A bit off topic, you totally psychologically hijacked me for a kudo. :-P
I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted that as a kudo from me to you!
That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so, and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-style nearly-ubiquitous service.
That happened to me too the first time I saw a link to this blog on HN. But now I'm wiser. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me, can't get fooled again.
Agreed, although I periodically "give" a kudo just to see if the platform has improved to allow one to revoke a kudo. It hasn't. It's a shame actual "kudos" get conflated with "what's this thing do" over and over. Was the design aspect overlooked or intentional? Either way It's a disrespectful UX error.
Wow, he's not fooling me with his rationalisations:
Here’s what it actually does: when you hover over the button, a CSS transform animation is activated which fills the circle. After 1 second (the length of the animation), it fires a request to the server which increments an otherwise meaningless number by exactly one.
Simple response: If that number is meaningless, why give it a fancy animation, why name it 'Kudos' (which even a non-techie would agree is equivalent to a +1, Like whatever) and then why place such a meaningless element next to every meaningful blogpost? If he just wants to amuse himself, may I propose random() in whatever prog. language he uses to update some meaningless local variable.
I do like Dustin's blog, but it's sad to see the self-deception going on here from an otherwise smart guy with loads of reputation to lose.
I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted that as a kudo from me to you!
That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so, and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-style nearly-ubiquitous service.