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Comment by jsjenkins168 | Hacker News Reader

My vote is to constrain growth as much as possible, at least that which comes from stupid sources. Smart hackers will find this site just fine without Yahoo or MSN, probably even Google.

As "evil" as blocking sites and crawlers may sound, I think these types of measures will be necessary to preserve the quality of content here. Whatever actions further that objective have my vote.

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Okay, that's one reason for not indexing the site. However, the poll question implies blocking it for traffic reasons. I'd vote for robots.txt'ing out the /x URLs, then re-running the vote with the question of "should we deliberately ban search engines so that we get less growth in visitors."

If we're sacrificing equal competitive access just to "constrain growth as much as possible", maybe we could block certain browsers, too?

IE users aren't smart enough to change their defaults; Safari users are mindless Apple fanboys; Opera users are weird and talk with funny accents. Smart hackers will take the trouble to launch FF to access News.YC.

Anything to preserve the quality of content here!

No, FF users are overzealous advocates of FOSS in general and Firefox in particular. Links, Lynx, and w3m users are too proud of their terminals. Netscape users don't realize it's the 21st century, AOL users are idiots. Flock and Seamonkey users are weird. No comment on Konqueror and Epiphany.

If you want to really constrain it, require a browser specific to YC... perhaps written in Arc. Also: secret handshake ;)

(I can think of a justification for the first part, though--the time it takes to launch a separate browser that one cannot use for any other sites is the perhaps near the time it takes to cool down and forget any external emotional influences on your reading.)

Not evil at all. Letting someone crawl your site is a business decision. If you think the resource cost on your servers is worth the added traffic that the search engine can send, then go for it. For this site, I would guess the resource cost is more (because of storing continuations) and the benefit of traffic is less (since pg doesn't even want it). Therefore, it's a good decision on pg's part and Yahoo's loss.

It is evil. A lot of the evil things out there are business decision (e.g. Microsoft monopoly practices). Even if this decision has a positive net effect on the community, as a result the world is likely to be worse off (all non-google searchers get suboptimal search, on this site and elsewhere).

It'd be interesting if source browsing and javascript hacking were the only ways to affect the site. Then only hackers would be able to contribute.

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