Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
Lately it seems like every article I read on TC devolves into some sort of speculation or gossip. I can't help but feel like the quality of HN goes down a little bit every time one of these articles gets to the front page. For example, currently #1 on the front page is a completely tabloid-esque TC article about Google making counteroffers to key employees getting courted by Twitter. It's almost like the "who's dating who" section in US Magazine.
Certainly I find some of the content on TC useful (for example, launch announcements), but I feel like a lot would be gained if the median TC article just never showed up on HN.
Thoughts?
49 comments
[ 0.34 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadFeel free to post any link, the community will decide.
To be fair the majority of those sites are spam sites, but I see Valleywag as a notable/relevant exception.
They reported about pg's personal life after the ban (which went into place April 11, 2008).
Try not to make up your own facts next time.
HN is self moderating (or rather community moderated). If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them. If HN starts banning websites because some people don't like them then it takes the power away from the community and then you are on a slippery slope of moderated content and a world of approval conflicts and power struggles.
You or I might not agree with every post on HN but we have the power to not vote, or if you've contributed enough to downvote.
Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.
A moderated HN is one I would not use.
That's an excellent recipe for the Lowest Common Denominator. Welcome to the internet, where it is September all the time.
If a small self moderating community of stamp collectors posted a few articles of interest to letter writers, word spread, and letter writers joined the community at a ratio of 10:1 till only letter writing articles hit the front page, the only thing this argument would prove is that the one making it is probably a letter writer.
You're right though, if stamp collectors don't like the letter writing articles, they don't have to vote for them. Doesn't matter much--their stamp collecting community is "organic" and "community moderated".
Anything that isn't spam shouldn't be "banned". It's all down to what people vote up. If people are voting up TechCrunch stories as opposed to flagging them, that's your poll result right there in real life action rather than indignant votes.
If so, is dismissing the opinion of people who actively vote up stories on HN a way to prevent the "decline"? I don't have an answer to these questions but if it comes down to blocking Web sites that are relevant to HN's gamut of topics, the answers could be important.
Part of the problem is that HN's "gamut of topics", as you put it, has gotten too wide. There are lots of general tech news sites out there, this shouldn't be another. This is a narrowly focused community.
First, there is a saying, "The state of a nation will never be better than the sum of the state of each one of its individuals." If the awareness of the people on HN is not enough to automatically cause content like TechCrunch to be excluded, maybe we deserve to see such content until we work to increase awareness.
Second, maybe it is non-core or new users of HN who vote up TechCrunch articles. Maybe we should take into consideration the opinion of the people who really care about HN and who know the business (and TechCrunch) better than the rest, and if they say the community will benefit if TechCrunch is banned then it should be.
Point 2 - sure, but that introduces a layer of authority that is, at present, well hidden and rarely engaged. Perhaps instead of the deus ex machina solution of arbitrarily coming up with policies or bans, the voting system should be improved. I'd suggest that there's enough of a userbase here nowadays to stop, say, people with under X karma or Y days of HN membership from voting without causing a negative impact. This sort of algorithmic solution appeals to me more than potentially erroneous and biased decision making by committee any day.
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On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic
If you run an advertising based company then its essential to get traffic. The linkbait certainly gets their articles to the top of HN. The more votes it gets the more traffic it gets.
Our role as ad blind superusers is to redistribute content that we intensely like or intensely dislike so that TC can reach non-adblind users so someone will click their ads. Linkbait works admirably in getting this process started. The point of TC is not information dissemination it's to make something as boring as employees at Twitter giving hiring information to Google interesting. Facts are boring, editorial is what gets content read.
As far as TC goes, I think some people are unnecessarily picking on it at the moment. There's no reason to give it special consideration over every other website on the internet, it's not really that terrible, even if the consensus is that it has gone downhill.
As far as banning websites goes, you're removing choice, and I think it would go against the spirit of an open and free community.
If people don't like the content, it won't get upvoted (bots and unscrupulous characters notwithstanding).
One option would be to make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment. I suspect the quality of posts on the frontpage would improve overnight, as interesting posts wouldn't fall off the frontpage within an hour, drowned out by gossip.
Love this idea.
I don't think it'd turn the focus to karma too much (does anybody really care about karma?), but it would almost certainly improve the signal:noise ratio.
I don't like TechCrunch. At all. I think the answer to dealing with the egregious TC stuff is simply to flag it and get on with your life.
2. Instead of a ban, would it be better if HN users slightly change the way they read articles or can HN show top X comments with each article title?
E.g. for 1., even though if a user writes a negative comment about an article, he/she may be inclined to upvote the article so that his/her comment is read resulting in an unsavory article gaining much attention.
E.g. for 2., a HN reader sensing a tabloid article from the header can go to the comments page first. Or better still, if HN can be tuned to just show top X comments, then would it solve the issue?
Add an extra personal setting where you can input urls of javascript files that you'd like your home page to link to. All that news.arc has to do is drop these includes (just the reference, not the actual content) somewhere in the final html that gets returned.
For example, my version of the home page would have this in it:
Users would be free to make any updates they want to their own DOM, such as blacklisting unwanted domains. People could also share useful code snippets.If this gets enough votes here I'll repost it on the features page (which looks surprisingly stale, are we still using this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363).
It's a very general (and wasteful) solution to a very specific problem. TC articles are undeniably insightful on some occasions.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625313
The thing is, why ban any article, as long as the votes for it are organic the best will rise to the top and the worst will be hidden anyway.