[rasvj]

I urge the mods to take a look at how often the "0x65.dev" domain, which is just Cliqz, ends up on the front page.

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.

[kick]

If you have concerns with Hacker News moderation, please send them a message at [e-mail]. They'll see it faster, and it's better than polluting the site with accusations.

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.

[thedaemon]

One must know what "astroturfing, shiling, brigading" are to follow that rule. As such, astroturfing is the labor in putting fake grass down. Shiling, I'm guessing is giving the money item, a shilling, to someone. Brigading, I guess is starting a brigade. My point is that making up, or using new words(not in the dictionary) and using them in a guideline without defining them, nullifies the rule to most of the populous. Also, dang is super responsive to HN comments that he finds incongruent with the rules. He'll be here shortly to chastise OP and me.

[kick]

Astroturfing in the most famous English dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/astroturfing

Brigading in the most famous English dictionary (see definition 2):

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brigading

[NeedMoreTea]

Oxford English Dictionaries might like a word about your fame assertion... :)

[dmos62]

Merriam-Webster is a popular a publisher of American-English dictionaries: emphasis on American. It also had a significant role in shaping American-English as distinct from British-English. E.g. removal of the letter u in British-English words like colour. Or, the unsuccessful campaign to spell the word acre as aker.

[kick]

That's false. Webster is the dictionary that had a role in shaping American English in a distinct fashion. The quality of the work deteriorated when the Merriam brothers purchased it, and they changed the title from Webster's by the time they had begun compromising the value of English reform.

[dmos62]

You're right. I thought it was Webster that acquired Meriams' company.

[toyg]

Oxford has astroturfing too: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/325483?rskey=aidQ7O&result=2&...

Shilling does have a NorthAmerican connotation: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/178128?rskey=UvAWn2&result=4#...

[pythux]

Hi,

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!

[ocdtrekkie]

In case anyone thinks the advent thing is super weird, FastMail is known for doing advent blog series: https://fastmail.blog/2017/12/01/fastmail-advent-2017/

[wolco]

I encourage more writing.

[asveikau]

Personally, I have never heard of cliqz, so 0x65.dev and cliqz mean exactly the same thing to me, which is nothing. I don't think I would be less inclined to click if it were cliqz.com.

[ocdtrekkie]

Honestly the first place I heard about Cliqz is a little unfortunate: Firefox sideloaded them into people's browsers in Germany back in 2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

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.

[downerending]

As a reader, I care about the quality of the article itself, not about whatever taint the site or author might have.

[abhs]

I like the series and I didnt even upvote. Not sure why you're angry.

[nif2ee]

I've also been noticing that. But tbh they are not alone. The list of companies and startups exploiting HN is long.

[layoutIfNeeded]

They use a different domain probably because people with uBlock Origin and pi-hole won’t be able to visit their main site at cliqz.com (which is enough for me to ignore everything coming from them).

[mfer]

I think the upvoting has to do with this series of posts on the domain. If it was uninteresting content the posts would not be upvoted in the way they are.

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).

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/

[jarcane]

But you are mistaken.

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.

[mfer]

There is a point in there I think you're missing. That is Google is an advertising company. Isn't it hypocritical to have an issue with Cliqz for being an advertising company while being OK with Chrome which is from an advertising company (Google)?

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.

[CmdrKrool]

Indeed, Cliqz appears to have a weirdly close, Pocket-like relationship with Mozilla. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History), in 2017 Cliqz was bundled in with Firefox for 1% of users downloading the latter (from Mozilla's own website, presumably) in Germany. This was despite that "Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit", and "text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent". HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708

[mirimir]

Thanks for that.

I was thinking about trying their browser.

That press release is insane. Sharing "approximate location"?

[Terretta]

I’ve noticed cliqz.com is on tracker block lists.

[yellowapple]

Apparently not by default on uBlock Origin.