Ask HN: Should HN have a domain blacklist like Wikipedia?

[drcongo]

I wonder if the submission quality could be raised by blacklisting certain sites. I've never seen a post of worth linking to theregister.co.uk for instance, and every TechCrunch post turns out to be nothing more than churnalism.

ref: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia-bans-daily-mail-as-unreliable-source-for-website

[brudgers]

1. To get an idea of what is automatically killed, turn on [showdead] in your profile and visit the |new| page.

2. Most of what most sites publish is banal. Banal != banned. Find a submission from medium.com and click "(medium.com)" and at what gets submitted from there...Bloomberg, NYT, the Economist submissions are a bit more likely to be intellectually interesting but only because they have professional editors and limit what their platform publishes: nevertheless, most of their submissions are banal.

3. TechCrunch and The Register were more important to Hacker News in its earlier days. TechCrunch reporting a startup raising $7 million was probably on the HN front page. The Register was often the earliest credible source for news about a company screwing up. These days, Topeka has a startup scene and the Orlando Sentinel has articles about Venture Capital. Both still provide quality from time to time. However, The Register's snarky style is less in keeping with the direction of Hacker News since the removal of karma counts from comments.

4. If for no other reason than what constitutes acceptable behavior within the community, Wikipedia is probably not a good model for Hacker News.

I think the big challenge for Hacker News is not filtering out banal submissions. It's finding good submissions in the haystack and particularly when it is the diamond from a source that mostly drivels.

[detaro]

it has such a blacklist (some domains clearly are auto-killed when submitted), but that's mostly against spam.

[spaceboy]

It's up to the users. Personally I don't post anything by cnet, zdnet, medium, techcrunch, arstechnica etc

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=spaceboy

[JamieOnUbuntu]

I'm looking at this from more of a security perspective.

Automatically block known malicious sites, but leave it up to the users and voting system to decide which sites have good articles.