He's being lionized on HN for making money, while he's polluting the written heritage of the human race. Not a chance I will take it elsewhere. He needs to be called out, to his face, as does anybody who thinks he deserves HN's respect.
GP's point: X are spammers and get undeserved respect on HN. Your response: there are worse spammers. Do the spammers also get undeserved respect?
I accept your point about it being harder to classify, but I don't see how the SE's job being harder can equate to slightly useful content being worse than outright spam.
Also note that Mahalo enjoyed that level of traffic based on auto-generating pages through shagging third party content (without requesting permission and without any way to opt out of getting your content scraped, since they were pulling in the scrapes from Google's search API & you couldn't block Mahalo doing that without blocking GoogleBot).
In the past when Matt Cutts wrote of such MFA scraper sites he described them as "shoot on sight" http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-webmasterradiofm/#commen...
"In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find."
And yet you have sympathy for Jason? Shows how powerful his public relations skills are! :D
I think not many people on HN realize (or probably are willing to admit) that This Week In Startups is the most interesting resource to learn from real experiences of fellow entrepreneurs, developers, etc. Mixergy is another interesting one, but the format of TWIST provides its viewers lots of insights and info that you simply can't get anywhere else on the web.
So not all Jason does is evil.
Just my two cents.