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Poll: Ban Valleywag?

75 points by pg ↗ HN
Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don't want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I'd ask for opinions first.

102 comments

[ 51.5 ms ] story [ 3292 ms ] thread
jakewolf
And ban all sites that use interstitial ads. Actually, I'd ban those before Valleywag.
mechanical_fish
I voted yes, as an application of my "PG should run his own site" principle... and because Valleywag links have often struck me the same way.

But I will play devil's advocate for three seconds, just for the hell of it: Are the conversations engendered by any previous Valleywag articles worth keeping? Just because the articles are inane or linkbaited doesn't mean that all the comments are as well. Good discussions can arise from all sorts of random sources. And eviscerating bad articles can be a fun sport, provided you don't get carried away with enthusiasm.

Okay, the three seconds are now up. And I, myself, can't remember any good Valleywag-inspired discussions, so... off with their head!

noodle
i'm personally kind of indifferent on their specific articles.

but imo, if you do ban them, you'll get a lot of "why ban vallywag and not XYZ"? its a slippery slope.

unless there are already similar sites that are banned. if so, ignore me, i'm a noob.

staunch
I don't think it's that slippery. There's only a few sites out there that are pure bottom feeders. Valleywag and Dailymail.co.uk are the only two that come to my mind immediately.
Xichekolas
I personally avoid anything by Guy Kawasaki because it all just seems like contentless fluff self-promotion, but not sure he is quite Valleywag quality.

... and I wouldn't advocate banning Guy either. It's a personal thing. But it would be nice if I had a blacklist that I could just add his domain to.

mattrepl
For the same reasons, shouldn't TechCrunch stories be banned?
mullr
TechCrunch actually bothers me more. I don't recall ever being pissed off that a ValleyWag story wasted my time.
fallentimes
I feel the opposite. I can't remember the last Valleywag story I've read that I would forward or recommend to a friend.
huhtenberg
Would it make sense to give them an initial score of zero instead ?
webwright
People can use their own judgment-- I can generally summon the sense to NOT click on a link to a Valleywag article because I know it's linkbait. It's a slippery slope. Linkbait abounds.

(I voted no)

tandaraho
Rather than explicitly banning Valleywag or other particular sources, it might be more useful if PG can leverage his influence in this community by adding to the posting etiquette thread from a few weeks ago (right after the rush caused by TC) regarding the type of content that is the aim/target of this space. A simple disapproval/opinion by PG should weed out 80-90% of these posts from getting generated.
shabda
No, this is the promise of social news. Good things bubble up, uninteresting get dumped. If its not blatant spam, or totally irrelevant don't ban them.
vlad
The premise that social news sites must degrade over time?
xlnt
Banning stuff isn't a solution to the problem of disagreement about what links should be posted here, or a solution for people who have conflicting ideas in their personality about what links they want to click on.
jsrfded
Banning a single site feels good, but is a short-term band-aid on the moderation system. Better to identify the factors in valleywag stories that are undesireable and find a way to target them generally - to raise the editorial quality here across the board and leave behind the dross.

As others have pointed out, Valleywag doesn't have a monopoly on linkbait titles and thin follow-through.

dood
Agreed, I think the important thing is raising quality across the board. Two possible solutions: a) stop people voting for crap b) get the community to filter out crap.

I don't have any good ideas for option a), and I dislike reddit-style downvoting for option b) since it has the same problem of people upvoting bad stuff, just in reverse.

One idea which could work for b) is a digg-like 'bury' option (i.e. a 'this is crap' button) - but only in tandem with a high karma minimum for being allowed to use it, and some statistical cleverness for deciding when a post should be buried. But I'm terribly enthused with this idea either.

b3eck
How about time-regulated voting for a)? ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147383 ) Presumably, people who go on an impulse voting spree do it without much thought and would be greatly discouraged by periodic voting prevention, whereas those who take the time to make thoughtful votes and comments wouldn't mind the regulation as much.
sc
I like idea "b", though maybe it's more of a "flame warning" button: i.e., the authenticity of this article/domain is suspect, so be warned that it may just be flammable material.

Really, I don't think we should be necessarily banning content, but rather encouraging the community at large to post worthwhile material for itself.

ubudesign
I don't think freedom of speech would apply here so yes if Valleywag is causing problems then ban, put on notice or anything that would fix it...

but there should also be some set of rules, guidlines that everyone should know about to make the ban fair.

wehriam
I think the existing voting system is adequate to determine if a Valleywag story is worthwhile.
cperciva
I voted for "No, don't ban them", but I don't particularly like Valleywag stories. Rather, I think the whack-a-mole approach of banning individual problem sites is a bad idea.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Users who post garbage stories should be more accountable. Make posting a story cost a few points of karma, so that people who repeatedly post stories which don't get voted up end up without any karma.

The specific problem of linkbait titles might also be helped by allowing users to "un-vote" a link which they previously voted up.

dood
I think a karma cost for posting stories is a really bad idea.

Firstly, it would not solve this problem since Valleywag stories tend to get lots of upvotes. Indeed, it would encourage posting link-baiting stories, since they also tend to be karma-baiting stories.

Secondly, it would stop people from posting borderline, but valid stuff. I often don't post things I'm unsure people will like, but many times posts that seem borderline to me end up getting loads of upvotes. With a karma cost for posting, people would simply not post these kinds of stories.

A karma cost for posting is a recipie for encouraging lowest-common-denominator stuff.

cperciva
Valleywag stories tend to get lots of upvotes.

In that case, the "let's ban valleywag" approach is even more wrong. The problem of "garbage gets voted up" is one which ought to be solved long before the problem of "people submit garbage".

dood
I agree, thats pretty much what I was getting at. I favor a systemic solution, not banning sites. The problem isn't that people submit bad stuff, its that the community upvotes it and has no ability to filter it.
rms
I'd like to see tagging support in the software. I think that would go a long way towards helping. It just might be a long time before someone implements it...
thaumaturgy
I see this often in forums that don't have tagging, where users say, "tagging will fix this!"

I haven't seen so many forums that use tagging where it actually works in a very useful way.

davidw
Agreed - it's a community problem, not a technology problem.

A while ago I suggested a 'name and shame' approach, where 'bozo' votes, if there are enough of them, reveal who voted for a story.

danw
Simply have a lsit of who voted up this article, and add a mechanism for changing your vote. It's easy to upvote something that's got a good title, then realise it's crap and not be able to retract your vote.
Bluem00
Currently, each person is left to give their own 'meaning' to a vote. I think that this approach would help define that meaning: A 'vote' is public support for the quality of an article, such that you are willing to associate yourself with it.
davidw
Well... I don't know if you'd always want to display the list, as that opens up the potential for vote buying, because you can verify that someone has voted a certain way.
Bluem00
Good point. In the case I described, someone could gain status in the community by consistently voting up good articles and voting down bad ones. This would add to the other two methods of becoming known to the community (commenting and submitting). Perhaps people who are respected would not want to risk tarnishing their image by supporting a bad article, and the support of people who would be willing to sell their 'vote' would be worthless?

As an aside, I wonder if each of article submissions, comments, and voting could be thought to respectively show that a person is interesting, intelligent, and has good judgment?

icky
The aforementioned "name-and-shame" approach would work if the names are only displayed for bad stories.

It would be a weird scenario indeed if vote-buyers were only able to pay out for stories that did not get a positive score.

Vote-buyers could still gain some long-term information that would enable payment, such as the reliability of a given paid-voter over time (by checking the stories that didn't make it), but that same information would be available to the news.yc admin(s), who could then just ban the offending accounts (even if they weren't suspected of vote-selling--just for consistently supporting crappy stories!).

jonnytran
I'm all for undoing votes, as everyone makes mistakes sometimes. With news though, it's slightly complicated by the fact that the effect of your vote is time sensitive.

In other words, if you vote up a story and then change your vote a day later, the vote has already contributed to putting the article on the front page on that first day, and so the "damage" has already be done.

davidw
Presumably it could easily be like comments: you have 2 hours to edit it.
andres
how about a feature where a user can ban certain domains from showing up in their results?

or a spam filter tailored to each individual user...

dcurtis
You asked about censorship and then deleted an article on the front page a few days ago that had some interesting comments. It was a stupid article, to be sure, but did you have to completely delete it? There's no "send to second page" button in the moderation options?

My feelings: Do not ban any content, ever. Only delete things after they are submitted if they are off topic or ridiculously stupid.

Instead ban the users who vote those stupid things up, or diminish their voting "worth".

Sometimes, I like reading Valleywag stuff. It's certainly on topic, even if it's linkbait or pure lies. It's the comic, tabloid, side of the industry we're in. Maybe you can add a tag that says "tabloid" next to the Valleywag domain instead of downright banning it.

This is a pretty good article from Valleywag:

* http://valleywag.com/378444/did-you-sign-googles-noncompete-...

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160603

Why would you want to censor that?

If you have to ask about being accused of censorship, something is seriously wrong. Also, using a poll like this is extremely ineffective. The mob is, as a whole, foolish. I imagine a ton of people are clicking "yes" simply due to a negative reaction to Valleywag, rather than understanding that censoring Valleywag may start a trend here that could get out of hand...

rms
In the profile there is a showdead option -- if you set it to yes, you can see stories and comments that have been marked dead by an admin.

By generally, I agree, banning Valleywag is a slippery slope, or, at least, it doesn't help to solve the broader problems of social news this site faces.

dcurtis
How many people keep ShowDead turned on? Do you, rms?
rms
I do, but I doubt very many other people do.
dood
I do, but I'm not sure why.
philh
I do, because there was a dead post linked to that I couldn't see otherwise. Or something along those lines. Since then it hasn't been annoying enough to turn off.
hooande
It sounds like the problem isn't Valleywag, but whoever is submitting articles from Valleywag (that is, if I'm properly understanding how news.yc works). If people stop submitting them, then the problem will go away right?

We should just make it known that it is not socially acceptable for people to submit worthless articles to our community, no matter what site the articles from come.

If someone submits something from Valleywag, heap scorn upon them! But if someone is voting for it, then someone likes it. Appealing to the lowest common denominator (no offense) is part of democracy.

hooande
And for the record, the poll seems like it has some bias in the wording. I wish the second option said something more neutral like "No, don't ban them; I don't think it's necessary".

Right now it has kind of a "No, don't violate my civil rights; I like the terrorists" feel to it.

chengmi
No, don't ban them; It's not going to solve anything.
mattmaroon
I have to grudgingly vote no, only because I think they have a good article on the front page here right now. I generally dislike them.

Now if you were to suggest banning any Ask News.YC posts with the word recession in the title...

kashif
While yau are at it dailymail.co.uk please...
schammy
You ban one site, you'll have people knocking your door down to ban others. Just let it be what it is.

Agree that VW is linkbait but I enjoy reading it anyways :P

thomasswift
Custom ban filter. I was thinking about posting a feature request of something similar but I didn't.

Like this huddlechat / campfire business over the last couple of days, i wanted to strip out that content.

rickmb
As with any social app, banning sites/users/apps that aren't deliberately damaging (like spam, trolls, whatever) is basically saying your system isn't working, and you can't be bothered to change it.

It's like 'fixing' a bug in software by simply suppressing the error messages. It will come back to bite you in the ass.

dejb
I certainly hope this poll isn't decided by a simple majority. Imagine how many things would get banned if it only required a simple majority vote. Things should not be banned without an overwhelming majority of people thinking it is necessary.
pierrefar
I don't think they should be banned, and I have this as a systemic fix: allow individuals to filter out sites they don't like to see in the new or home page lists. This will contain the "Valleywag submissions" to the people who really like them and vote them up.

With this data in mind, you could then say that given that x% of our members have filtered out a site, we should block their submission. x could be defined in a number of ways and tweaking that will be another discussion.

Pierre