Poll: Ban Valleywag? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Ban Valleywag?

75 pointspg102 comments

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.

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I'm very much in favor of banning Valleywag.

They picked up a comment that I made on HN about a friend of mine at Yahoo. They picked up my one comment, and turned it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards the Microsoft merger. They also posted information that personally identified my friend as the source of the information.

Granted, it was my mistake to begin with in posting that here, but I tried to make it right. PG edited the offending comment for me, and I wrote Valleywag asking them to remove the identifying information for fear that my friend might loose his job in the upcoming layoffs.

Not only did they not remove the identifiying information, but they were really nasty to me about the entire affair and I though needlessly hurtful.

My friend did get laid off. I don't know if it had anything to do with the article or not, however. I don't think it did, and either way, he's doing rather well for himself consulting.

So, while I do have some issues about quality of the content over at Valleywag; I have bigger issues about the editorial process there. If they can take a random post from an online forum and turn it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards Microsoft in the takeover process, all of their content is suspect in my opinion.

My opinion is that the majority of their content has a gossip rag/tabloid feel to it, and I would love to see that removed from the Hacker News listing. I see no reason to reward their trollishness with traffic from Hacker News, even if 15-20 people vote up a post linking to them.

Wow, iamelgringo, that's a scary story. Not just the valleywag thing, but the whole "information" angle. Sorry to hear about your friend. Glad to see that things are working out for him.

I have made many comments about my experiences, but in "loud mouth restaurant mode", without names and places. Isn't that one of the purposes of this board, to learn and share with each other?

I often wonder if a sleuth" went through my posts, they could figure out names, dates, and issues. I'm not sure what they would do with that, but your experience, along with with HN's increasing popularity, gives one food for thought.

Thanks.

Yeah. There's a lot of players in the tech world that lurk on this site, even if they don't post. I mean, Arrington, D Shah, P Buchheit and obviously PG post fairly frequently. I'm sure that O'Reilly has someone lurking here, if not reading Hacker news himself. I have no doubt that a number of angel investors and VC's read up on HN users just to find out what's bubbling among the next group of founders.

Paul early on said that one of the reasons that he made the site was to be able to get to know founders and applicants and have a bit of reference material before they apply. I'd guess it has at least a little bearing on their YC application screening. I could be wrong.

All that to say, is... Post intelligent, well reasoned comments and interesting articles. Avoid trolls and flame-baiting. Avoid posting things that you might regret later. People are reading what you post.

I did not have an opinion. But after reading this I do. Ban Valleywag

Their editorial process is questionable. But is that a reason to completely ban the organization?

I sincerely hope this does not turn into a common practice. Making decisions like forcing censorship due to an ideological difference of opinion is an extremely dangerous road to come to.

And I hate Valleywag.

That's awful - how were they able to identify your friend?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!).

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.

Presumably it could easily be like comments: you have 2 hours to edit it.

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.

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...

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.

How many people keep ShowDead turned on? Do you, rms?

I do, but I doubt very many other people do.

I do, but I'm not sure why.

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.

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.

Ok, we'll try banning them for a while.

Thank you.

Even though it seems to do what it aims to do well, its ultimate goal == to sell advertising by creating sensationalist headlines and feeding the egos of people who have (or who nurture through Valleywag mentions) a grotesque vanity complex == is hardly original or noteworthy. Most hackers go out of their way to _avoid_ spotlight, so I think for the most part Valleywag is just digital GIGO. Occasionally almost humorous, but GIGO nonetheless.

Right now the poll is 55% in favor of banning. Banning an entire organization is rather unprecedented, so I'd suggest we wait for a bit more of a consensus before going ahead with it.

It's not unprecedented. There are other sites that are banned, mainly because they spammed us or consist mainly of linkjacked content. I only asked this time because users occasionally vote up Valleywag stories.

They aren't spamming new.yc nor does it consist mainly of linkjacked content. I can understand that people have problems with some of their content, but then just don't vote it up. It's as simple as that. To ban a site entirely that does have some legitimate content simply because you don't like it is a very bad precedent to set.

Could you just add the ability to blacklist domains on a per-user basis? That way I could personally blacklist valleywag.com and nytimes.com if I wanted to, while others could enjoy their linkbait if they wanted.

Blacklisting would simply not show me stories with given string in the url.

I thought of that, but the goal here is not to evolve into a site that's everything to everyone, like Reddit or Digg. We want to have the best collection of links for hackers. So we can't duck decisions like this.

We shouldn't expect never to have to ban a site if both (a) we want to make News.YC be about a specific topic, and (b) there are sites with a deliberate strategy of linkbaiting.

I don't think this would fracture the community much and it would probably do a tremendous thing to improve the signal to noise ratio for me personally. Not everyone has the same measure of what is 'signal' and what is 'noise', so I wouldn't want to impose my blacklist on them, and I'm not voting this stuff up anyway, so it's not like I'd be affecting other users by just not seeing some things. Even only being allowed three blacklisted links would be huge for me.

But honestly, not too passionate about this either way, just throwing in my two cents.

Edit: Wrote a cheapo greasemonkey script to do this... http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

What good is the best collection of links if it is not easily searchable? Is there a reason you're avoiding this functionality?

http://searchyc.com

I'd rather see news.YC figure out how to be a coherent community than fracture into different interest groups.

Yeah I'd say a suspension would be more appropriate. Let it expire silently in 6 months or something and see if anything worthwhile starts showing up.

This is the worst mistake you have ever made regarding this community.

Censorship is not the answer, ever.

Your mailbox is not filtered for spam then?

If you have a blog, you do not prevent or delete comment spam?

It is definitely sometimes the answer. You wouldn't like News.YC if spam submissions weren't "censored," for example.

Though in fact I do have a new plan for dealing with cases like Valleywag (suggested by Nick Grandy of Wundrbar): instead of simply banning linkbait sites, I'm going to try semi-banning them by requiring them to get more points to make it onto the frontpage. That sounds right: they're semi-spam, so semi-ban them.

Blatant spam should obviously be censored, but Valleywag is not "spam." There is at least a sliver of good content over there, and it's on topic.

I like the idea of requiring sites like XKCD, Valleywag, TechCrunch, and others to get more votes to make it to the front page. When that's implemented, will you then un-ban Valleywag?

How is that not censorship? You aren't such a hardliner after all, are you?

It allows exceptional stories to pass through the filter. That's a form of censorship, but it's only censoring the spammy, linkbait articles.

So, like Paul said, I guess there IS a time when censorship in the answer, and it's for obvious spam.

Have you considered a bell curve?

- At one end: the posts from new/under-participatory users, where spam and linkbait is more likely.

- At the other: the posts to popular domains.

What I love about HN is that it manages to uncover interesting content from all over, but I am inclined to believe this is due to its current user base. With an algorithm in place that reinforces this behavior, I think we can continue to grow in the right direction.

I believe the first point may already factor in, but does the second?

The solution could be relatively simple: the more "popular" a domain name is, the more votes a submission requires to become "relevant."

Popularity could be determined a number of ways, at least using the number of submissions under the same domain, and perhaps the average number of votes the domain receives. The actual formula would take some tweaking over time.

In theory, a site with multiple submissions, like Valleywag or TechCrunch, would require more universal and active interest to warrant a front-page appearance. Valleywag (the more volatile of the two), would probably fade away, whereas the interesting TechCrunch articles would still come through.

If you find a great story there you've absolutely got to share, maybe you could look at this as an opportunity to find a second source for it.

If enough people like a Valleywag article (vote it up) there is not reason it should not be displayed. If you don't like it simply don't vote.

Paul, In your article on Bayesian spam filters (I didn't read the essay since before joining YC aka several years) You mentioned rules based systems only work up to a point. Today it's Valleywag (I don't care about the site one way or the other) tomorrow your getting requests to ban half a dozen sites per day. I think that instead of banning a specific site a better solution is to make the algorithm better.

You're correct in that a better system could be implemented than a manual blacklist, but, as my old boss always used to say, "some progress is better than no progress". Although it is nice, you don't need to get fancy when simple things satisfy your needs.

I think you can't really rely on people to withhold their votes when the content is engineered to take advantage of the human psyche.

Could a bayesian filter really separate fact and fiction? Cross-correlated ancedote and rumour? Satire and sensationalism? Humans struggle. Maybe one day...

The community doesn't seem to be able to correct itself, so if the content starts to veer away from the site's original principles, some external force is needed to gently nudge it back on track.

All that said, I don't really have a considered opinion on whether or not blacklisting Valleywag is a good thing; it is not something that I care much about.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

What are the stats for valleywag articles? I don't recall seeing any on the front page for quite some time, aside from the latest one about the google noncompete.

There are a lot of other linkbait articles that float up to the front page. The "businesshackers" guy comes to mind. There have also been a number of completely vapid articles recently, such as the "to be a programmer, you need these 10 things: 1. text editor..." article. I can only hope these are linkbait for some SEO scam network; the thought that these articles are written and upmodded by actual hackers is too depressing.

Anyway, at least we know Valleywag is a "real" site which sometimes has humor or interesting gossip. The other linkbait sites that make it to the front page truly have nothing to offer. The current moderation scheme deals with Valleywag just fine. If you must ban, there are other sites which seem to be a higher priority.

These are inadequate options. The issue isn't whether you like to see them on News.YC, it's do you want to start banning people. Yes, I don't like seeing them on YC. But no, I don't want to ban them.

Come on! Isn't this a democratic news site front page is voted on by readers!?! This vote is absurd.

I think a better idea would be to institute negative points to submissions, not just comments. That way, the handful of people needed to make news frontpage worthy can be rejected by the masses tired of Valleywag.

If you have to ban sources on your democratic news site, you're missing the point.

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

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.

I don't think an automated ban is a good idea. Hopefully the weighting system will count those voting the VW stories up with less weight.

Valleywag sometimes goes too far, but the writers are often willing to tell the ugly truth about technologies, even if no one wants to listen. For instance, Valleywag was one of the few blogs to question the Second Life hype a few years back, while practically every mainstream media publication was gushing about all of the great business potential there.

Valleywag also highlighted some of the negative goings-on with Wikipedia under Jimmy Wales. Yes, some of the revelations were merely titillating but it also pointed to first-person accounts of alleged financial wrongdoing.

The media has an important watchdog role, and Valleywag's coverage, as flawed as it may be, sometimes goes where other reporters and bloggers fear to tread. Let it remain on Hacker News.

Valleywag seems like a good candidate - but do we want to get into the mindset of banning an entire site? This seems like an emotional and short-sighted decision.

What about the hypothetical 1% of Valleywag articles that is interesting?

Why not find a way to prevent linkbait in general?

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.

And ban all sites that use interstitial ads. Actually, I'd ban those before Valleywag.

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.

Instead of outright banning, can we do something like this:

1. maintain a list of controversial sites 2. every time someone attempts to submit a link from that list, s/he'll get a warning message stating that should the moderators find this submission lacking, 5 karma pts will be docked. No appeals will be allowed. This is the risk of submitting from a blacklisted site. And only users above some karma threshold can submit from the blacklisted sites.

This would still allow possibly useful information from those sites, but also punish irrelevant submissions.

Even the most scathed and unpopular of opinions, when allowed expression, can add value to discourse provided they don't commandeer and dominate the dialog. Perhaps a voting-based moderation would give us a pre-viewing filter we can use to decide to leave some posts un-viewed? Or a tagging system like Slashdot's? Censorship by a central authority disturbs me--it is a slippery slope and place too much power in the biased hands of a few. Didn't most countries get rid of monarchies and divine right for a reason?

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.

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)

For the same reasons, shouldn't TechCrunch stories be banned?

TechCrunch actually bothers me more. I don't recall ever being pissed off that a ValleyWag story wasted my time.

I feel the opposite. I can't remember the last Valleywag story I've read that I would forward or recommend to a friend.

Paul, Leave Valleywag alone. They're just a symptom of a bigger challenge. Let's fix the moderation system so we can squash any obvious linkbait.

The wording of this poll is unfair. I don't think they should be banned, because that's censorship, but I don't necessarily "like seeing" Valleywag stories on News.YC. However, that's why I have a mouse, eyes and a brain.. I can "censor" stuff in my head, just like many other humans. Clearly some people here lack that facility, which strikes me as odd.

i'm no fan of the rag - but censorship on a social site bothers me more - do like it dont read it - seems simple enough.

Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man. In Freedom,

Hmm .. looky, looky .. 1-point comment from a single use account and yet not only it was quoted in TechChrunch cover of the story, but it was also remarkably fit for propagating whatever point Arrington was making.

Does it smell fishy to anyone else ?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/hacker-news-considers-b...

It was at zero points when Arrington posted it.

I think the existing voting system is adequate to determine if a Valleywag story is worthwhile.

I think banning them is playing into Valleywag's game. They want to be banned. That just increases their "brand equity" a controversial gossip rag. Perhaps they'll receive less traffic in the long run, but I'm sure they love the publicity of this meme.

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...

Would it make sense to give them an initial score of zero instead ?

Ban Valleywag

Review of valleywag on yelp

http://www.yelp.com/biz/valleywag-com-east-palo-alto#hrid:es...

Yes. Ban Them.. They dont add any value. All their articles are sleezy and just a waste of time. I wonder why cant they come up with some decent stuff worthy of talking.

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.

The premise that social news sites must degrade over time?

I'm guessing these decisions need not be static. if in future their content improves, im sure we can turn off the ban.

I signed up just to vote on this. I appreciate your candor and community engagement. Thanks!

If they are getting voted up, doesn't that mean we shouldn't ban them?

No, don't ban them; It's not going to solve anything.

edit: did you miss an option "auto post to reddit" ?

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...

While yau are at it dailymail.co.uk please...

ban those assholes

no soup for vallywag

I think we might miss interesting things if ban particular news sources. And so, I might end up visiting them more just to ensure that I don't miss any news.

To the gentle(wo)men iamelgringo, thanks for telling us that valleywag is a bunch of aho* but that has no correlation with reporting.If people find that valleywag reports are made up, lack substance, people will choose to not go there despite it being posted on hacker news. You want to give the choice to the end user (me and you) to see that valleywag article or not. Why restrict choice.

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.

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

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