggest changing the name to something
that's not going to violate their trademark.

Also, a quick way to avoid hot-linking the images is to use a service like
Cloudinary, it will proxy them for you with little code change.

There's also <http://www.ruddl.com/> as a Pinterest-Reddit mashup, but they
only have a few subreddits.

~~~
slifty
Thanks for the feedback, and great tip on the images!

------
jaredsohn
You should fix the top links (Video, Politics, Sports, Business, Science,
Tech, Entertainment, and Breaking) so that they don't take you to the real
Onion.

~~~
slifty
Taking suggestions on places to link to! We've swapped out a few of them, but
were waiting for inspiration to strike for the others.

~~~
rajivm
Having a site that 50% links to the real onion, and otherwise is a real site
branded like the Onion makes this very confusing for the user. It could be
easily mistaken as the real Onion rather than being obviously a joke.

~~~
slifty
Yep -- fixed ;)

------
stevenleeg
You may want to rid of those sharing links:

<http://i.imgur.com/3EYKseY.jpg>

Generally those are more harm than they're worth, as nobody uses them and they
annoy the user (especially since they're in the way of what I'm actually
trying to read).

~~~
slifty
Noted, and removed in the next push.

------
jaysonelliot
This seems childish and a little bit reactionary. Oh, I see, the content is
chosen by Reddit. That makes sense.

~~~
prawn
How is it childish and reactionary? They're headlines you can imagine seeing
on The Onion, but are legit; it's harmless and a touch amusing. It's just
riffing off The Onion's style of presenting content.

I post on HN but don't have an account on Reddit, but I think pigeon-holing an
entire community is more likely to be considered childish and reactionary.
This isn't "our site vs your site" and some sort of tribal war. What about
this site or its content has irritated you?

(Main parts of Reddit I do read are AskScience and AskHistorians and they are,
for the most part, excellent. Anything but juvenile.)

~~~
Tloewald
Looks like trademark infringement to me. Come up with your own identity.

~~~
prawn
Is that "reactionary" though?

Maybe a bit unprofessional. They could easily rework this to host their own
CSS/images, come up with a better name (The Garlic?) and tweak the appearance
a bit.

Hardly worth the slight on another community. I expect better on HN.

~~~
Tloewald
What does reactionary have to do with picking a typo url and a very similar
logo? If this were bankofamer1ca.com it would be assued to be phishing.

~~~
prawn
The original criticism was that it was childish and reactionary. Likening this
to phishing is quite the stretch.

------
philsalesses
So this is this like the onion, only true? Manually curated by you or do you
have some magic code to do it?

~~~
slifty
Yep! real headlines -- curation is done by redditors (why re-invent something
that already kicks ass)

------
duggieawesome
The Science/Tech header tab is great.

------
hansy
Hmm I was confused when I saw actual articles from The Onion on there, but
that's because the top navigation links point to pages on The Onion.

Aside from that minor confusion, the site's purpose is absolutely hilarious
and I applaud the tongue-in-cheek approach.

------
greenyoda
This site reminds me of "News of the Weird":

<http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html>

------
throwaway420
This is a reasonably decent idea.

But copying the name and look and feel of an existing site in so casual a
manner seems very lazy and is off-putting.

~~~
slifty
The point of this project is the blunt comparison to The Onion -- it is using
reality to create a parody of a parody of reality. In other words, the copying
of the name, look, and feel of a well known and well recognized satirical
publication is actually a vital part of the statement about our world and the
media.

~~~
Vivtek
I think it's mindblowingly effective. The eye just _really wants_ to interpret
those headlines as funny... and manages to fail, but just barely.

------
cpdean
Cool. It's like <http://www.fark.com/> but with a more attractive layout.

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tlogan
Excellent! This reminds me of "Daily Rotten News".

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jdolitsky
haha yes

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wilfra
Hopefully theonion appreciates the homage, this is fairly textbook trademark
infringement and they can take this domain away.

~~~
scott_s
I have a feeling The Onion staff appreciates satire.

