Hacker News Considers Banning Valleywag

Paul has created exactly the opposite effect he was hoping for, talk about giving Valleywag free PR.

I'm sure Owen and crew are plotting a year's worth of articles just to ruffle Paul's feathers now.

I guess there's a hidden PR lesson here:

If you don't like someone or something, just ignore them. Or better yet, create a system so the group can collectively tune them out.

Corollary:

If you want to get someone attention, create drama.

It's nice to know that Michael Arrington agrees that Valleywag is toxic. And, I also find Michael's tone regarding Hacker News is significant. It's pretty clear that he has tons of respect for the site and what PG is doing with it.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in the community voting. I think the site/system works quite well as it is. If there would be any tweaking it would be to attribute some kind of score to people/sites which will weight give them a handicap score which will work alongside the standard voting algorithm. I don't agree that they should be automatically banned though

I'm surprised Valleywag hasn't made a post about their banning. Perhaps they are still too busy complaining about how they were kicked out of the PopSugar-Techcrunch party.

I don't understand, why is this a big deal? It must be Friday.

Three words: slow news day.

I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and see nothing but "valleywag reports on techcrunchs comments on hacker news banning valleywag for too many stories on techcrunchs reporting hacker news considering banning valleywag."

Can't you see this is rapidly becoming one of those death spirals from which we could rapidly collapse into digg like mediocrity. In fact, the feedback from this might be enough to destroy the internet. Our only hope is to ban ban stories about banning valleywag recursively out to some bizarre order of infinity that only cantor understands.