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.