Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

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.

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.

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?

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:

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/