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Not to diminish this problem, but do the people upvoting this realize how pwned they are by these journalists? The journalists know (1) HN is a giant pipe of p

by pg 15y ago

Not to diminish this problem, but do the people upvoting this realize how pwned they are by these journalists? The journalists know (1) HN is a giant pipe of page views, and (2) any story they write with new revelations about some misdeed by Curebit will be reflexively upvoted by enough users to rise high on the frontpage. And so they write said story, people upvote it as predicted, and this fluff is our news for the day. I usually err on the side of not killing stories criticizing startups we'd funded, but if this was about a startup we didn't fund I'd kill it in a second. (Though of course I wouldn't have to, because few would upvote such a story, which means no journalist would bother writing it.) So I'm going to bury it. I'd rather seem like I'm censoring bad news about startups we funded than let Venturebeat fill HN with crap like this.

jvandenbroeck 15y ago
Well I think people are interested in the story, it's like girls that like to watch a girls serie, like to gossip. That said the "tech" relevance of the story isn't that big & I feel bad for Curebit, I read DHH 's post on twitter about it yesterday & although they are making incredible stupid mistakes, one public flame is enough, they're also just trying to start a company.
- rhizome 15y ago
  I don't think this story's presence on VentureBeat indicates that "people are interested in the story."
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    82 upvotes says people are.
tptacek 15y ago
Please, then, don't be selective: ban the site. You ban lots of other sites. Venues that "pwn" HN shouldn't be allowed space on the front page. If they write something uncharacteristically excellent, someone is sure to blog it, and that person can collect the pageviews. Also, Venturebeat is far from the worst offender. At least they (ostensibly) have reporters.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Here's my favorite O'Dell article, from last March: http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/node-js/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/node-js/ I'm not going to say that her having written a decent article a year ago confers a ton of respectability on VentureBeat but it's not all bad.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    The "bad" at Venturebeat (and Torrentfreak and Techdirt) outweighs the good, even before you consider that a bad story is more harmful to HN than a good story is helpful. On those occasions where Venturebeat gets it right, someone will inevitably blog it. The blog posts won't get banned. People will find out about the article. Meanwhile, Venturebeat has that much less incentive to directly troll HN. I have zero illusions that Venturebeat is going to get banned. The incentives are wrong for Paul Graham. Venturebeat writes more positive stuff about YC companies than negative stuff. But if Graham is serious about Venturebeat trolling the site --- which it clearly does, all the time --- he shouldn't be choosy about pushing back on it.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- nicholasjbs 15y ago
  I agree. I'm in favor of banning any sites that consistently write linkbait like this. Anything exceptionally good will still find its way to HN.
- pg 15y ago
stouset 15y ago
Clearly this is the sort of story the Hacker News community finds interesting, worthwhile, and informative. If they did not, they would not have upvoted it. As you sow so you shall reap, and all that.
dpritchett 15y ago
From the HN submission guidelines [1]: 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. Curebit's follies definitely interest hackers in two ways: - How far is too far when 'Keeping It Lean'? - How important is design to startups? Off-Topic: ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Can't really prove a negative here, but this is certainly the sort of inside baseball that belongs on a startup-focused medium and not on broadcast television. Edit: It could be that this is the ballyhooed YC naughtiness [2] at work: Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] http://paulgraham.com/founders.html http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
- amirmc 15y ago
  The two questions you've asked are interesting. It would be nice to read some thoughtful posts on those topics. The article here does not try to tackle either of those questions.
stevefarnworth 15y ago
Yes, the story may be written in a slightly sensationalistic way to go along with current sentiment, but that's how most news, from all verticals and from most news sources from TV, newspaper and radio all the way to one person blogs, is presented in modern times. The fact is that this is an incredibly pertinent tale for startups, especially those launched by these high-profile programmes where the spotlight will be on from day one, and the lessons it brings, along with the negative publicity is extremely important. Sure, you can bury the story and say that it's the fault of the community (that YC has fostered itself, organically) for taking an interest in a story, that whilst presented as fluff, contains (as far as we can tell from the comments made by all parties) very solid facts that compound those in a current thread of news, but hey, it'll blow over soon.
staunch 15y ago
I think it'd be a lot better if you just killed submissions or banned sites outright. Burying submissions is as bad as if Google started manually tweaking search results. Google only deindexes webspam, they never manually adjust PageRank. People already think HN is a YC propaganda machine, which long time users know isn't true, and this kind of thing just fuels the conspiracy theories.

by pg 15y ago

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

Well I think people are interested in the story, it's like girls that like to watch a girls serie, like to gossip. That said the "tech" relevance of the story isn't that big & I feel bad for Curebit, I read DHH 's post on twitter about it yesterday & although they are making incredible stupid mistakes, one public flame is enough, they're also just trying to start a company.

rhizome 15y ago
I don't think this story's presence on VentureBeat indicates that "people are interested in the story."
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  82 upvotes says people are.

tptacek 15y ago

Please, then, don't be selective: ban the site. You ban lots of other sites. Venues that "pwn" HN shouldn't be allowed space on the front page. If they write something uncharacteristically excellent, someone is sure to blog it, and that person can collect the pageviews. Also, Venturebeat is far from the worst offender. At least they (ostensibly) have reporters.

dpritchett 15y ago
Here's my favorite O'Dell article, from last March: http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/node-js/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/node-js/ I'm not going to say that her having written a decent article a year ago confers a ton of respectability on VentureBeat but it's not all bad.
- tptacek 15y ago
  The "bad" at Venturebeat (and Torrentfreak and Techdirt) outweighs the good, even before you consider that a bad story is more harmful to HN than a good story is helpful. On those occasions where Venturebeat gets it right, someone will inevitably blog it. The blog posts won't get banned. People will find out about the article. Meanwhile, Venturebeat has that much less incentive to directly troll HN. I have zero illusions that Venturebeat is going to get banned. The incentives are wrong for Paul Graham. Venturebeat writes more positive stuff about YC companies than negative stuff. But if Graham is serious about Venturebeat trolling the site --- which it clearly does, all the time --- he shouldn't be choosy about pushing back on it.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
nicholasjbs 15y ago
I agree. I'm in favor of banning any sites that consistently write linkbait like this. Anything exceptionally good will still find its way to HN.
pg 15y ago

stouset 15y ago

Clearly this is the sort of story the Hacker News community finds interesting, worthwhile, and informative. If they did not, they would not have upvoted it. As you sow so you shall reap, and all that.

dpritchett 15y ago

From the HN submission guidelines [1]: 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. Curebit's follies definitely interest hackers in two ways: - How far is too far when 'Keeping It Lean'? - How important is design to startups? Off-Topic: ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Can't really prove a negative here, but this is certainly the sort of inside baseball that belongs on a startup-focused medium and not on broadcast television. Edit: It could be that this is the ballyhooed YC naughtiness [2] at work: Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] http://paulgraham.com/founders.html http://paulgraham.com/founders.html

amirmc 15y ago
The two questions you've asked are interesting. It would be nice to read some thoughtful posts on those topics. The article here does not try to tackle either of those questions.

stevefarnworth 15y ago

Yes, the story may be written in a slightly sensationalistic way to go along with current sentiment, but that's how most news, from all verticals and from most news sources from TV, newspaper and radio all the way to one person blogs, is presented in modern times. The fact is that this is an incredibly pertinent tale for startups, especially those launched by these high-profile programmes where the spotlight will be on from day one, and the lessons it brings, along with the negative publicity is extremely important. Sure, you can bury the story and say that it's the fault of the community (that YC has fostered itself, organically) for taking an interest in a story, that whilst presented as fluff, contains (as far as we can tell from the comments made by all parties) very solid facts that compound those in a current thread of news, but hey, it'll blow over soon.

staunch 15y ago

I think it'd be a lot better if you just killed submissions or banned sites outright. Burying submissions is as bad as if Google started manually tweaking search results. Google only deindexes webspam, they never manually adjust PageRank. People already think HN is a YC propaganda machine, which long time users know isn't true, and this kind of thing just fuels the conspiracy theories.