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Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

Doesnt the HN voting system kind of take care of this problem? If the tweet is low-quality, not important, then it wont get many upvotes.

But if the tweet is highly important, has information people believe is valuable etc - then it gets upvoted towards the top of HN.

An outright ban on tweets also creates a secondary problem; what if there was some single tweet that was extremely important to the HN community. The inability to post it means people miss out on the news/discussion, until later on when it is re-submitted as a news story elsewhere.

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That's one way to view it.

Personally, I think it works the opposite. The voting only gives the community so much power. Often the content starts dictating the community, not the other way around. With enough low effort and uninteresting content clogging up the chronological feed, you eventually see core- and power users migrating to other sites or communities. The community is eventually transplanted by those who seek out the kind of content that made the core community leave, perpetuating the new kind of content.

I've seen it happen to a lot of subreddits.

But...the community provides the content, too. It's not like submissions of Twitter posts just materialize out of the aether. They're made by HN users.

So if you want different content, answer the question: What are you providing?

I wouldn't say that the community provides the content. Some of it, yes, but anyone can provide content, be they passerby, lurker, or indeed part of the community. But generally, the lurkers vastly outnumber the participants. Therefore, the actual community has very little power in the face of the faceless and voiceless masses. hn is a pretty niche site, all things considered. Given a surge in popularity, an influx of new lurkers, you might see the type of link being upvoted change over night. Your voice is powerless, the vote decides everything, and the lurkers have 90% of the votes.

I've seen it happen on various subreddits too, but preventing that is not done by blanket banning Twitter. It's by moderating the content so that the easy to consume stuff doesn't overwhelm the thoughtful content. And I do believe moderation is the only way to ensure the issue doesn't arise where quality content gets drowned out because the quick and easy to consume content will gather upvotes far faster.

I agree with this.

This is asked for somewhat regularly as well as banning paywalled sites. It would be wrong to do so.

In general I think it's good to have the primary source be the linked posting. If that's a Twitter thread or an original price of journalism on a paywalled site, and its interesting to the HN community it should be linked here.

What the OP if suggesting is that the only Twitter threads that are submitted are submitted by the Twitter user themselves, that's a tiny proportion of posts. If someone sees a twitter thread that would be interesting to the HN community there is no other option but to post it.

Not anymore.

Last week we had an article about "Why babies cry" on the first page.

Exact title was "Why babies cry in the first three months, how to tell them apart, and what to do"

Exactly this. I don't click Twitter links myself and have considered taking the time to filter them out often. But I don't feel the need to impose that on others. Just because I think Twitter is a poor way to share and discuss information, and that the website is painful to use doesn't mean that I should deprive others.

Now an account-level domain filter. That would be a fantastic idea.

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