Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Speaking as a person who's done as much, and definitely is no fan of Cliqz:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718650
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21724844
They're really responsive, and they're very proactive about these things.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/astroturfing
Brigading in the most famous English dictionary (see definition 2):
Shilling does have a NorthAmerican connotation: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/178128?rskey=UvAWn2&result=4#...
I work at Cliqz in the engineering team and have been involved with this advent project. I'd like to provide some background.
For a while, we have been thinking internally about having a tech blog for Cliqz engineering teams. It is fairly common for tech companies to have a separate blog for technical content, separated from the main website. We picked a name: 0x65.dev (0x65 being the hexadecimal representation of 101, the idea was that we would write about the tech at Cliqz in an accessible way).
To make sure we'd commit to writing on this new blog, we thought of organizing an "advent" for Christmas, where we would publish one article per day digging on one of the aspects of what we do: search, privacy, browsers. When creating the list of topics, we did not optimize for Hacker News (or any other community for that matter, we also post and twitter and Reddit equally), as this was suggested by some other comment. We really wanted to create a coherent schedule to explain why and how we do things, to have a logical progression in the topics (looking at the posts from first to last, it should hopefully make some kind of sense!). We started on day one with "Why the world needs more search engines", to motivate our efforts in this area, and started detailing on following days the way we built our engine from scratch.
One thing we wanted especially, was for engineers to write about the projects they work on, to get their perspective, without any filter. So far, many different people have contributed. If some of the technologies or keywords we use seem "trendy", it's because we are ourselves hyped about those, and we use them internally to build our products.
Before the event we never anticipated this would resonate so much with the HN community, and while very pleasant, it was not the goal. We were of course extremely enthusiastic when we saw the great feedback from the community. If anything, this proves that the topics which we are passionate about are also of interest for a part of the HN community (many of us at Cliqz read HN every day; in fact we all used our personal accounts to submit, comment or discuss about the posts). It also shows that what we do is not disconnected from reality, and that there is real interest around the topics of search, independence, privacy; a good validation for us!
While I understand the need for base training data to launch a competitor to a search engine like Google, I won't deny this gave the name an immediate bad taste in my mouth.
It's not unusual for a company blog to have a different name. A simple example is Signal v. Noise [1] which is the Basecamp folks. I would not want to seem them penalized for doing what others have done for a long time which has been seen as fine.
Knowing who Cliqz is a bit about being an insider for certain technology circles. Many people do not know and many people do not care. Some folks having issues with the company should not stop interesting content from being upvoted. Some members here have issues with Google, Microsoft, and other companies. That never stops their content from being listed.
I am not a Cliqz user. I am curious of the motivations of people who use Chrome (put out by an advertising company) while having issues with Cliqz (being put out by a media company).
Increasingly buried underneath all the big talk about privacy and the blog spam, is the fact that Cliqz also is an advertising company: https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/press-release-cliqz-introduces...
They've literally resurrected the ad-riddled browser toolbar: https://myoffrz.com/en/
My bet is spinning off their own browser has nothing to do with anything but fear the browser vendors, Firefox and Chrome alike, will start blocking their real money maker.
This is not even a new strategy. Other companies have tried similar tricks over the years too, though most of them went with Chromium forks instead for their spy/adware laden wares.
Frankly, it's disappointing to see this even on here, but I don't blame anyone for it; they are really working hard to sugar up the pitch here.
If posts from Google and Chrome are OK for hacker news then why not from others with similar business models?
I'm not attempting to say that Cliqz has an OK model. I'm suggesting self examination and consistency.
I was thinking about trying their browser.
That press release is insane. Sharing "approximate location"?
Of special note (and I bow to them) is how they've used such a domain name to spam their services. If they had used "cliqz.com" or whatever their actual domain is, fewer people would click, but when I see this I'm inclined to think this is some personal blog of a fellow software developer, and not blogspam of a shady ads company.