No. This isn't someone commenting on an inflammatory comment that Calacanis made in order to attract attention. It's someone outing Calacanis for shady business practices, and putting more pressure on Google to end those practices.
It's part of the search engine scammer playbook to stay just close enough to the line for people like us to get exhausted hearing about it.
Calacanis shady business practices have been outed for months, plenty of google employees read HN, there really is no reason for him to still be around in the google index.
Yup, this is the worst part, he is getting away with this even though tens of Google employees, and i'm sure including Matt Cutts, have read these articles. They do nothing about it..
Companies like Google care about and have responded to populist uprisings like this in the past (especially as it relates to search quality). I imagine that's the actual goal here.
Why would they? This generates revenue for Google.
There's no excuse for them not having banning them from day one, like they do every other individual trying to capitalize on the same tactics -- only the sheer capitalization and size that Jason brought to the table allowed him to get away with this at scale.
Shame on Google for having double standards, IMHO.
Google ultimately generates revenue from people using their engine and ad server to find things. If the quality thereof goes down, you will see people flow out of Google. If you say, no, that won't happen, remember people have to flow into Google in the first place... it's not the default search engine for the majority of installs...
Google has made revenue negative banning decisions in the past. They have demonstrated that they recognize that the long-term quality of their index is more important than short term profits.
Every banning is against revenue, yet Mahalo still is operational......... Google's lack of definitive action against Mahalo's outright spam is the clear example here.
I think it's a mistake to think of large corporations as singular entities in these sorts of cases. Given what I know about big-company politics, I am positive that there are people inside Google who support banning Mahalo and others who do not. Political battles like these are not resolved quickly, and an ongoing visible public backlash is the best weapon those who support banning him have.
It's come to the point where I actively avoid SEO-optimized sites on Google. If I see my search terms in the URL ("how-to-become-a-travel-agent") of a result, I'll just skip over it. Even moreso when there is generic, cut-and-paste content in the description. SEO may help you rank, but you won't get any clicks from me until I've run out of options.
Wasn't Mahalo's founding goal to improve search by creating quality pages written by humans, without the spam and low quality content you get with traditional search engines?
The charitable explanation: in the course of growing the business, Mahalo discovered that the tools they had created to support the "quality pages written by humans" were sufficiently powerful that laying off most of the humans and transitioning the rest to a "We pay you with Mahalo Dollars, which are sort of like a real dollar except for the bit about being able to be spent on goods and services" model did not affect the business in the slightest. Accordingly, Mahalo pivoted away from the original vision in the direction that the actual results demonstrated was working.
The uncharitable explanation: "quality pages written by humans" is a bit of PR for Valley consumption (and, ahem, Googleplex consumption) designed to make Mahalo "too high profile to bounce out of the index like a black hat spam site."
There's no need to rely on search engines to find pages full of useful information. I do broad topical research, and I've managed to find pretty decent concentrated sources on most topics online. There are many fine specialist websites, and blogs, done by knowledgeable human beings.
It takes time to find them and organize them (I use a custom database rather than bookmarks). SE's are fine for quick, one-off searches that -aren't important- ... otherwise, human expertise is far preferable, and always will be.
1) Post a quality, well thought out comment on the subject at hand. "Thank you for you important research!" sounds like something a spam bot would post. Also be sure to watch your spelling. That should have been "your" not "you".
2) Never complain about receiving downvotes. That just results in more downvotes for you. Instead look at your comment, think about why people may have downvoted it, and then adjust your commenting pattern to better fit what the rest of us want to see on the site.
A downvote is hardly punishment, it is just a community measure of the worth of a comment. From that point of view it is a learning experience, as you learn what is valuable to other people and what is not at all valuable.
If you can't handle correction, or the opinions of others, then Hacker News isn't for you. If you want to improve, learn more, and become a sharper, more attuned, internet citizen then this is the place to hone your skills.
When you measure something, like height, it's usually a uni-directional growth.
With karma here, it's bi-directional. So a downvote can actually take away your earnings so it's not that great of a measure because a polarizing comment could have +100 and -100 masked underneath a 0.
It is a learning experience. But just because it conditions people towards some behavior doesn't mean it's not also punishment. Punishment is a type of conditioning too, but it's also usually the less ideal method.
OK I'll bite. I didn't vote you down, but I'd guess that you got voted down because you didn't add anything to the conversation. And it sounded a little sarcastic maybe to say "Thank you for your important research." Write something interesting and people will vote you up.
Oh, and you can't vote down until your account reaches a certain points threshold. I think it's 200 right now.
My personal opinion is that the "stop posting Mahalo stories" comments aren't any better than yours, but apparently other people here feel differently. That's just the way it is.
If you feel that it's an important conversation though, then there are several things you can (and should) do rather than just post "Thanks." (1) Vote up the top-level HN post so that more people will read it. (2) Respond to comments complaining about seeing this conversation repeatedly on HN with your analysis of why you feel it's important. Then you're adding something useful.
If you're willing to make a few hundred thousand people have more trouble finding what they're looking for by landing them on your stub pages, just for your personal gain, does that make you the best guy in the world?
You forgot to sign with "peace and love". Although maybe that's because it's been ringing hollow lately... might I suggest that you also add "xoxo" to your signature? Maybe that'll win people over.
If it makes you feel any better, there are currently 23 upvotes on the comment you linked to, even though its score is -3. So there are a lot of people who are ready to give you a hearing, if you want that.
It's true that users here can sometimes behave like a mob. But there are also a lot, possibly even a majority, who can be convinced by cogent arguments regardless of who they come from. Whereas if you give up and get mad, you lose those as well.
That is actually quite typical of you, Jason. You respond to well documented and well written articles that cast you and your actions in a negative light by avoiding any discussion whatsoever that actually addresses those facts, by making more stuff up with zero substantiation, and by insulting and lying about the authors of said posts... but anyone who disagrees with you is a troll.
You are a fucking piece of work Jason. Seriously.
@Devilboy - technically speaking it was the noindex tags that disappeared (and which he refuses to address). There was never a nofollow meta tag on the pages.
For someone who claims they value debate and conversation you seem to expose the opposite in your posts here..
What are you afraid of sir?
Some honest debate? Get real sir
Your non logic in this area seems to turn people off who were fans of your work in other areas..
Some of us are extremely disappointed in your responses coming from someone, in your own self appointment , who claim to support relevant results from search engine searches.
Every post like this just fuels the fire and creates more drama around the theme and in the end will benefit the spammer.
There is no such thing as 'bad publicity'.