Reason Magazine's Hit & Run now using idiotic nofollow tag

The loony libertarians at Reason Magazine's Hit & Run are now using the braindead nofollow tag on links in comments.

See this for just some of the reasons why that's an idiotic idea.

Pending clarification, I'm going to put Reason's decision in the "psychological affliction/what else do you expect libertarians to do/cut off nose to spite face" category.

UPDATE: In case you aren't familiar with this issue, here's what it means:

- If you've left comments at their site in the past, and you've left a link in your comments, you've now been retroactively stabbed in the back.

- If you leave a comment at their site in the future, you're being ripped off.

Here's an example of what that means: as it is right now, this post has less than two hundred words. But, search engines ("SE") just love lots of text, they gobble it up and like returning results containing pages that have 300 to 500 (or more) words.

But, I can only write so much. So, that's where you come in. If ten people leave comments here, it increase the value of this page, meaning the SEs will send more people here.

So, in effect, you're creating content for me. If you include an on-topic, non-spammy link in your comment, well I guess that's the price I pay for having you create content for me.

So, Reason has basically just told all those unpaid content creators to go fuck themselves. And, they did it after all those creators created that content for them.

While I might still leave comments there in the future, I strongly advise you to only do it in the rarest of cases. Why spend the time creating something for them if they aren't going to return the favor?

On the plus side, one of the ways that SEs find out what a page is about is by looking at what it links to. Reason is reducing the chance that a SE will be able to find out what their posts are about, which will probably end up hurting them far more than any benefit from using the nofollow tag. When wikipedia started using that tag, they started tanking in the search results. So, hopefully, we'll have that to look forward to.

And, of course, if you link to them, perhaps you should remove that link. Or, just change it to use nofollow.

Bloggage · Sat, 09/10/2005 - 13:31 · · Importance: 1