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.
Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
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Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Tec…
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 engage…
Great suggestion! I wholeheartedly agree with what you said, it is vastly superior to my second solution.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#43I thought we had banned polls asking if we should ban TechCrunch.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#44Being 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 sub…
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.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#45Here'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: Us…
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).
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#46whether you agree with it or not, if you're marketing a business it's still important to know whats in the news cycle.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#47Being 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 sub…
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.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#48If 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.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 once reported on pg's personal life. He threw the ban hammer at them the next day.
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.