Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181539

by eugenejen • 18 years ago

32 63 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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

goofygrin• 18 years ago

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 :)

tyohn• 18 years ago

Same here

dpapathanasiou• 18 years ago

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

wumi• 18 years ago

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

brlewis• 18 years ago

I 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• 18 years ago

Very true indeed - perhaps it would be better to have filters :-)

jnl• 18 years ago

kyro• 18 years ago

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.

danielha• 18 years ago

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.

jsdalton• 18 years ago

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.

simonseto• 18 years ago

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

xlnt4• 18 years ago

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

obelix• 18 years ago

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

piers• 18 years ago

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.

alex_c• 18 years ago

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.

prakash• 18 years ago

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

Mistone• 18 years ago

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

dmpayton• 18 years ago

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

xlnt4• 18 years ago

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

kirubakaran3• 18 years ago

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

huhtenberg2• 18 years ago

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.

gwc• 18 years ago

This capability is available as a third-party tool:

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

mcxx• 18 years ago

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".

kirubakaran3• 18 years ago

http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u...

mkull• 18 years ago

No.

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

sabat• 18 years ago

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

xlnt4• 18 years ago

Let's ban everything!

xlnt4• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

mosburger• 18 years ago

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.

mutex• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

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

The comments here are also good.

calvin• 18 years ago

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.

immad• 18 years ago

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

gojomo• 18 years ago

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.

simianstyle• 18 years ago

Yes, Arrington runs it like a tabloid.

xenoterracide• 18 years ago

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

chokosabe• 18 years ago

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

jrockway• 18 years ago

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.

jdavid• 18 years ago

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 --

aneesh• 18 years ago

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.

dusklight• 18 years ago

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!

noelchurchill• 18 years ago

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.

omfut• 18 years ago

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

christefano• 18 years ago

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.

matthewer• 18 years ago

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.

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

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.

phaedrus• 18 years ago

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.

techcrunch• 18 years ago

WTF?

thaumaturgy2• 18 years ago

Wasn't exactly a popular idea.

donwilson• 18 years ago

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 =)

eugenejen2• 18 years ago

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.

eugenejen2• 18 years ago

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".

_d4od• 18 years ago

No. What a stupid fucking post.

LKM• 18 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy2• 18 years ago

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'.

bluelu• 18 years ago

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)

Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles?

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