Ask HN: Should Techcrunch be banned on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should Techcrunch be banned on HN?

186 pointsTekMol18 comments

When I click on a Techrunch link, it tries to redirect me to some tracking url on advertising.com. That would probably collect data about me, set cookies and send me back to Techcrunch. Since I do not allow that, I cannot read Techcrunch articles at all.

I have the feeling that links on HN should lead to pages with at least a minimum of adherence to what one expects from a website.

A site that immediately redirects a visitor to a different domain is not what I expect from a link.

View on HN

Evert time I see a techcrunch link on HN I automatically skip it. The site's cookie pop-up has all the dark patterns.

If I go to techcrunch.com, the cookie pop-up has a long piece of text, containing a few inline links tot e.g. a "Privacy center", and the two buttons, "Accept" and "More information". Clicking "more information" shows a button "Manage partners " and "Accept". Clicking "Manage partners" shows a blob of text and links to all the partner websites. Clicking "back" and then the aformentioned "Privacy center" leads to a different website all together. I still haven't been able to find the cookie settings, if they're available at all! And all the while, clicking "Accept" is only a single button away.

Yes, TC has become such a metastasizing cancer of adtech that I will never intentionally click through.

And if I accidentally click without checking the domain first, uBlock won't even let me see the page because it's advertising.com.

I'd vote to block TC until they reform their ad practices.

No need. HN has a practice of updating links when appropriate and an upvote system to determine which articles should (or shouldn't) make it to the front page. Banning a source outright because of how some people experience it or feel about its content doesn't seem appropriate (and I say that as someone who _does_ skip TechCrunch articles).

A better idea may be to make a Request HN to use the best possible links rather than easy-to-find links and to encourage that behavior going forward.

And if a TechCrunch article makes it to the front page, then enough people upvoted it to imply it is worth checking despite its origin. Sometimes it's better to have an article from a less-favorable website than one from a site that is more informative but lacks the visibility to reach HN in the first place.

I don't know. On the one hand, the content that gets linked here usually meets the bare minimum of HN's standards. On the other hand, I'm inclined to say "ban it with extreme prejudice" for that Oath popup. Because of that popup, I don't think I've read a single TC article since May 2018.

I actively avoid clicking on links pointing to techcrunch because they put up a geowall asking me to let them track me. Ban it!

I mentioned TC in a post the other day on here for this very reason: took me 4 clicks on the back button to get out.

I for one am happy to get my pitchfork for TC...

Kill it. I don't read any articles there, because it puts up a wall of dark patterns that pretend to be GDPR-compliant, and I'm never clicking "agree" on that mess.

> Since I do not allow that, I cannot read Techcrunch articles at all.

I don't get any such redirects with Techcrunch.

But if the ability to see a site without compromising my defenses is the bar (and I'm not convinced it should be), then there are a whole lot of other sites that should be banned as well. For instance, I can't view most Medium links... (Edit: I was corrected on the Medium thing, so that's no longer a ferinstance.)

Why can't you see Medium?

Most of the time it won't show me the articles unless I sign up for an account, which I'm not willing to do (it's part of my defense posture).

Click outside of the modal asking you to sign up for an account and it'll go away. It's still annoying though.

Hey, you're right. Thanks for the tip! I never bothered to play with it. I guess I've just been very well trained to close down a page as soon as a dialog like that pops up. My loss!

This will get rid of the sticky header and footer too http://www.staticding.org/

I have a fork of it that removes the pop up it creates and adds support for another element type. You can use this bookmarklet

  javascript:%20(function%20(){var%20jsCode=document.createElement('script');jsCode.setAttribute('src',%20'//cdn.rawgit.com/Avery3R/StaticDing/master/src/StaticDing.js');document.body.appendChild(jsCode);}());

source is here https://github.com/Avery3R/StaticDing

I’d say yes - ban it.

I don't see any ads on TC, but I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger with Firefox.

Yes. In fact I would not mind a blanket block on all paywalled sites as well.

I think there's a big difference between scammy paywall sites and the likes of the New York Times. Banning all paywall sites would be excessive.

Adding another voice saying that I will not click through to techcrunch articles due to the insane amount of tracking and advertising, a privacy screen that doesn't appear to be GDPR compliant, but is certainly user-hostile, and finally the articles rarely seem to be original or adding value. I wouldn't miss it.

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