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.<p>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.<p>Thoughts?
No, if only because it still (occasionally) breaks interesting startup news. Most of the articles are either speculation or outright flaming (Arrington, I'm looking at you), but there are some nuggets that would be lost if we banned it altogether. Instead, I'd simply recommend the community flag less substantive submissions, and let the mods sort it out.
We've been there, done that: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625255" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625255</a><p>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 <i>real life action</i> rather than indignant votes.
A regular topic on HN over the years. Let's keep this thread simple. They're not going to be banned from HN. HN's link to YC is so overt that it doesn't even make sense to think of it as a "conflict of interest"; HN is a favor YC is doing you. YC isn't going out of its way to alienate a key PR channel.<p>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.
Being inundated with techcrunch articles is just a symptom of the real problem: there's no cost to submit articles, and there's potentially major karma in being first to submit an article that other people will also submit. Therefore, some people will submit anything they think others will, just to be first. These duplicate submissions also upvote the articles, pushing out better ones.<p>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.
One of the great things about HN is how organic it is in nature. HN is loosely about startups and hacking, but really it's about what people in the startup/hacking world find interesting.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.<p>A moderated HN is one I would not use.
The main problem is every Techcrunch headline is crafted as linkbait while the articles themselves contain no actual information other than financial details.
Maybe some smart HNer can make a Chrome/FF/whatever plugin like Google's Personal Blocklist for HN? I'd like to be able to just not see certain links without forcing that moderation decision on the entire community.
I think we need more good content to encourage the culture of makers we want (e.g. regular "erlang days"). Banning junk sites is helpful, but probably not as much.
Here's an idea that could address a lot of complaints here, and potentially be kind of fun:<p>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.<p>For example, my version of the home page would have this in it:<p><pre><code> <script src="http://mydomain.com/myscript.js"/>
</code></pre>
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.<p>If this gets enough votes here I'll repost it on the features page (which looks surprisingly stale, are we still using this? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363</a>).
No, explicitly banning whole websites seems like a brute-force way of preventing bad content from getting submitted/upvoted on hacker news. I think it's better to modify the mechanics of the community so that inappropriate articles get filtered out, rather than banning sites wholesale.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If people don't like the content, it won't get upvoted (bots and unscrupulous characters notwithstanding).
1. If a bad TechCrunch article makes it to the top, is it because the karma system of HN needs refinement to mitigate perverse incentives?<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?
Even though the quality has degraded, there's no doubting it still gets exclusives and is still one of the premier sources for startup info, seems to early too write it off entirely.
If anything should be banned it's polls on HN (lol, well some are interesting).<p>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.
Banning TC articles is equivalent to the Red Cross refusing gay people's blood donations.<p>It's a very general (and wasteful) solution to a very specific problem. TC articles are undeniably insightful on some occasions.
I'm not a big fan of TC either but they earned their position and users are sharing their stories. Help the community promote other points of views instead, but arguing against them just gives them more relevance.
I thought we had banned polls asking if we should ban TechCrunch.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625313" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625313</a>
If the HN community starts upvoting gossipy TechCrunch articles, the community has deteriorated and the focus should be on rebuilding that. Banning TechCrunch would be treating the symptom and bring the community into more rapid decline, introducing an era of elitist censorship and immediately alienating core constituents.