Poll: Ban Codinghorror?
I wouldn't mind ignoring his stories that show up here, but the recent posts where he
(a) criticizes the decisions that drive News.YC despite of being ignorant of how things work
(b) recommends news.YC to his subscriber base, potentially bringing a new mass of users that will contribute very little to the website
are close to being provocative. It does give a feeling that he is not happy to have his own blog, but feels like he needs to control every possible conversation channel.
I'm not suggesting censoring it for anything in particular that he writes about, but because the articles are always such deliberate linkbait. In 99% of his articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don't want PG and the editors to be accused of censorship, so I thought I'd ask for opinions first.
69 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadperhaps a better solution overall would be to implement some sort of restriction on submissions. if you submit from a single domain more than X number of times in the last Y submissions, you're disallowed from submitting from that domain for another Z submissions.
I'm actually a bit suspicious that the following may be happening:
1) Karma-hungry users submit all of his articles as soon as they're posted without checking whether or not they've been submitted already.
2) Since submitting a page that's already been submitted results in an upvote, his articles make it to the front page and RSS feed without the usual oversight of people reading things in the new submissions list.
In effect those hypothetical karma-hungry users amount to a voting ring, but one that does not need to communicate --- or even realize that they are in a voting-ring: Members just notice that sometimes --- when they are by chance the first to submit --- they get a huge karma boost. And when they are not the first, they do not lose anything from supporting the other members.
Potential solution: Decouple. I.e. do not make submitting an automatic upvote for existing stories. Just forward to the existing item and let people upvote (or not) manually.
If you're going to ban one source that irritates some people, I'm sure a list can be prepared of other sources to ban. Here's a sample of authors/blogs to ban:
1. Guy Kawasaki
2. Seth Godin
3. TechCrunch
4. 37Signals
5. Joel the Fog Creek Guy
They all can be seen as shameless self-marketing disguised as blogs or worthless regurgitations of tech news and gossip.
EDIT: to note one has been banned already.
Unfortunately, "Ban it, it causes brain rot" wasn't a poll option.
Jeff's post had some thoughtful things to say about designing rules for communities. He's thinking a lot about what the rules should be for his community at stackoverflow, and comparing your rules to other people's rules is a good way to think about this kind of problem.
There certainly isn't one answer: there's an interaction between the rules and the actual bunch of people you have visiting a site.
Personally I'm losing interest in reddit, for instance, because articles about mainstream programming languages get downvoted immediately -- but articles about farting in Python or computing fibonacci functions recursively in an obscure LISP dialects get hundreds of votes.
As for attracting the "wrong" kind of people, I think you're taking the wrong angle. Atwood is trying to get more people to pay attention to stackoverflow -- if he's got any tactical aspirations towards hacker news, it would be using it as a way to promote his own ventures, as he's done with DZone and other programming sites.
Sure he gets things wrong but so what? If we were afraid of getting things wrong we would never publish anything - and would probably also never learn anything new.
What bothers me a lot is the whole attitude of shoot-first-ask-later. It causes excessive noise. He knows it, but he doesn't care, because it gets people talking about him.
He tries to control the conversation by saturating the channel, and the one filter that we have (the community itself) will go bust if we let the channel be saturated.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Edit: modding this up to 11? Give me a break. There are much better comments than this.
No, don't ban it; But I don't like seeing Codinghorror stories on News.YC.
I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains.
The human eye can serve as that mechanism if the parenthetical label of the submitted article's domain is unique to one author or group of authors. (E.g., google.com as a source domain doesn't help me at all in filtering articles, but techcrunch.com does.) I read HN selectively, depending on what the source of submitted articles is. For the record, I like reading some of the codinghorror.com articles submitted here.
Letting hn users specify their own domain black-lists can be implemented trivially, and saves a ton of time, in aggregate. I agree with the grand-parent post.
On the other hand, it's refreshing to see the comments of someone who doesn't think that a simple count of users is the be-all and end-all of a website's worth. That attitude is intriguing and makes me want to learn more about this site.
Don't worry, all they're talking about is banning links to Codinghorror, not banning people coming from it. We would never do that. Not that we would ban CH itself either.
I can think of a few :(
Also, banning a site for generally worthless content is one thing. Banning a site because they made some incorrect but interesting criticisms of Hacker News is another.
So that's a good example, if you disregard the paradox ;-)
Even your second point is baseless, "potentially bringing a new mass of users that will contribute very little to the website". Note the use of the word 'potentially', you know you have no evidence of this but you don't like Jeff so just throw any shit around and see what sticks.
What next, CH causes cancer, CH makes you homosexual, CH promotes liberalism?
(I am no longer bothered by having negative karma)
OTOH, peterhi, I just skimmed your past comments: the negative karma isn't just b/c you say unpopular or off-topic things--it's also because you're mostly a jerk about it.
And I'm the jerk?
As for the "jerk" aside, well, it goes either way. You can either say something politely, knowing that most people who disagree with you will probably ignore you. Or you can say something more heavy that will get their attention, but then you'll have to deal with character assassination tactics like marginalizing you as a extremist or a jerk, etc. Either way you're kinda screwed.
Yours is much better.
Also, I sort of find it hard to believe that Jeff's posts are as bad as all that, but I can't say from experience b/c I just don't click the links anymore.
I read a lot of programming blogs and I'd say that the codinghorror content better than many. The size of his readership certainly bears that out. It's actually not really a programming blog anyway. It's mostly opinion pieces that are designed to provoke a response. One common response is that he's simply dismissed. Everyone's entitled to have their say.
If you don't like Jeff's blog, don't click the link. If the community likes the blog, it will get voted up. I don't get what the point of banning it is in the first place if the community in general is voting it up. Controversial or not, it's way more relevant than a lot of the other crap that gets voted up.
I listen to Jeff and Joel's Stack Overflow podcast. Jeff seems like a totally reasonable guy whose ego is in check and who is not looking to piss anybody off. He's just out there writing down his thoughts, just like everybody else. You're allowed to disagree with him. Feel free to do so. I don't see the need to ban his blog.
Isn't that the point? If everything were censored and all we ever heard about was TDD and how great and spiffy it is how would we ever know why? Why is Jeff Atwood to be despised? Why is "An open letter to Steve Jobs about approving the amber alert application" more appropriate than "Sharpening the Saw"?
I want the good, the bad and the ugly. I agree with censoring spam, sites that are gaming the system, and the like but this is just silly. It all seems very ad hominem to me. Get off your soap box and write something worth while.
Criticism is how start-ups thrive. Learn it, live it.
I guess that I'm one of those users. Is this community really that elitist?