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Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

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Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#11

Post by xirium »

mark-t wrote: post #7

Maybe instead of trying to change everybody else's behavior, you could just solve the problem and move on. If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter. If you visit the front page, write a greasemonkey script. This is not a hard problem. I also subscribe to steve yegge's rss feed, raganwald's, jeff atwood's, joel spolsky's, paul graham's, xkcd's, TED's, and so on. It would be ludicrous to try to get people…

> If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter.

There's an easier technique with no code required. Access http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/ and list all of the terms that you don't want, for example, -alleyinsider -codinghorror -techcrunch ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... ). Then subscribe to the RSS.

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#12

Post by volida »

TC has many stories, if a TC story submitted to YC gets points it means it's worth it to read it.

If your "90% guess" is right, then if the story gets points in HN, then the fact that "is worth it for a read" is only increased.

I don't see where is the problem.

Oh, you know I guess the 10% reads Paul Buchheit blog, or 105% reads Paul Gragham essays from his site, 60% reads Philip Greenspun's blog, 25% reads Aaron Swartz blog. With the same logic no story should be submitted.

I am sure you are going to say but their posts are not subbmited every day. Well that's because they don't write so often something of general interest, which means that TC because of the fact that is writting too many stories they have higher potential of hitting something of general interest more often...

I don't see where is the problem

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#14

Post by BSeward »

mark-t wrote: post #7

Maybe instead of trying to change everybody else's behavior, you could just solve the problem and move on. If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter. If you visit the front page, write a greasemonkey script. This is not a hard problem. I also subscribe to steve yegge's rss feed, raganwald's, jeff atwood's, joel spolsky's, paul graham's, xkcd's, TED's, and so on. It would be ludicrous to try to get people…

I've put together a Yahoo Pipes mashup that filters TechCrunch stories. It's accessible at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1ML... ; you should be trivially able to look at its source and modify it to filter whatever sites you don't need. Easy and fun.

You should be able to subscribe to the RSS directly at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1MLe...

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#15

Post by tlrobinson »

In his book (The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership) Steven Sample (the president of my alma mater, USC) talks about how he doesn't read newspapers, but rather gets his news from his peers.

He figures they're a pretty good filter, and if anything important or interesting happens he'll hear about it through them.

I take a similar approach with Hacker News. You guys are my filter. 90% of TechCrunch articles are uninteresting to me, but the other 10% usually get posted to Hacker News.

Same with a lot of other sites. I prefer lots of niche blogs/news sites to the more mainstream and high traffic sites.

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#16

Post by nertzy »

I'd like to see the threshold for the front page raised just a bit. I think there are too many stories making it to the top, and personally I find it hard to assume a TC post is meaningful when it has a score of merely 4.

This is true for news from other sources by the way. I see the problem as an infoglut rather than any sort of predisposition towards one source over another.

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#17

Post by mhartl »

I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed

I'd guess it's much less than that. I used to have TC in my feed, but there were so many articles it was hard to keep up. I've found that, at least relative to my interests, the signal-to-noise ratio at TechCrunch is too low; Hacker News is my filter for picking out the signal.

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#18

Post by jonknee »

rms wrote: post #6

Techcrunch posts NEWS . About software startups. They are the preeminent news source and incredibly relevant here, even when they are talking more general business (like Yahoo/Microsoft) Get used to it and please stop complaining, at this point it is just annoying because Techcrunch is not going to be banned. There are greasemonkey scripts to filter out domains from this site if you never want to see Techcrunch again…

> They are the preeminent news source

Except when Mashable writes about something first and TechCrunch refuses to follow.

Re: Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

#19

Post by dbrush »

There seems to be a growing trend of proclamations and conjectures against the quality and quantity of items on this site. However, I'll dissent and say that I'd rather see more activity around those items than items like this discussing how there aren't enough of the right kind of items..
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