Poll: Ban Valleywag?

[pg]

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.

[iamelgringo]

I'm very much in favor of banning Valleywag.

They picked up a comment that I made on HN about a friend of mine at Yahoo. They picked up my one comment, and turned it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards the Microsoft merger. They also posted information that personally identified my friend as the source of the information.

Granted, it was my mistake to begin with in posting that here, but I tried to make it right. PG edited the offending comment for me, and I wrote Valleywag asking them to remove the identifying information for fear that my friend might loose his job in the upcoming layoffs.

Not only did they not remove the identifiying information, but they were really nasty to me about the entire affair and I though needlessly hurtful.

My friend did get laid off. I don't know if it had anything to do with the article or not, however. I don't think it did, and either way, he's doing rather well for himself consulting.

So, while I do have some issues about quality of the content over at Valleywag; I have bigger issues about the editorial process there. If they can take a random post from an online forum and turn it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards Microsoft in the takeover process, all of their content is suspect in my opinion.

My opinion is that the majority of their content has a gossip rag/tabloid feel to it, and I would love to see that removed from the Hacker News listing. I see no reason to reward their trollishness with traffic from Hacker News, even if 15-20 people vote up a post linking to them.

[edw519]

Wow, iamelgringo, that's a scary story. Not just the valleywag thing, but the whole "information" angle. Sorry to hear about your friend. Glad to see that things are working out for him.

I have made many comments about my experiences, but in "loud mouth restaurant mode", without names and places. Isn't that one of the purposes of this board, to learn and share with each other?

I often wonder if a sleuth" went through my posts, they could figure out names, dates, and issues. I'm not sure what they would do with that, but your experience, along with with HN's increasing popularity, gives one food for thought.

[huherto]

I did not have an opinion. But after reading this I do. Ban Valleywag

[fallentimes]

That's awful - how were they able to identify your friend?

[jsrfded]

Banning a single site feels good, but is a short-term band-aid on the moderation system. Better to identify the factors in valleywag stories that are undesireable and find a way to target them generally - to raise the editorial quality here across the board and leave behind the dross.

As others have pointed out, Valleywag doesn't have a monopoly on linkbait titles and thin follow-through.

[dood]

Agreed, I think the important thing is raising quality across the board. Two possible solutions: a) stop people voting for crap b) get the community to filter out crap.

I don't have any good ideas for option a), and I dislike reddit-style downvoting for option b) since it has the same problem of people upvoting bad stuff, just in reverse.

One idea which could work for b) is a digg-like 'bury' option (i.e. a 'this is crap' button) - but only in tandem with a high karma minimum for being allowed to use it, and some statistical cleverness for deciding when a post should be buried. But I'm terribly enthused with this idea either.

[cperciva]

I voted for "No, don't ban them", but I don't particularly like Valleywag stories. Rather, I think the whack-a-mole approach of banning individual problem sites is a bad idea.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Users who post garbage stories should be more accountable. Make posting a story cost a few points of karma, so that people who repeatedly post stories which don't get voted up end up without any karma.

The specific problem of linkbait titles might also be helped by allowing users to "un-vote" a link which they previously voted up.

[dood]

I think a karma cost for posting stories is a really bad idea.

Firstly, it would not solve this problem since Valleywag stories tend to get lots of upvotes. Indeed, it would encourage posting link-baiting stories, since they also tend to be karma-baiting stories.

Secondly, it would stop people from posting borderline, but valid stuff. I often don't post things I'm unsure people will like, but many times posts that seem borderline to me end up getting loads of upvotes. With a karma cost for posting, people would simply not post these kinds of stories.

A karma cost for posting is a recipie for encouraging lowest-common-denominator stuff.

[hooande]

And for the record, the poll seems like it has some bias in the wording. I wish the second option said something more neutral like "No, don't ban them; I don't think it's necessary".

Right now it has kind of a "No, don't violate my civil rights; I like the terrorists" feel to it.

[dcurtis]

You asked about censorship and then deleted an article on the front page a few days ago that had some interesting comments. It was a stupid article, to be sure, but did you have to completely delete it? There's no "send to second page" button in the moderation options?

My feelings: Do not ban any content, ever. Only delete things after they are submitted if they are off topic or ridiculously stupid.

Instead ban the users who vote those stupid things up, or diminish their voting "worth".

Sometimes, I like reading Valleywag stuff. It's certainly on topic, even if it's linkbait or pure lies. It's the comic, tabloid, side of the industry we're in. Maybe you can add a tag that says "tabloid" next to the Valleywag domain instead of downright banning it.

This is a pretty good article from Valleywag:

* http://valleywag.com/378444/did-you-sign-googles-noncompete-...

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160603

Why would you want to censor that?

If you have to ask about being accused of censorship, something is seriously wrong. Also, using a poll like this is extremely ineffective. The mob is, as a whole, foolish. I imagine a ton of people are clicking "yes" simply due to a negative reaction to Valleywag, rather than understanding that censoring Valleywag may start a trend here that could get out of hand...

[rms]

In the profile there is a showdead option -- if you set it to yes, you can see stories and comments that have been marked dead by an admin.

By generally, I agree, banning Valleywag is a slippery slope, or, at least, it doesn't help to solve the broader problems of social news this site faces.

[rickmb]

As with any social app, banning sites/users/apps that aren't deliberately damaging (like spam, trolls, whatever) is basically saying your system isn't working, and you can't be bothered to change it.

It's like 'fixing' a bug in software by simply suppressing the error messages. It will come back to bite you in the ass.

[pg]

Ok, we'll try banning them for a while.

[bkmrkr]

If enough people like a Valleywag article (vote it up) there is not reason it should not be displayed. If you don't like it simply don't vote.

Paul, In your article on Bayesian spam filters (I didn't read the essay since before joining YC aka several years) You mentioned rules based systems only work up to a point. Today it's Valleywag (I don't care about the site one way or the other) tomorrow your getting requests to ban half a dozen sites per day. I think that instead of banning a specific site a better solution is to make the algorithm better.

[andreyf]

Right now the poll is 55% in favor of banning. Banning an entire organization is rather unprecedented, so I'd suggest we wait for a bit more of a consensus before going ahead with it.

[indiejade]

Thank you.

Even though it seems to do what it aims to do well, its ultimate goal == to sell advertising by creating sensationalist headlines and feeding the egos of people who have (or who nurture through Valleywag mentions) a grotesque vanity complex == is hardly original or noteworthy. Most hackers go out of their way to _avoid_ spotlight, so I think for the most part Valleywag is just digital GIGO. Occasionally almost humorous, but GIGO nonetheless.

[Xichekolas]

Could you just add the ability to blacklist domains on a per-user basis? That way I could personally blacklist valleywag.com and nytimes.com if I wanted to, while others could enjoy their linkbait if they wanted.

Blacklisting would simply not show me stories with given string in the url.

[dcurtis]

This is the worst mistake you have ever made regarding this community.

Censorship is not the answer, ever.

[Goladus]

Yeah I'd say a suspension would be more appropriate. Let it expire silently in 6 months or something and see if anything worthwhile starts showing up.

[noodle]

i'm personally kind of indifferent on their specific articles.

but imo, if you do ban them, you'll get a lot of "why ban vallywag and not XYZ"? its a slippery slope.

unless there are already similar sites that are banned. if so, ignore me, i'm a noob.

[staunch]

I don't think it's that slippery. There's only a few sites out there that are pure bottom feeders. Valleywag and Dailymail.co.uk are the only two that come to my mind immediately.

[mechanical_fish]

I voted yes, as an application of my "PG should run his own site" principle... and because Valleywag links have often struck me the same way.

But I will play devil's advocate for three seconds, just for the hell of it: Are the conversations engendered by any previous Valleywag articles worth keeping? Just because the articles are inane or linkbaited doesn't mean that all the comments are as well. Good discussions can arise from all sorts of random sources. And eviscerating bad articles can be a fun sport, provided you don't get carried away with enthusiasm.

Okay, the three seconds are now up. And I, myself, can't remember any good Valleywag-inspired discussions, so... off with their head!

[dejb]

I certainly hope this poll isn't decided by a simple majority. Imagine how many things would get banned if it only required a simple majority vote. Things should not be banned without an overwhelming majority of people thinking it is necessary.

[menloparkbum]

What are the stats for valleywag articles? I don't recall seeing any on the front page for quite some time, aside from the latest one about the google noncompete.

There are a lot of other linkbait articles that float up to the front page. The "businesshackers" guy comes to mind. There have also been a number of completely vapid articles recently, such as the "to be a programmer, you need these 10 things: 1. text editor..." article. I can only hope these are linkbait for some SEO scam network; the thought that these articles are written and upmodded by actual hackers is too depressing.

Anyway, at least we know Valleywag is a "real" site which sometimes has humor or interesting gossip. The other linkbait sites that make it to the front page truly have nothing to offer. The current moderation scheme deals with Valleywag just fine. If you must ban, there are other sites which seem to be a higher priority.

[dbreunig]

These are inadequate options. The issue isn't whether you like to see them on News.YC, it's do you want to start banning people. Yes, I don't like seeing them on YC. But no, I don't want to ban them.

Come on! Isn't this a democratic news site front page is voted on by readers!?! This vote is absurd.

I think a better idea would be to institute negative points to submissions, not just comments. That way, the handful of people needed to make news frontpage worthy can be rejected by the masses tired of Valleywag.

If you have to ban sources on your democratic news site, you're missing the point.

[pierrefar]

I don't think they should be banned, and I have this as a systemic fix: allow individuals to filter out sites they don't like to see in the new or home page lists. This will contain the "Valleywag submissions" to the people who really like them and vote them up.

With this data in mind, you could then say that given that x% of our members have filtered out a site, we should block their submission. x could be defined in a number of ways and tweaking that will be another discussion.

Pierre

[tandaraho]

Rather than explicitly banning Valleywag or other particular sources, it might be more useful if PG can leverage his influence in this community by adding to the posting etiquette thread from a few weeks ago (right after the rush caused by TC) regarding the type of content that is the aim/target of this space. A simple disapproval/opinion by PG should weed out 80-90% of these posts from getting generated.

[ivankirigin]

I don't think an automated ban is a good idea. Hopefully the weighting system will count those voting the VW stories up with less weight.

[ilamont]

Valleywag sometimes goes too far, but the writers are often willing to tell the ugly truth about technologies, even if no one wants to listen. For instance, Valleywag was one of the few blogs to question the Second Life hype a few years back, while practically every mainstream media publication was gushing about all of the great business potential there.

Valleywag also highlighted some of the negative goings-on with Wikipedia under Jimmy Wales. Yes, some of the revelations were merely titillating but it also pointed to first-person accounts of alleged financial wrongdoing.

The media has an important watchdog role, and Valleywag's coverage, as flawed as it may be, sometimes goes where other reporters and bloggers fear to tread. Let it remain on Hacker News.

[andreyf]

Valleywag seems like a good candidate - but do we want to get into the mindset of banning an entire site? This seems like an emotional and short-sighted decision.

What about the hypothetical 1% of Valleywag articles that is interesting?

Why not find a way to prevent linkbait in general?

[ubudesign]

I don't think freedom of speech would apply here so yes if Valleywag is causing problems then ban, put on notice or anything that would fix it...

but there should also be some set of rules, guidlines that everyone should know about to make the ban fair.

[jakewolf]

And ban all sites that use interstitial ads. Actually, I'd ban those before Valleywag.

[hooande]

It sounds like the problem isn't Valleywag, but whoever is submitting articles from Valleywag (that is, if I'm properly understanding how news.yc works). If people stop submitting them, then the problem will go away right?

We should just make it known that it is not socially acceptable for people to submit worthless articles to our community, no matter what site the articles from come.

If someone submits something from Valleywag, heap scorn upon them! But if someone is voting for it, then someone likes it. Appealing to the lowest common denominator (no offense) is part of democracy.