I pointed this out months ago. This website is called Hacker News, not Largest Newspaper in the World News. There is really no need for a poorly-written clickbait editorial to be on the front page of HN every day.

If an nytimes article (or any article) is not interesting to the HN community, wouldn't it simply not get upvoted and left to decay and rot? Why is a ban needed?

I feel a ban will only serve a minority audience, not the majority of HN who can choose with upvotes.

The front page of HN quite democratic, allowing folks to vote up articles that they liked and find interesting. It works pretty well most of the time.

A permanent ban is pretty extreme because NYT does have some interesting articles and stories in recent months.

Why don't you get a HN clone that uses the HN api and filter out the URLs/hosts you don't like.

That way you can keep your preference to yourself too.

HN community can upvote or flag websites. Shouldn't be a problem. If the NYT keeps doing shitty content, people will not take it to the homepage. Same as Medium with their walled articles.

I agree, people are arguing in favor of self-moderation, but if we are here is precisely because we like the moderation.

Pay-walled and lower-than-average quality articles promote people judging the article by the title, going to the comments to actually understand the article's content or post without enough information.

Banning NYTimes would increase average comment quality by forcing the link-poster to find an article readable by everyone, possibly higher quality and less click-baity.

A total ban seems extreme. Like others said, if it's a problem for most people the sites won't just get voted enough to appear on thee main page.

Well, just don't upvote these posts. That's the natural way of filtering out nytimes if enough people think like you.

What I don't like about nytimes is the paywall. It is just stupid to allow bots to read all content but try to make people pay by allowing them to read a few articles but requiring (payed) login afterwards. This requires tracking people and this can be conterfighted by adblockers, cookie cleaners, etc. Either put all your content behind paywalls or make everything free.