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Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#21

Post by fleitz »

dstein wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#23

Post by teyc »

petercooper wrote: post #8

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.

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

Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#25

Post by petercooper »

Hawramani wrote: post #17
petercooper wrote: post #8

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.

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 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.

Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#27

Post by ktsmith »

seiji wrote: post #14
rgarcia wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

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

Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#29

Post by ericd »

petercooper wrote: post #15
rgarcia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 We…

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.

Re: Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

#30

Post by dstein »

fleitz wrote: post #21
dstein wrote: post #18

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. Linkbai…

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.
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