Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.”
After 20 hours of voting, 60% of the 400+ people who voted said yes to the ban. One commenter writes “Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man.”
Based on the voting, Hacker News then banned them from the site.
Hacker News is still in the honeymoon period – it hasn’t yet attracted such a large readership that the trolls have taken up permanent residence. After mentioning them a couple of times and seeing comments asking me to please stop writing about them, I asked the community if they’d prefer I didn’t mention them. The responses were mixed.
It’s clear that the site is aiming for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, so it’s no surprise that they are thinking of banning the toxic wasteland known as Valleywag. The question is, will larger sites, hoping to avoid the Valleywag trolls, begin to ban them, too?
I think that they should. I hate gossip.
What strikes me as weird is that even though the people on Hacker News seem to be a very intelligent bunch, some of them are unable to ignore or vote down stories they don’t like the sound of.
ValleyWag stories aren’t that common on the front page. It’s certainly nothing like the proliferation of politics on Reddit (once very ‘clean’ like Hacker News – and a development which was one of the key drivers behind the sub-Reddits). The community is small enough and intelligent enough at this point to, I hope, use intelligence rather than censorship.
I think Hacker News is a great source to see whats really going on not only in Silicon Valley but across the entire Web 2.0 landscape. Yes, I’ll admit they aren’t as cleaned up and put together as other sites. Thats the point! There is always mixed reactions about Hacker News and many have even accused Michael of just copying and pasting news from there. All and All Hacker News is a far better site then Valley Wag.
yeah ban em. You shouldn’t over them either on TC. In fact what would happen if the large blogs and social news sites banned them?
Whats the saying, theres no such thing as bad press or something.
you are talking about them here and they will get traffic from it.
It is already done.
http://news.yco.../item?id=161031
I think this is slightly misleading as it’s a niche community who’s news aggregator caters for a particular niche also, ergo Valleywag rumours are not really relevant their small corner of the universe. In a wider scope for something say like Techmeme, Digg, or Reddit, it’s more relevant that a broad mix of story matter is included to appeal to the interested segment of the wider wider audience.
I don’t have a lot of time for Valleywag, I read it for a while and it was like reading the Sun (UK folk will understand), most of it is over-sensationalized or misreported bollocks from what I could tell.
Valleywag isn’t a tech news site, it is a gossip site about internet celebrities. I don’t even understand why Valleywag stories would ever show up on Hacker News.
Valleywag died when Owen started going after people on a very personal level. He sold out his talents for page views with written posts i KNOW he wouldn’t have the sack to say in person to his targets (i.e., Salim Ismail).
Kevin, thanks, reworked the post.
In fact what would happen if the large blogs and social news sites banned them?
news is good
why is this a post?
“Tyranny of the democracy” – uh, that’s supposed to be ‘majority’.
Besides that, the comment makes zero sense. Is he for or against VW? The quote appears in the context who said ‘yes’ to the ban, and then goes about building ‘constitutions’, not ‘institutions’, in private, by great minds, etc.
The comment is just spam, right?
Let’s have a vote here whether to ban stories from the vwag cesspool. My vote is yes – it is stupid and pointless at best.
I think the importance of this vote is being substantially over estimated. The reality is that everyone who reads news.y probably reads Valleywag. This ban is roughly as significant as banning xkcd from reddit: it increases the signal to noise ratio, but it doesn’t change anybodies reading habits.
HackerNews is not really a great community. It’s for a bunch of Paul Graham fan boys. Great. What’s next? A community for coders with no jobs who wish they could mockup the next site that shoes you a view of how efficiently you clip your toenails?
I read news.yc AND Valleywag regularly… For different reasons, though. I scan Valleywag for fun every few days, whereas I go to news.yc and open five or six interesting articles in new tabs and read for half an hour during lunch nearly every day.
So the reason not to allow Valleywag on YC would be more about keeping up the style of the content – technical, some opinion stuff, some business stuff – the kind of things I would really want to sit down and read.
Kudos to them for sticking with it.
For getting underground covering news such website is necessary.
Valleywag aside, banning on a 60/40 split is clearly a bad idea. It’d have to be 95% vs 5% to make sense. How many sites can make a 60% 40% cut *anywhere*
I read this site daily.
HN: At first try I got no response from site, second try few minutes later, still no site, read all comments, tried again, ah, there it was, a webbed rss. I like that it, has no pics and is easier to read through, no junk, no descriptions, no ads blaring at me, way cool! I think it just may have a good go against their kin if they keep it this clean. Lots to read too (:
It’s HN’s site, they choose the content. So what’s the problem? Sites who post polls over something they have complete control over, just to get the community all up in arms against another. Dissing another site just to get your own sites rocks off (using it to get community attention), is worse then being a linkbait site.
Isn’t any site that puts external links in it’s posted articles, linkbaiters?
Share and share alike. Isn’t that how communities keep going?
I am sure I read this in one of Mike’s articles on the ‘blogging sphere’. LOL
Anywho, great site, HN. Thanks Mike!
Daisy
There’s only room on Arrington’s tech soapbox for Arrington, I guess. Personally, I think a story about the petty vindictiveness of a valley illuminatus is far more newsworthy than the 5,000th story about some pointless social networking aggregator. Go valleywag. Boo techcrunch.
Valleywag is very entertaining. Whoever feels the need to ban it needs to chill.
Looks like valleywag may be being served their just desserts by the same start-up folks that they put up for hotness votes.
I wonder who will be next to ban valleywag… check out my latest post on this here…
http://webpoet....les-so-amazing/
Thanks, Michael! We realize at Valleywag that we couldn’t buy press like this from you. Even though Paul Graham wrote a long, nerdy, peer-reviewed essay insisting that we can.
Kisses,
Paul