Zerohedge.com - website review:

I have spent more time on this web site than on any other in my life, and this includes internal sites for work and anything else! Zerohedge posts in the neigborhood of 25 items each day that porport to demonstrate the terrible financial state of the country, and most of the world, written by "Tyler Durden" ("Fight Club" guy - famous tag-line: "First rule of fight club: you do not talk about how much the movie sucks!").

It is not so much the posts, as the comments, that make this both my favorite political web site and the one that I waste the most time on. I have learned more about the terrible financial state we are in, preparations for the fallout from said state, and who is really responsible, than from the post themselves. The problem for me is that I am kind of compulsive in trying to get through sometimes as many of 10 pages of interesting back-and-forth. With the exception of some the insults, which are still some of the best I ever read, I learn a lot from some of the erudite commenters' arguments back and forth. I can tell many of these people have a lot of life experiences, and it is easy to see through the ones that are full-of-it.

One thing to keep in mind is this is a Doom and Gloom blog! Don't expect good cheer from reading any article at all, excepting when there is a post on George Soros dying.

USEABILITY:

Zerohedge is set up very well, and I like that the format has not changed since the time I started viewing it. One must be a member to comment, which I am not, in order to see up and down arrows or what have you, how long members has been members, and that sort of thing. Therefore, I couldn't explain all that. One pretty minor bug is that one can go to comments directly, but upon clicking for next page of comments goes to the top of the article, but has the continuing comments afterward.

Here is a major problem. These guys must be making a killing on the ads. Great for them, but the ads are annoying, all over the place, and many scripts run out of control. Zerohedge can lock up your computer if you're not careful. Having adblock of some sort is a requirement to enjoy this site, unless you have a lot of RAM space available. OK, I got through this, but it sure doesn't help when I am at another computer somewhere. Zerohedge, you're only going to hurt your viewership in the long run, as people give up.

CONTENT:

As mentioned already, there are many articles put up each day, perhaps 2 - 3 pages worh. It would take an hour a day just to keep up without reading the comments, I would guess. However, I enjoy the comments, which are usually better and even better-informed than the articles. It is not clear on the front pages that about half of the posts are from other authors from various web-sites (mostly gloom/doomers). Most of these are as good or better than the Tyler Durden stuff, but occasionaly there are ones that have not been vetted well (or zerohedge doesn't care) and are left-wing/extreme stupid. The comments on these take care of the problem very well.

A majority of the articles are still on financial matters, but, at this point, possibly 40 % are political items. Those probably increase the hit-count and the comments, and those comments are well-worth reading, too. The "Tylers" (probably a number of people) include articles about science topics, but, having read a few a long time back, I could see that these contain many errors. Once you get the units wrong, I don't give you any more credit for knowing what you're writing about. Skip anything scientific on zerohedge, as these guys are not smart enough to cover it with any good writing.