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Show HN: Like The Onion, But Real
- slifty 14y agoAs a quick backstory: This is a mashup between /r/nottheonion, google image search, and The Onion's CSS. Pretty crazy what a little styling can do to the way your brain interprets information!
- chewxy 14y agoI was going to suggest /r/nottheonion but it seems OP is already using it. Not bad though, I kinda like it. EDIT: oops, you're OP. Ever thought of suggesting this CSS to reddit?
- sp332 14y agoUm, are you seriously hotlinking to resources hosted by theonion.com? That is a terrible, terrible idea. <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.theonion.com/static/CACHE/css/2903347c3113.css" type="text/css" media="all">
- slifty 14y agoCan't argue with ya' there.
- marssaxman 14y agoWhy is it a terrible idea?
- slifty 14y agoFor the record this was an oversight in the rush to get this out ASAP -- I'm correcting it now (thanks for calling it out!)
- benwerd 14y agoAh, you should probably think about recreating the Onion's look and feel, rather than grabbing their resources and literally copying it.
- Cryode 14y agoI'd hope you aren't correcting it by saving your own local copy of _their_ stylesheet...
- slifty 14y agoBaby steps people baby steps!
- unclebucknasty 14y agoI hear you and I applaud just about anybody who builds just about anything. But, it should never be a step (baby or otherwise) to completely take someone else's work. It's one thing to take cues from them. It's another thing to literally take their code without permission, even if it is "only CSS". That is really, really poor form from the start. If you don't think so, then try asking The Onion if they mind. Then you can have a clear conscience. But, if you are unwilling to even ask, well, then you really don't have to. You already know it's not cool. BTW, good luck with it.
- slifty 14y agoDon't worry -- we're in their circles ;) But regardless! As I mention in another place on this thread: The point of this project is the blunt comparison to The Onion -- the copying of the name, look, and feel of a well known and well recognized satirical publication is actually a vital part of the statement about our world and the media.
- pinoceros 14y agoThis adds another DNS lookup, which will slow down your page load times. Also, it is essentially leaching the bandwidth from theonion.com. However, if your users are already readers of theonion.com, the static files may be cached.
- rcfox 14y agoRemember that copyright applies to CSS too.
- slifty 14y agoAbsolutely! We have some contacts at the organization and are hoping they will lean towards finding this amusing rather than finding this offensive (although what a story that would be ;) ) || if they don't like it they will let us know!
- jere 14y agoWhen brainstorming website ideas lately, I find myself often thinking "well shit, that could just as well be a subreddit." Probably not a very productive attitude.
- philsalesses 14y agoSo this is this like the onion, only true? Manually curated by you or do you have some magic code to do it?
- slifty 14y agoYep! real headlines -- curation is done by redditors (why re-invent something that already kicks ass)
- jaredsohn 14y agoYou should fix the top links (Video, Politics, Sports, Business, Science, Tech, Entertainment, and Breaking) so that they don't take you to the real Onion.
- slifty 14y agoTaking suggestions on places to link to! We've swapped out a few of them, but were waiting for inspiration to strike for the others.
- benatkin 14y agoYour site is bad and you should feel bad. ;)
- duggieawesome 14y agoThe Science/Tech header tab is great.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jaysonelliot 14y agoThis seems childish and a little bit reactionary. Oh, I see, the content is chosen by Reddit. That makes sense.
- mehrzad 14y agoInsulting the Reddit community on HN? We can finally do it without being downvoted? That's somewhat pleasing.
- meritt 14y agoPleasing? So you prefer for the HN community to be outwardly elitist and can look down at other online communities? Or are you just saying being able to voice ones opinion without a torrent of downvotes is a step in the right direction?
- mehrzad 14y agoThe latter. I actually go on reddit, though I dislike much of it. Ironically, now I've been downvoted like crazy, but I did say something cruel.
- prawn 14y agoHow is it childish and reactionary? They're headlines you can imagine seeing on The Onion, but are legit; it's harmless and a touch amusing. It's just riffing off The Onion's style of presenting content. I post on HN but don't have an account on Reddit, but I think pigeon-holing an entire community is more likely to be considered childish and reactionary. This isn't "our site vs your site" and some sort of tribal war. What about this site or its content has irritated you? (Main parts of Reddit I do read are AskScience and AskHistorians and they are, for the most part, excellent. Anything but juvenile.)
- Tloewald 14y agoLooks like trademark infringement to me. Come up with your own identity.
- mikk0j 14y agoThis is such troll-fodder. I'm not even a militant atheist, and still just looking at the front page pisses me off. That and the design, which jars my brain and hurts my eyes.
- huhsamovar 14y agoIt's not a high school essay. Calm yo teat.
- mmahemoff 14y agoA visual nottheonion is a great idea. I suggest changing the name to something that's not going to violate their trademark. Also, a quick way to avoid hot-linking the images is to use a service like Cloudinary, it will proxy them for you with little code change. There's also http://www.ruddl.com/ http://www.ruddl.com/ as a Pinterest-Reddit mashup, but they only have a few subreddits.
- slifty 14y agoThanks for the feedback, and great tip on the images!
- TheShadowFog 14y agoPretty bad.
- snoonan 14y agoI'm not ok with this. Watch the trademark. I'm not even talking about litigation -- just not ok with people willing to trade on another company's name.
- UnFleshedOne 14y agoDoesn't this count as parody and thus fair use? Or does parody of parody completes the circle and the site is not a parody anymore?
- rajivm 14y agoHe's not making a parody of the trademark. He's making a parody of their site, and representing it with their trademark. As a random visitor of the site, I could easily mistake this as the 'real onion'. And it's also questionable whether this is a parody of 'The Onion'. It seems to be a parody of world news, branded with The Onion.
- stevenleeg 14y agoYou may want to rid of those sharing links: http://i.imgur.com/3EYKseY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3EYKseY.jpg Generally those are more harm than they're worth, as nobody uses them and they annoy the user (especially since they're in the way of what I'm actually trying to read).
- slifty 14y agoNoted, and removed in the next push.
- cpdean 14y agoCool. It's like http://www.fark.com/ http://www.fark.com/ but with a more attractive layout.
- networked 14y agoI'm not sure the I'd go with the name "The On1on". It seems too close to trademark infringement. An alternative off the top of my head is "The Un-ion" (as in "un-" + "Onion") but it's hard to distinguish from "union" (as in "trade union"). "The Garlic", anyone? Edit: I'd better let you judge what sounds nice. Edit 2: Hmm. Let's try my Rebrand-O-Matic: On1on — On-1-on — 1-on-1 — Ioni — iOni. You can illustrate it with a sleek iPhone-like icon of an oni (a Japanese demon) holding an onion. http://ioni.io http://ioni.io is available for $50, which may or may not be too much for this project. More seriously, though, http://allium.org http://allium.org is available for $10.69 from NameCheap. "Allium" is the Latin name of the genus to which onion and garlic belong.
- prawn 14y agoJust go with The Garlic if available. Needs to be more obviously than Allium, and should be a .com to mimic The Onion.
- throwaway420 14y agoThis is a reasonably decent idea. But copying the name and look and feel of an existing site in so casual a manner seems very lazy and is off-putting.
- slifty 14y agoThe point of this project is the blunt comparison to The Onion -- it is using reality to create a parody of a parody of reality. In other words, the copying of the name, look, and feel of a well known and well recognized satirical publication is actually a vital part of the statement about our world and the media.
- Vivtek 14y agoI think it's mindblowingly effective. The eye just really wants to interpret those headlines as funny... and manages to fail, but just barely.
- wilfra 14y agoHopefully theonion appreciates the homage, this is fairly textbook trademark infringement and they can take this domain away.
- scott_s 14y agoI have a feeling The Onion staff appreciates satire.
- jdolitsky 14y agohaha yes
- hansy 14y agoHmm I was confused when I saw actual articles from The Onion on there, but that's because the top navigation links point to pages on The Onion. Aside from that minor confusion, the site's purpose is absolutely hilarious and I applaud the tongue-in-cheek approach.
- rckrd 14y agoWhy do the links take me to the actual onion site? Let's say I visit your site. Then I am viewing real news that looks fake (i.e. just poor and sensationalist journalism). But once I click an article at the top, I'm taken to the real onion site - with fake news that looks real. With the sites looking the same, I might not notice I've changed to the real onion... Very confusing. Also, as said before, hotlinking to another site's resources is not a good idea. At all. Execution aside, I don't like the idea. The Onion provides well written fake news. The content that you're linking to is a poor excuse for news; its the low-hanging fruit of the internet. I couldn't see myself browsing this stuff. In fact, the reason I browse HN is to not have to deal with content like this.
- a_p 14y agoThe Video, Politics, Sports, Business and Entertainment links point to theonion.com. I suggest that you change this. An Onion dev already posted that he had considered screwing with your site when it was using the Onion's CSS. If they did want to screw with your site (or its visitors) it would be easy for them to redirect anyone that clicked one of those links (giving them a referer from your site) to someplace unexpected.
- slifty 14y agoBut... that would be amazing...
- a_p 14y agoThe threat of changing their CSS to mess with your site reminded me of something a Web 1.0 trolling site did to people who linked to images on their site, causing an unnecessary load on their server. The images that were linked to were usually put in (a third party's) forum signatures. So the site owners would replace the original image with a copy that had a different file name, and change the image at the original uri to something obscene. This would usually lead to the bandwidth leech being banned from his forum for linking to obscene images.
- tlogan 14y agoExcellent! This reminds me of "Daily Rotten News".
- greenyoda 14y agoThis site reminds me of "News of the Weird": http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html