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Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles?
I think most users here read Techcrunch frequently. Shall we just ban submissions linked to Techcrunch? We can have room for more interesting stuffs.
- piers 18y agoDon't bite the hand that feeds you. I know that some people find Mr Arrington very annoying etc, but a lot of people read TC and he does generate a lot of traffic towards the target, even if what he writes isn't nice.
- goofygrin 18y agoI actually don't read TC. I'd rather have the knowledgeable folk on here upmod a good TC article, then I'll read it. Crowdsourcing my reading :)
- tyohn 18y agoSame here
- dpapathanasiou 18y agoI agree, but I'd also like to have the ability to down-vote submissions.
- wumi 18y agoconsidering that TC employees regularly check news.yc it's plausible to assume they automatically upvote all TC stories.
- create_account 18y agoYeah, which is why you should be able to downmod.
- humanlever 18y agoIf you add in the ability to downmod submissions this place will rapidly turn into Digg. i.e. An environment where a handful of people control the majority of the information. As far as excluding TC content goes, while I could live without it, think about the number of AWESOME discussions that would have killed in the past, then ask yourself if that's what you want for the future.
- xirium 18y agoA handful of people already control the majority of the information on this forum. ValleyWag posted a flurry of articles which were counter to YCombinator interests and now ValleyWag articles are automatically posted with the dead attribute. The same scenario could happen with TechCrunch.
- brlewis 18y agoI occasionally skim TC to find articles about photo sharing, since that's related to my startup and possibly not as interesting for other news.yc readers. I mostly find interesting non-photo-sharing TC articles by seeing them rise up on news.yc.
- samratjp 18y agoVery true indeed - perhaps it would be better to have filters :-)
- jnl 18y ago+1
- kyro 18y agoAs much as people bag on Techcrunch, with many times said bagging being justified, I find that it's one of my main sources for startup news. They tend to cover a lot of startups that I wouldn't hear otherwise from other sources, probably runner up being Mashable. You guys have to remember that they are writers, so it's in their nature to write stuff that's interesting and conspiratorial, granted this can come at the price of accuracy, but that's where the community here can filter and chime in. But inaccuracies of specifics aside, I still think it's a great source.
- danielha 18y agoMore room? Is there some submission/day limit I'm not aware of? It might be that most read TC, and it might also be true that most read it through here.
- jsdalton 18y agoI like Techcrunch. I can't keep up with it though, they just publish so many articles, and I don't have time for all of them. I count on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. to tell me which ones are worth the read, so I vote no.
- simonseto 18y agoYes. I like the unique interesting stuff Hacker News aggregates. Techcrunch is like fast food these days.
- xlnt 18y agoshould fast food joints be banned? just because you don't like something isn't adequate argument to ban it.
- obelix 18y agoNo please. The comments here on TC articles is very interesting. The comments on TC often are trolling and add no value.
- alex_c 18y agoI would say no. I do read Techcrunch, but I very rarely read the comments there. The important articles do find their way on News.YC, and I'd rather read 20 insightful comments here than 100 spammy comments there.
- prakash 18y agoUnlikely to happen, since YC companies get so much coverage from TechCrunch....
- Mistone 18y agowell said they definitely scratch YC's back and are a key media outlet for startups. I get a bit annoyed seeing every TC article on YC but oh well
- dmpayton 18y agoNo. I don't read TC that often (or at all, really), so I get use out of having the better articles posted here. techcrunch != valleywag
- xlnt 18y agoso you're saying you read valleywag often? :)
- kirubakaran 18y agoInstead of banning any website, pg can enable down-votes just for posts from websites that are brought up for ban.
- huhtenberg 18y agoA personalized blacklist would be nice. I.e. a submission with a blacklisted URL won't even be visible on my front page unless its score is over a configurable threshold.
- gwc 18y agoThis capability is available as a third-party tool: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173581
- huhtenberg 18y agoGreat, thanks, but - no. (a) it doesn't exactly do what I want it to (b) it's a third party (officially unsupported) extension (c) GreaseMonkey itself is just too much of a security risk. PS. I did upmod your post though :)
- Xichekolas 18y agoAs the 'third party' that wrote this, I have to ask: (a) What else do you want it to do? I'm bored and willing to add to it. (b) Is it so mission critical you need official support? I'll gladly sell you a support contract for $100/yr. That will buy you piece of mind that if PG ever changes the html structure of the page, I'll update my GM script accordingly. (c) Don't install scripts without looking at the source first. I posted mine for all to see. PS. I'm serious about (a) ... I'll gladly work on it for fun.
- kirubakaran 18y ago> I'm bored and willing to add to it Kind of unrelated request: Can you write a GM script that displays a red envelope like in Reddit, if someone replies to any of my comments? Thanks for the blacklist btw. Very useful. And your cross site GET via image request is interesting. How about multiple requests when the data doesn't fit (with an end-of-requests marker)
- mcxx 18y agoA bit OT, but what I like about this thread: PG didn't even react, the community decided what is best. And the title is wrong - it should be "Ask HN" not "Ask PG".
- kirubakaran 18y agohttp://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-ui.html http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u...
- mkull 18y agoNo. Too much noise to read TC directly. I prefer to see the noteworthy posts show up here.
- sabat 18y agoWhat harm is Techcrunch doing here on HN? None that I can see. (Valleywag may be another matter.)
- xlnt 18y agoLet's ban everything!
- mosburger 18y agoI've been pretty critical of the content of TechCrunch articles in the past, but I'd never suggest an outright ban on them for any reason (either volume or content). If we really believe in crowd-sourcing, then any issue with any content provider, TechCrunch or otherwise, should correct itself if the collective group thinks that it's becoming a problem. Artificial, arbitrary bans shouldn't be necessary.
- mutex 18y ago'Ban' is a very strong word. Maybe there should just be a handicap that rates TC articles 'lower', that way if the article is good it can be rated up, but the ones nobody cares about will trickle down
- Jesin 18y agoNo, don't ban them. I only read TC articles when they show up here. The comments here are also good.
- calvin 18y agoI agree. Hacker News acts as a good filter, and the comments here are generally higher quality than what one sometimes finds on TechCrunch. No point in banning it -- some of their stories are worth reading.
- immad 18y agoNope. Dont like the idea for the reasons mentioned by others.
- gojomo 18y agoI would rather ban TechCrunch inlinks to News.YC. Every mention of News.YC there means an incremental merging of that community into this one, meaning here becomes more like there.
- simianstyle 18y agoYes, Arrington runs it like a tabloid.
- xenoterracide 18y agoI'm still more interested in having the number of upvotes required to get somthing in the rss be increased, having 1 other person finding something interesting isn't enough. 3 or 4 should be about right
- chokosabe 18y agoNo. Thats a daft suggestion. This site acts as a filter for the more popular techcrunch articles.
- jrockway 18y agoNo it doesn't. The techcrunch shills submit and upmod (multiple times) every techcrunch article. Techcrunch's writing style is terrible, and the articles are usually hearsay and completely unresearched. In the words of a famous kitten: DO NOT WANT.
- jdavid 18y agoon those wire photo contests, you can count up votes and down votes separately. what if you could filter by: -- x up votes -- -- y down votes -- -- x/y ratio --
- aneesh 18y agoThe "more room" argument is silly. The techcrunch articles aren't just "taking up room", they're on the main page because people are voting them up. People like them more than the articles that aren't being voted up.
- dusklight 18y agoHonestly Techcrunch is such a tabloid. You know when I first started frequenting this board, it was because of links that would challenge my existing understanding of coding and teach me something new, or thought-provoking questions challenging the establishment party-line, such as needing to go to a name-brand college or even going to college in order to be successful. How is reading about the latest trials and tribulations of Microsoft and Yahoo any different from reading about the latest exploits of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus? Less gossip more ideas please!
- noelchurchill 18y agoI vote to NOT ban it. I stopped following tc because the best tc articles always floated to the top here on HN, and I didn't need to sort through the riffraff myself.
- omfut 18y agoNo. Techcrunch is a good source of technology and startup news. I agree sometime there is too much of fabricated stories and rumor stuff. Nevertheless, techcrunch does an amazing job of introducing new startups. I guess it acts like an advertisement platform for many of the YC startups. As long as we can control the submission on YC through voting, it’s good to submit techcrunch article
- christefano 18y agoYes, please. I appreciate that Arrington has solicited feedback here at news.ycombinator.com, but that in itself doesn't make TechCrunch articles any more useful. If TechCrunch isn't banned, please mod the system so that links to TechCrunch start out with a negative point value and can be modded up.
- matthewer 18y agoWhy are we banning any sources? You never know where any good news/information is going to come from. It just seems pretty silly to me.
- TrevorJ 18y agoI actually like my tech crunch filtered through the great minds that make up the YC community. I also find value in the commentary that gets made here regarding the tech crunch articles that do make it to the front page.
- phaedrus 18y agoWhy not just add a small negative weight to all articles that come from an address which isn't unique? For instance if someone discovers XKCD for the first time and submits 20 of them, sure they're great but presumably once you've seen one you could navigate the rest of the site on your own. So add a little automatic downmod to the other 19 submissions because it wasn't a unique site. It would alleviate the techcrunch problem and similar ones without actually banning anything.
- techcrunch 18y agoWTF?
- thaumaturgy 18y agoWasn't exactly a popular idea.
- donwilson 18y agoLooks like Arrington is taking the active step and banning Hacker News: http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/804383391 http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/804383391 Good thing I don't frequent this site =)
- eugenejen 18y agoI can't believe he said that. But I personally had several arguments with Mike Arrington before on his Techcrunch blog comments. (Mostly regarding to Music business model and one of the startup that I worked before) So I am really sorry to PG and other HN members that my submission causing such a big trouble. I learned from a friend before that most law school students may take an oath in not telling a lie due to their special status in society. I hope Mike is not really taking this one seriously. My deep apology to PG.
- eugenejen 18y agoI did not know this one post attracts so many replies. I did not mean it to be a troll to promote my own karma. I was a bit annoyed this morning when I saw a lot of top 30 articles are from Techcrunch on Yahoo! Microsoft deals. I felt I am not here to read Techcrunch but some other rare stuffs that other members feeling interesting. And I am sorry that I can't modify the title of the post after I submitted it. Yes, it should be a question to "Ask HN:" instead of "Ask PG".
- schammy 18y agoNo. What a stupid fucking post.
- LKM 18y agoYes. Not becuase I read it, but because I don't want to read it. I'm always disappointed when an interesting-sounding article ends up linking to a pointless Techcrunch rant.
- thaumaturgy 18y agoNobody bothered to mention that Michael Arrington gave a lot of us a pretty useful talk, for free, at Startup School '08. (And after getting hosed by Bezos, no less.) Just sayin'.
- bluelu 18y agoNo, I don't read techcrunch. But I think PG should cluster new stories to filter out similar stories. (Such that there isn't a new story on Microsoft/Yahoo, Xobni each day on hacker news)