Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

47 pointsrgarcia48 comments

Lately it seems like every article I read on TC devolves into some sort of speculation or gossip. I can't help but feel like the quality of HN goes down a little bit every time one of these articles gets to the front page. For example, currently #1 on the front page is a completely tabloid-esque TC article about Google making counteroffers to key employees getting courted by Twitter. It's almost like the "who's dating who" section in US Magazine.

Certainly I find some of the content on TC useful (for example, launch announcements), but I feel like a lot would be gained if the median TC article just never showed up on HN.

Thoughts?

View on HN

No, if only because it still (occasionally) breaks interesting startup news. Most of the articles are either speculation or outright flaming (Arrington, I'm looking at you), but there are some nuggets that would be lost if we banned it altogether. Instead, I'd simply recommend the community flag less substantive submissions, and let the mods sort it out.

We've been there, done that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625255

Anything that isn't spam shouldn't be "banned". It's all down to what people vote up. If people are voting up TechCrunch stories as opposed to flagging them, that's your poll result right there in real life action rather than indignant votes.

Good point. Although I would say that TC from two years ago is a lot different than TC today. I guess I submitted this in the same spirit as pg's ominous "How to prevent the decline of HN" post earlier this week. Maybe drastic times call for drastic measures?

Perhaps, but let's say this poll gets 500 votes "for" blocking TechCrunch and 300 against. What would that tell us? That there's a legion of TechCrunch fans/upvoters whose opinion matters less than a legion of TechCrunch detractors?

If so, is dismissing the opinion of people who actively vote up stories on HN a way to prevent the "decline"? I don't have an answer to these questions but if it comes down to blocking Web sites that are relevant to HN's gamut of topics, the answers could be important.

We shouldn't avoid paring stuff out to avoid the possibility of missing something. There's way too much news out there to take that approach, and the really big stuff generally gets posted multiple places.

Part of the problem is that HN's "gamut of topics", as you put it, has gotten too wide. There are lots of general tech news sites out there, this shouldn't be another. This is a narrowly focused community.

There are two ways to think about this.

First, there is a saying, "The state of a nation will never be better than the sum of the state of each one of its individuals." If the awareness of the people on HN is not enough to automatically cause content like TechCrunch to be excluded, maybe we deserve to see such content until we work to increase awareness.

Second, maybe it is non-core or new users of HN who vote up TechCrunch articles. Maybe we should take into consideration the opinion of the people who really care about HN and who know the business (and TechCrunch) better than the rest, and if they say the community will benefit if TechCrunch is banned then it should be.

Point 1 - agreed. To counter this, regulars need to spend more time in /newest setting a good example with their votes. I subscribe to the "HN firehose" on Twitter for this reason. It's amazing, though, how much good stuff gets stuff in the low single digits because people just don't happen to be looking there.

Point 2 - sure, but that introduces a layer of authority that is, at present, well hidden and rarely engaged. Perhaps instead of the deus ex machina solution of arbitrarily coming up with policies or bans, the voting system should be improved. I'd suggest that there's enough of a userbase here nowadays to stop, say, people with under X karma or Y days of HN membership from voting without causing a negative impact. This sort of algorithmic solution appeals to me more than potentially erroneous and biased decision making by committee any day.

Great suggestion! I wholeheartedly agree with what you said, it is vastly superior to my second solution.

While the site guidelines (see below) classifies general news as off-topic, I believe tech news sites like TC needs a higher level of votes before showing up on the front page.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

A regular topic on HN over the years. Let's keep this thread simple. They're not going to be banned from HN. HN's link to YC is so overt that it doesn't even make sense to think of it as a "conflict of interest"; HN is a favor YC is doing you. YC isn't going out of its way to alienate a key PR channel.

I don't like TechCrunch. At all. I think the answer to dealing with the egregious TC stuff is simply to flag it and get on with your life.

Being inundated with techcrunch articles is just a symptom of the real problem: there's no cost to submit articles, and there's potentially major karma in being first to submit an article that other people will also submit. Therefore, some people will submit anything they think others will, just to be first. These duplicate submissions also upvote the articles, pushing out better ones.

One option would be to make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment. I suspect the quality of posts on the frontpage would improve overnight, as interesting posts wouldn't fall off the frontpage within an hour, drowned out by gossip.

make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment

Love this idea.

This won't weed out TechCrunch submissions because they are usually upvoted above average. But the idea of charging against Karma is sound -- inferior submission incurs a certain "collective" cost to the HN audience and hence must be paid for. Only downside, as many have mentioned before, is that this turns the focus to Karma.

Part of their upvotes are implicit submission upvotes, though. While not all their upvotes, it often gives them the 10 or so they need to actually stick on the front page.

I don't think it'd turn the focus to karma too much (does anybody really care about karma?), but it would almost certainly improve the signal:noise ratio.

One of the great things about HN is how organic it is in nature. HN is loosely about startups and hacking, but really it's about what people in the startup/hacking world find interesting.

HN is self moderating (or rather community moderated). If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them. If HN starts banning websites because some people don't like them then it takes the power away from the community and then you are on a slippery slope of moderated content and a world of approval conflicts and power struggles.

You or I might not agree with every post on HN but we have the power to not vote, or if you've contributed enough to downvote.

Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.

A moderated HN is one I would not use.

>" If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them."

That's an excellent recipe for the Lowest Common Denominator. Welcome to the internet, where it is September all the time.

This isn't a mass market site. The lowest common denominator on Hacker News should be orders of magnitude above the mean. If you think a cabal of top users should curate the content, that's cool, but that's a different idea to be discussed.

I very much agree with you, but the threshold to downvote must be pretty damn high if I haven't reached it. That needs to be lowered. If you have greater than 2k in karma and an average karma score greater than two you belong here. Tech Crunch has some great articles but they also pump out first-to-rumor ones at an alarming pace. If more of us could downvote it wouldn't be a problem.

I see this argument emerge on every "community" site after it crosses a threshold, and consider it disingenuous.

If a small self moderating community of stamp collectors posted a few articles of interest to letter writers, word spread, and letter writers joined the community at a ratio of 10:1 till only letter writing articles hit the front page, the only thing this argument would prove is that the one making it is probably a letter writer.

You're right though, if stamp collectors don't like the letter writing articles, they don't have to vote for them. Doesn't matter much--their stamp collecting community is "organic" and "community moderated".

HN is already moderated (subtly), and there are indeed sites that cannot be linked to from here.

The main problem is every Techcrunch headline is crafted as linkbait while the articles themselves contain no actual information other than financial details.

Whats wrong with linkbait? It's how you get traffic.

If you run an advertising based company then its essential to get traffic. The linkbait certainly gets their articles to the top of HN. The more votes it gets the more traffic it gets.

Our role as ad blind superusers is to redistribute content that we intensely like or intensely dislike so that TC can reach non-adblind users so someone will click their ads. Linkbait works admirably in getting this process started. The point of TC is not information dissemination it's to make something as boring as employees at Twitter giving hiring information to Google interesting. Facts are boring, editorial is what gets content read.

If an article only contains financial details, gossip, unverifiable rumor, or rambling incoherent editorials, then I don't think it belongs at the top of HN. Linkbait headlines are how TC articles get there.

Maybe some smart HNer can make a Chrome/FF/whatever plugin like Google's Personal Blocklist for HN? I'd like to be able to just not see certain links without forcing that moderation decision on the entire community.

I don't think any domain should be blocked.

Feel free to post any link, the community will decide.

Tell that to pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044

To be fair the majority of those sites are spam sites, but I see Valleywag as a notable/relevant exception.

Valleywag doesn't exist anymore as an independent site so its ban is now meaningless.

Valleywag once reported on pg's personal life. He threw the ban hammer at them the next day.

The valleywag ban was also put to a vote: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160704

Yo, seiji. You're wrong: http://m.gawker.com/379498/yahoo-millionaire-paul-graham-sec...

They reported about pg's personal life after the ban (which went into place April 11, 2008).

Try not to make up your own facts next time.

I think we need more good content to encourage the culture of makers we want (e.g. regular "erlang days"). Banning junk sites is helpful, but probably not as much.

Here's an idea that could address a lot of complaints here, and potentially be kind of fun:

Add an extra personal setting where you can input urls of javascript files that you'd like your home page to link to. All that news.arc has to do is drop these includes (just the reference, not the actual content) somewhere in the final html that gets returned.

For example, my version of the home page would have this in it:

  <script src="http://mydomain.com/myscript.js"/>

Users would be free to make any updates they want to their own DOM, such as blacklisting unwanted domains. People could also share useful code snippets.

If this gets enough votes here I'll repost it on the features page (which looks surprisingly stale, are we still using this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363).

There's a (very popular) Firefox extension that already lets you do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

The only downside of greasemonkey is that you have to install it on each browser you use. By bolting it into news.arc it would always be there (assuming you're logged in).

The upside is that it works on more sites than HN. I've customized most of the sites I visit regularly, but mostly only cosmetic things like colors and font-sizes.

No, explicitly banning whole websites seems like a brute-force way of preventing bad content from getting submitted/upvoted on hacker news. I think it's better to modify the mechanics of the community so that inappropriate articles get filtered out, rather than banning sites wholesale.

As far as TC goes, I think some people are unnecessarily picking on it at the moment. There's no reason to give it special consideration over every other website on the internet, it's not really that terrible, even if the consensus is that it has gone downhill.

As far as banning websites goes, you're removing choice, and I think it would go against the spirit of an open and free community.

If people don't like the content, it won't get upvoted (bots and unscrupulous characters notwithstanding).

1. If a bad TechCrunch article makes it to the top, is it because the karma system of HN needs refinement to mitigate perverse incentives?

2. Instead of a ban, would it be better if HN users slightly change the way they read articles or can HN show top X comments with each article title?

E.g. for 1., even though if a user writes a negative comment about an article, he/she may be inclined to upvote the article so that his/her comment is read resulting in an unsavory article gaining much attention.

E.g. for 2., a HN reader sensing a tabloid article from the header can go to the comments page first. Or better still, if HN can be tuned to just show top X comments, then would it solve the issue?

Even though the quality has degraded, there's no doubting it still gets exclusives and is still one of the premier sources for startup info, seems to early too write it off entirely.

No, I'd hate to have to read Techcrunch itself. Reading it through the HN filter makes it much more useful.

If anything should be banned it's polls on HN (lol, well some are interesting).

The thing is, why ban any article, as long as the votes for it are organic the best will rise to the top and the worst will be hidden anyway.

Banning TC articles is equivalent to the Red Cross refusing gay people's blood donations.

It's a very general (and wasteful) solution to a very specific problem. TC articles are undeniably insightful on some occasions.

I'm not a big fan of TC either but they earned their position and users are sharing their stories. Help the community promote other points of views instead, but arguing against them just gives them more relevance.

I thought we had banned polls asking if we should ban TechCrunch.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625313

Of course most of us read TechCrunch as well, but the discussion I always find most valuable. Discussion that is not had on the post itself

This is like the time someone on Metafilter suggested banning Cracked articles.

whether you agree with it or not, if you're marketing a business it's still important to know whats in the news cycle.

No, it is up to us to self moderate.

If the HN community starts upvoting gossipy TechCrunch articles, the community has deteriorated and the focus should be on rebuilding that. Banning TechCrunch would be treating the symptom and bring the community into more rapid decline, introducing an era of elitist censorship and immediately alienating core constituents.

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