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A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

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Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#111

Post by oneplusone »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #41

1. We're working with the folks impacted to place them at whatever company they would like to join. I'm personally reaching out to folks who might want these fine people. They will all wind up on their feet and be great additions to the vibrant startup scene in Los Angeles. 2. Mahalo is doing amazing videos with experts, but our (text) articles were created by passionate writers who are not necessarily experts. Googl…

I took a look at that page you linked as an example of quality content, and I just don't see it. The video was incredible superficial and a better medium would have been screenshots that identified all the UI controls and their function since that is all the video did.

Khan Academy has quality content which are dense with information. Your video wasted four minutes and told me nothing I couldn't find out by playing around with Photoshop.

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#112

Post by haploid »

Am I the only one who doesn't understand this at all?

As far as I can tell, Mahalo.com is a video site. Why on earth would google going after content farms affect a video site in any way?

To me, this headline makes about as much sense as "Microsoft changes Windows 7 pricing, pork belly futures skyrocket." Am I missing something?

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#113

Post by endtime »

ehsanul wrote: post #91
endtime wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why the hell is this getting so many upvotes? Concision is valuable.

You made me look this up. *Is it "concision" or "conciseness" - http://raymondpward.typepad.com/rainman2/2005/11/is_it_conci...

I prefer the relative concision of "concision" (9 chars vs. 11).

Eh, that's my cute answer. I really just think "conciseness" sounds awkward.

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#115

Post by Splines »

rimantas wrote: post #72
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #41

1. We're working with the folks impacted to place them at whatever company they would like to join. I'm personally reaching out to folks who might want these fine people. They will all wind up on their feet and be great additions to the vibrant startup scene in Los Angeles. 2. Mahalo is doing amazing videos with experts, but our (text) articles were created by passionate writers who are not necessarily experts. Googl…

> Video is the future, and we're going to be the largest > creator of educational videos this year. Oh no. I cannot wait for the video be the past. It may be the best way to teach some things (mainly involving physical activities or physical manipulation of some sort), but for programming topics it most often just waste of time and bandwidth. Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code…

You're right - the only times I've used video tutorials is when performing actions in space (video game guides for hidden objects, where pictures aren't enough, and home repair guides where showing how something works in real-time is paramount).

Trying to teach somebody something like programming over video is taking the lazy way out. In my university days some large first-year classes were delivered by video - I never took any, but I'd wager that student transcripts of the talks would have been worth real money.

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#116

Post by aaronwall »

moultano wrote: post #75
sofakeekafos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's being lionized on HN for making money, while he's polluting the written heritage of the human race. Not a chance I will take it elsewhere. He needs to be called out, to his face, as does anybody who thinks he deserves HN's respect.

Mostly I see people expressing sympathy for a guy who had a really bad day (and a newsworthy one.) And if you think mahalo is polluting the written history of the human race, then boy do I ever have some spam to show you. Mahalo may not be the best, but it certainly isn't the worst.

How many of those sites had the sustained level of traffic that Mahalo had for years?

Also note that Mahalo enjoyed that level of traffic based on auto-generating pages through shagging third party content (without requesting permission and without any way to opt out of getting your content scraped, since they were pulling in the scrapes from Google's search API & you couldn't block Mahalo doing that without blocking GoogleBot).

In the past when Matt Cutts wrote of such MFA scraper sites he described them as "shoot on sight" http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-webmasterradiofm/#commen...

"In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find."

And yet you have sympathy for Jason? Shows how powerful his public relations skills are! :D

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#117

Post by tertius »

clojurerocks wrote: post #95
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I really believe in the mission to build a site that helps people learn anything... and I believed in human-powered search before that (and still do to be honest). I've got the education bug, and I want to take the promise we all see in things like Lynda.com and Kahn Academy and scale it into a brand as big as Google or Wikipedia. LAUNCH, Angel investing and This Week in Startups are all fun, but they are not a…

Jason, you might consider doing a non profit with a more narrow focused education project rather then a for profit catch all product. Im personally involved with 2 projects that are being directed at kids and teens and are using game mechanics to try to get them excited about learning. There is a DESPARATE need within this market for passionate knowledgeable and skilled people who are willing to invest their time ene…

I think he's busy.

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#118

Post by georgemcbay »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #67
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I really believe in the mission to build a site that helps people learn anything... and I believed in human-powered search before that (and still do to be honest). I've got the education bug, and I want to take the promise we all see in things like Lynda.com and Kahn Academy and scale it into a brand as big as Google or Wikipedia. LAUNCH, Angel investing and This Week in Startups are all fun, but they are not a…

For someone so obsessed with education sites...... s/Kahn/Khan from both your posts.

I wasn't going to say anything... but I find the straight-up 4th grade grammatical issues (eg. "Google want's") to be far more annoying than the proper name misspellings.

Re: A Week After Google Changes Algo, Mahalo Fires 10% of Staff

#120

Post by pier0 »

aaronwall wrote: post #116
moultano wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly I see people expressing sympathy for a guy who had a really bad day (and a newsworthy one.) And if you think mahalo is polluting the written history of the human race, then boy do I ever have some spam to show you. Mahalo may not be the best, but it certainly isn't the worst.

How many of those sites had the sustained level of traffic that Mahalo had for years? Also note that Mahalo enjoyed that level of traffic based on auto-generating pages through shagging third party content (without requesting permission and without any way to opt out of getting your content scraped, since they were pulling in the scrapes from Google's search API & you couldn't block Mahalo doing that without blocking…

I honestly couldn't care less what happened to Mahalo and I pretty much agreed with all your points when you first revealed their ways of creating tens of thousands of useless pages, but nevertheless I also have simpathy for Jason.

I think not many people on HN realize (or probably are willing to admit) that This Week In Startups is the most interesting resource to learn from real experiences of fellow entrepreneurs, developers, etc. Mixergy is another interesting one, but the format of TWIST provides its viewers lots of insights and info that you simply can't get anywhere else on the web.

So not all Jason does is evil.

Just my two cents.

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