Why are these on HN? Bloomberg seems omnipresent and todays top story "The Dying Mall's New Lease on Life: Apartments". This seems like spam and since Bloomberg is behind a paywall (after a couple of reads) why is this at the top?
Can someone explain this to me?
Bloomberg has around 20k HN listings[1], of which a majority are around technical topics or relating to scientific/technical topics i.e patents or law which are valuable to HN community, granted some of them are duplicates and possibly spam but I wouldn't rule out clicking on one.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=bloomberg.com&res...
Paywalls with workarounds are ok. People post workarounds in the threads. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
No idea why Facebook's technical blog is included in the list since it's exactly what HN is.
And the Economist I'd hardly call Mass Media.
And complaining about paywals has been explained many times before. And should be downvoted since it's explicitly against the rules.
Trouble is, the comments will only be on this site unless the comments link is pasted on other websites and there's a risk of the comments box itself being closed because of it being flagged and dead.
That part I can help with: HN has a policy that paywalled content is okay as long as it's a soft paywall and there's a way to bypass it. AFAIK that's what the "web" button is there for, even if in my case it has not worked even once.
Edit: taking them both out.
Edit: got pushback on 'past' so put it back. 'web' is still toast.
The Bloomberg story is interesting to this cohort as many people pay a ton of money for it and thus are interested in seeing how it might be disrupted.
And why would paywall deter a group of techies? Getting around them is trivial.
This extension will filter stories from domains that - per november 2015 - had more than than 2500 submitted stories but less than 40% had more than 3 votes. Domains with usergenerated content (as github.com or youtube.com) are not included.
Is this censoring?
- No, this is a way of limiting domains with a high amount of noise.If you do have any evidence, such as links to posts that you think "get on the frontpage" with "managed accounts", you should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. It's highly unlikely that the Economist or Bloomberg are trying to game HN. There are plenty of voting rings but the ones we've seen come from quite different places.
I think it's lock-down. a lot of people have lots of time now, either they lost their job or are now struggling even more than previously. They are being sucked into the hell of MSM trying to fill their time.
can't blame people for tuning into weak content - it's a form of escape which leads to more such content getting eye-balls and ultimately being submitted and upvoted.
it's not all bad. People now maybe read things they never paid attention to before. I now also see a lot more links to arts and the humanities being shared.
it's easy to just ignore something that doesn't match my interest. weak content hardly ever makes it past 100 upvotes and doesn't stay long. the best way to combat this is to find and share great things yourself. after all the quality of this site depends on what everyone here submits