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Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

#41

Post by BobN »

midnightmonster wrote: post #29

I used to read codinghorror regularly. I'd like to think I've "graduated" (since some time ago now). Welcome all visitors from codinghorror. Also, I sort of find it hard to believe that Jeff's posts are as bad as all that, but I can't say from experience b/c I just don't click the links anymore.

If it wasn't for Jeff's recent posts I would not have known that HN even exists. I'm sure there are many more like me. Thanks for the welcome!

I read a lot of programming blogs and I'd say that the codinghorror content better than many. The size of his readership certainly bears that out. It's actually not really a programming blog anyway. It's mostly opinion pieces that are designed to provoke a response. One common response is that he's simply dismissed. Everyone's entitled to have their say.

Re: Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

#43

Post by peterhi »

midnightmonster wrote: post #35
peterhi wrote: post #26

You are not suggesting consorship. This a clearly well beyond suggestion. You want Codinghorror banned but you do not have the spine to say this outright, so you propose a poll to make yourself appear reasonable. Even your second point is baseless, "potentially bringing a new mass of users that will contribute very little to the website". Note the use of the word 'potentially', you know you have no evidence of this b…

Parent upvoted (from -1 to 0) b/c unsupported warnings of possible future harm really is a lousy way to carry out debate. OTOH, peterhi, I just skimmed your past comments: the negative karma isn't just b/c you say unpopular or off-topic things--it's also because you're mostly a jerk about it.

I have a way with words, mostly because people seem to miss the point if it is subtle. A slap in the face will get attention, a polite cough is all too easily ignored. The OP has basically called the readership of Codinghorror worthless and incapable of contributing to a site so elevated as HackerNews and if we could only ban Codinghorror from HackerNews then perhaps this flood of proles could be thwarted (and how is that supposed to work exactly? Do we get an injunction to stop Jeff sending his readers here?)

And I'm the jerk?

Re: Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

#46

Post by turtle3 »

tokenadult wrote: post #28
wynand wrote: post #18

I don't particularly like Codinghorror, but I'm not in favour of having it banned. I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains.

I would however like a mechanism to filter out stories from certain domains. The human eye can serve as that mechanism if the parenthetical label of the submitted article's domain is unique to one author or group of authors. (E.g., google.com as a source domain doesn't help me at all in filtering articles, but techcrunch.com does.) I read HN selectively, depending on what the source of submitted articles is. For the…

The whole point of technology is to eliminate mindless, repetitive tasks like looking at a domain, comparing it to our black-list, and ignoring it. Sure, it only takes a second, but how many times do you visit hn? How many articles do you have to parse before you have wasted time?

Letting hn users specify their own domain black-lists can be implemented trivially, and saves a ton of time, in aggregate. I agree with the grand-parent post.

Re: Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

#48

Post by bmj »

rglullis wrote: post #8
bdfh42 wrote: post #7

Jeff Atwood is only doing his job - promoting his blog and start-up. Doing a better job than most of us at that. Sure he gets things wrong but so what? If we were afraid of getting things wrong we would never publish anything - and would probably also never learn anything new.

It's not the "getting things wrong" that bothers me. I don't mind at all seeing flawed, but honest attempts of writing. What bothers me a lot is the whole attitude of shoot-first-ask-later. It causes excessive noise. He knows it, but he doesn't care , because it gets people talking about him. He tries to control the conversation by saturating the channel, and the one filter that we have (the community itself) will go…

I'm not sure the several posts a week constitute "saturating the channel." Jeff is hardly prolific as far as bloggers go.

Re: Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

#50

Post by rudle »

I was waiting for something like this to happen after reading Coding Horror this morning.

Everyone is scared of this site turning into to digg. The signal:noise is very good, and everyone appreciates that. I'm not sure banning stories from CH are going to help this matter, because the damage is already done. The cat is out of the bag, and Hacker News will either turn into digg, stay the same, or, most likely, settle at a happy middle-ground.

Hopefully there won't be any lolcats on the front page.

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