This will really blow your mind, then:

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/

Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.

This actually isn't all that unusual, and there's nothing sinister about it. Amazon does the same thing; try changing

  http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/

to

  http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash/dp/B000FC11A6/

People like seeing friendly, human-readable URLs. But it's bad practice to depend on them--if the title changes for some reason, you can break old links. That's why these URIs include both a human-readable description (which is ignored) and the unique ID of the resource, which is what's really used to render the relevant page.

It's not just the meaningless stubs that I found fishy. It was the same article, posted twice on the same day to two different URL's, by the same person - the author of the article.

It's called A/B testing.

That is not A/B testing, that is circumventing the duplicate submission filter.

Or, it's A/B testing.

The Atlantic is in the content business, and in case you hadn't heard, that space is having its lunch eaten. It's part of the job to produce content and figure out how to have it read. That involves playing around with things.

I don't really find it reprehensible that people write and then promote their own content, whether that's music, movies or the written word. What else should be done? Establish centralized "distribution" centres? Wait a minute...

Promoting your articles on Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other channels expressly designed for that kind of purpose is fine.

Submitting your own articles once to a place like HN or reddit is pretty shady in the first place; since that's not the intent of these sites. The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created.

Submitting your own article twice is just a dick move.

>"Submitting your own articles once to a place like HN or reddit is pretty shady in the first place"

I just disagree. These sites operate pretty well as martkets. If your stuff sucks, I likely won't stumble on it.

>"since that's not the intent of these sites"

Ironic, since we have a "Show HN" topic here, the sole purpose of which is to do what you're saying shouldn't be done.

>"The intent of these sites is sharing stuff you found, not stuff you created."

I want to read good content; I don't care who submits it. I'd rather risk people submitting their own crap sometimes than never getting a chance to read something good that nobody "found".

Spamming is one thing, and obnoxious. But I find it a tad hypocritical to accept A/B testing colours on a button to squeeze another buck from someone, but reject someone A/B testing content to find out what combination of words in the title creates the most page views. It's the same business.

> Spamming is one thing, and obnoxious. But I find it a tad hypocritical to accept A/B testing colours on a button to squeeze another buck from someone, but reject someone A/B testing content to find out what combination of words in the title creates the most page views. It's the same business.

Oh come on. It's clearly not the changing of the URL in and of itself that I was objecting to. It's the doing it for the express purpose of submitting it twice to a site which has a filter set up in order to prevent that behavior.

I can't believe you didn't understand that from the get go, so I can only conclude that you are being deliberately obtuse which is annoying.

I don't think there's anything surprising about it. Lots of sites (including stackoverflow) make the slug useless so they (or users) can change the title whenever they want.

Actually I think the feature is primarily for SEO purposes, since the alternative is to have the article ID only.

SEO-friendly URL's are fine, but meaningless dynamic slugs are a really Bad Idea.

Even if you remember to implement a canonical tag pointing to the "real" page, you risk people linking to these dummy pages (producing a minor loss of link value according to Cutts) or weird mangled versions coming into existence (think escaped referrer logs that make their way public and crawlers find, etc), and then bots have to take the time to request incorrect URL's and find out they're junk. Better to return a 404 or 301 to the correct page (if you know what it should be).

See, this is actually the kind of sh*t that SEO is about: usability for bots.

Yes exactly.

If you're going to have slug-type Urls, they should at least be unique, and if they do change, the old version should at least show a canonical link and/or 301 to the new one.

Usually this means keeping a record of every variation the Url has ever been for a piece of unique content.

A feature like that is a tremendous boon to karma whores. The Atlantic probably isn't the site to accomplish this, but such a feature could be used to effectively "outsource" your site's spamming to karma whoring cabals.

The thing I don't understand is why people are actually seeking karma by these means. Sonner or later they have to get cought, no? And once you are, all that precious karma will just evaporate, no?

I can understand spammers, kind of and even trolls in their own logic. But karma whores, in my understanding WANT to belong. So such a move would be quite, well, stupid.

That's vicious! But they really thought they would get away with it on site called HACKER news???

It's funny because if you look at the HN poster's submissions, @mattobrian, his submit history is all Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, Atlantic, etc., until 7 hours ago for the last 2 months when, boom, he posts a link to Slate. Feeling a change in the wind direction?

Is he only posting links to his own articles at his employer? He should, really, make that a bit clearer in his profile.

I think I'd be a bit more worried if someone posted a variety of link-baity slugs to the same story.