

Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles? - eugenejen

I think most users here read Techcrunch frequently. Shall we just ban submissions linked to Techcrunch? We can have room for more interesting stuffs.
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goofygrin
I 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 :)

~~~
dpapathanasiou
I agree, but I'd also like to have the ability to down-vote submissions.

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wumi
considering that TC employees regularly check news.yc it's plausible to assume
they automatically upvote all TC stories.

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create_account
Yeah, which is why you should be able to downmod.

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humanlever
If 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
A 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.

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obelix
No please. The comments here on TC articles is very interesting. The comments
on TC often are trolling and add no value.

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kyro
As 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.

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jsdalton
I 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.

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dusklight
Honestly 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!

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prakash
Unlikely to happen, since YC companies get so much coverage from
TechCrunch....

~~~
Mistone
well 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

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kirubakaran
Instead of banning any website, pg can enable down-votes just for posts from
websites that are brought up for ban.

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huhtenberg
A 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.

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gwc
This capability is available as a third-party tool:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173581>

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huhtenberg
Great, 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 :)

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Xichekolas
As 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
_> 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)

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mcxx
A 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".

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mosburger
I'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.

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christefano
Yes, 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.

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alex_c
I 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.

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Jesin
No, don't ban them. I only read TC articles when they show up here.

The comments here are also good.

~~~
calvin
I 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.

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phaedrus
Why 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.

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danielha
More 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.

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chokosabe
No. Thats a daft suggestion. This site acts as a filter for the more popular
techcrunch articles.

~~~
jrockway
No 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.

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mkull
No.

Too much noise to read TC directly. I prefer to see the noteworthy posts show
up here.

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donwilson
Looks like Arrington is taking the active step and banning Hacker News:
<http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/804383391>

Good thing I don't frequent this site =)

~~~
eugenejen
I 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.

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aneesh
The "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.

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piers
Don'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.

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xenoterracide
I'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

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mutex
'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

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eugenejen
I 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".

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immad
Nope. Dont like the idea for the reasons mentioned by others.

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omfut
No. 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

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matthewer
Why 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.

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TrevorJ
I 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.

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gojomo
I 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.

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bluelu
No, 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)

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LKM
Yes. 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.

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noelchurchill
I 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.

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kirubakaran
[http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-
with-u...](http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-ui.html)

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dmpayton
No.

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
so you're saying you read valleywag often? :)

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simonseto
Yes. I like the unique interesting stuff Hacker News aggregates. Techcrunch is
like fast food these days.

~~~
xlnt
should fast food joints be banned? just because you don't like something isn't
adequate argument to ban it.

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simianstyle
Yes, Arrington runs it like a tabloid.

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techcrunch
WTF?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Wasn't exactly a popular idea.

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jdavid
on 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 --

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thaumaturgy
Nobody 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'.

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xlnt
Let's ban everything!

~~~
xlnt
ok guys it's not that amazing. stop upvoting this and write a better comment
please.

edit: they keep upvoting it. i feel like gail wynand.

~~~
rms
Banning is hard... let's go shopping?

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sabat
What harm is Techcrunch doing here on HN? None that I can see. (Valleywag may
be another matter.)

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schammy
No. What a stupid fucking post.

