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There seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.

by baobun 1y ago

viraptor 1y ago
In August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall." Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.
- tomhow 1y ago
  The main issue is the (sometimes) hard signup wall. I've been a moderator on HN for longer than 404media has existed, and I know from experience that this changes from time to time or article to article. Other paywalled sites that appear on HN (WSJ, NYT etc) have a porous paywall; you can (almost) always get around it by using an archive site like Archive.today. If it's a good article (contains significant new information and can be a topic of curious conversation) and a paywall workaround works for that article, we'll happily allow it.
  - phonon 1y ago
    If they do their own, original, investigative reporting, you may want to be a bit more permissive.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      Since HN doesn't really facilitate any workarounds anyway and we've been doing manual archive links and content reposting as needed in other cases... I suspect we can handle 404 as well as a community.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    Even porous paywalls can have a marked effect on story performance on HN. The New York Times tightened its paywall markedly in August 2019, with a net effect that appearances in the top-30 stories on HN's front-page archive (the "Past" links in the site header) fell to ~25% of their previous level. I'd asked dang at the time if HN had changed any of its own processes at the time. Apparently not. I suspect then that this reflects frustrations and/or inability to access posted articles behind the paywall. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (July 2023)

There seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.

by baobun 1y ago

There seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.

viraptor 1y ago

In August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall." Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.

tomhow 1y ago
The main issue is the (sometimes) hard signup wall. I've been a moderator on HN for longer than 404media has existed, and I know from experience that this changes from time to time or article to article. Other paywalled sites that appear on HN (WSJ, NYT etc) have a porous paywall; you can (almost) always get around it by using an archive site like Archive.today. If it's a good article (contains significant new information and can be a topic of curious conversation) and a paywall workaround works for that article, we'll happily allow it.
- phonon 1y ago
  If they do their own, original, investigative reporting, you may want to be a bit more permissive.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Since HN doesn't really facilitate any workarounds anyway and we've been doing manual archive links and content reposting as needed in other cases... I suspect we can handle 404 as well as a community.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  Even porous paywalls can have a marked effect on story performance on HN. The New York Times tightened its paywall markedly in August 2019, with a net effect that appearances in the top-30 stories on HN's front-page archive (the "Past" links in the site header) fell to ~25% of their previous level. I'd asked dang at the time if HN had changed any of its own processes at the time. Apparently not. I suspect then that this reflects frustrations and/or inability to access posted articles behind the paywall. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (July 2023)