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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

What is it? The site makes no effort to explain what it is or did.

For reasons I've never been able to understand many sites that have a separate subdomain for news and blogging about the site either do not have any kind of link on the blogging site back to the main site, or do but fail to make it obvious.

In this case the main site is https://www.soup.io/ and the submitted story is to their news/blog site at kitchen.soup.io. Go to the main site and it is clear there what they do.

There is actually a link to that at kitchen.soup.io, but it is easy to miss. It's the small red circled "soup" in the very upper right.

This always bugs on doc sites as well (I think readthedocs based stuff is guilty of this a lot) - no link back to the 'main' site. Forum software often does this too (no link to main site in the forum directory).

I find it really annoying...

I've heard dogma from seo wizards that running the blog on a subdomain yields either negative or positive seo outcome, depending on the phase of the moon.

Also, it could just be the result of some bad ops/sysadmin decisions.

It was a microblogging platform; it had a chance to become a worthy competitor to tumblr from Europe but sadly, instead of gaining funding, it got spambots. Over the last 10 years a devoted community managed to grow around the site - it's hard to say how large in numbers but now it seems it wasn't enough to keep service running.

Spammers really do ruin everything. The guy who acquired delicious says as soon as he turned it back on after several years of read-only mode it immediately started getting hammered by spambots again. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247

There were periods on soup when main activity stream named here everyone was filled with nothing but some spambot posts; most likely these were green-lighted by staff itself up until few last months when they tried to introduce premium accounts, while basic ones were supposed to come with ads (disguised as native posts) and tracking. Majority of users were angered when a big banners shaming them for using adblocking and tracking extensions were introduced.

what’s so hard about keeping spambots out? not all sites seems to suffer from spambots after all.

Site was always pretty much left alone beside serious issues like hardware failure that wiped most of the content from 2016; my problem with being unable to load and post within a particular group was never resolved (I was a member and confirmed to never being on blacklist; obviously the group always loaded within private mode without issues).

The simplicity of account registration, the possibility of creating sub-profiles within main one (similar to tumblr) were probably the sources of spambot thriving on soup. While we had post report and flagging features, only ignoring was the best way of getting rid of all that trash.

Those are all GET requests, how can you attribute that to spammers? Seems like crawlers, aggregators etc are more likely.

Did they charge money to use it?

Aren't spambots, and by extension spam, an indicator of market interest in advertising to the userbase.

Tuning up the opportunity cost of spamming while making semi-targeted advertising more accessible and less obtrusive could tap into that market.

Spambots just post pages full of plagiarised content peppered with links, a hangover from SEO days when the belief was that a Google paid attention to word count of pages linking to your content.

What’s the point of their explaining what it did when they are closing down?

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