InfoWorld Noise

[jgrahamc]

Since I cruise the New page fairly regularly I've noticed that one user is submitting a lot of InfoWorld stories that rarely get voted up. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ccraigIW)

There are some gems there, but perhaps we should encourage this user to slow down a bit and submit less stories after considering which ones are likely to be a hit.

For example, there's a story on New right now about haptics (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400944) which reads like a press release that's been reformatted into a story. This has little value to HN.

In fact, it is a press release reformatted into a story: here's the press release http://www.sensable.com/pr_20081216OH3/news-press-detail.htm.

[icey]

I hate it when people register here and just start spamming submissions without ever commenting on anything. It seems like the people who actively participate in the community here are the ones most likely to have solid submissions.

On the other hand, this submitter seems like pure SEO BS.

[arockwell]

The best way to handle bad submissions is to simply ignore them, which is what seems to be already happening. Don't comment on them or vote them up.

[jgrahamc → arockwell]

Not true if the volume of submissions is high. The New page is fairly short and knowing that x% is automatically rubbish is very annoying.

[arockwell → jgrahamc]

Its certainly annoying, but telling a spammer to stop spamming is unlikely to work.

[trezor]

I find most InfoWorld content worthless. Either it's shallow or formatted over multiple pages you have to click your way trough and the site as a whole just doesn't seem to have much of substance at all.

Good job on confirming the press-release. I've had that suspicion for quite a few "articles" there.

[jgrahamc → trezor]

Here's my blog write up of the similarity between the article and the press release. It's pretty blatant: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/12/how-to-write-infoworld-artic...