HACKER Q&A
📣 thunkshift1

Petition: Can we ban non tech posts from news sources posting in HN?


By news sources I mean the following ones : - economist - Nyt - Reuters - Atlantic - Washington Post - Guardian - Bbc - Cnbc - Bloomberg - Npr

HN is the place we come to for dedicated tech related news, views and blogs. And while they are news sources, I wouldn’t put them in the same group as Anandtech, techcrunch, the register etc or other dedicated tech news publications.

The sources listed above are just news sources with articles that are at best tangential to tech.. Most of them they are unrelated or opinion pieces along the lines of ‘Big Tech bad.. real bad’.

To me it feels like they discovered this forum of fairly dedicated readers and decided to spam it with whatnot, scouting for clicks. I think its degrading the quality of content that we all appreciate and come here for. Before long this will turn into yet another random news forum, or worse like the news section of reddit.

  👤 toomuchtodo Accepted Answer ✓
I come here for the very sources you seek to have disallowed, and the discussions of those topics.

The value isn't in the links posted specifically, but in the community, the discussion from those folks, and most importantly, the moderation.

If I wanted just a raw feed of tech news, I could toss an RSS feed in NewsBlur. There is some nuance why "Hacker News" has more depth than "Tech News" (/r/programming, /r/technology, and similar); it's a state of mind, not a domain (imho). My take is this is a place of exploring curiosity, regardless of topic, and it would be a shame to limit Hacker News to technology topics only.

There is a "hide" link to hide posts if that is helpful for hiding posts you have no interest in. I use it frequently myself.

👤 eimrine
I would ban way more than you have named, not because I am not intereted in Bloomberg news but because some really interesting topics disappeares too quickly. But the only possible solution for us is a browser extention which modifies DOM and deletes everything except the interesting content (which is not handy because I usually read HN from non-customizable browsers like borrowed phones or computers at work).

If HN devs read this, consider to add some extra buttons - best of day/week/year where will be deep articles about eternal things which almost nobody reads till the end, and junk food news which are easy to read but will be forgotten after few days - twitter posts and the sources mentioned by topicstarter.

👤 grawprog
>HN is the place we come to for dedicated tech related news

As far as I know HN exists to aggregate news people applying for YC funding would find interesting. I don't think it's supposed to be about any one subject in particular. I imagine YC applicants have a wide range of interest, including traditional news stories from the sources you mention.

👤 sidpatil
> HN is the place we come to for dedicated tech related news, views and blogs.

According to who? Certainly not the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

👤 rektide
Why not write a very small script to give yourself what you want? This is the web after all, it is yours to manipulate & work as you wish! This is what makes the web different, better!

Here's a sample UserScript I scratched together in 3 minutes: https://gist.github.com/rektide/6d0af312d03482a7f3593f8fee7e...

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name        Url Filterer
  // @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
  // @match       https://news.ycombinator.com/\*
  // @grant       none
  // @version     1.0
  // @author      -
  // @description 6/30/2021, 5:27:00 PM
  // ==/UserScript==
  const BANNED = [
    "medium.com",
    "bariweiss.substack.com",
    "yoyodyne.example.net",
    "klein"
  ]
  
  // see if a link element includes the banned text
  function isBanned(link) {
    for (let ban of BANNED) {
      if (link.textContent.includes(ban)) {
        return true
      }
    }
  }

  // remove the 3 rows that make up a HN link
  function drop(link) {
    const row = link.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode;
    row.nextElementSibling.remove();
    row.nextElementSibling.remove();
    row.remove();
  }
  
  // find all links, filter to only banned ones, then drop them
  [...document.querySelectorAll("span.sitestr")]
    .filter(isBanned)
    .forEach(drop)
Alas of course Google is actively killing userscripting extensions & lots of other really neat extensions, in a new security crackdown & desperate grasp for control & certainty. Lame. This tiny little script will need to become a fancy extension unto itself with a lot of boiler plate & crap, need a build processs. But for now!
👤 rvz
As much as I dislike some of the sources listed above, it is good to look at multiple news sources rather than a few.

There could be a case where there is an exclusive tech story not covered by another source or a founder doing an interview for only one news source.

The rule to have tech-related content from multiple sources sounds more balanced than excluding them all to only dedicated tech news sources. It is better to see more points of view of the same story; even if the source has little clue to about the the company itself.

At least you will be able to see that for yourself and recommend a better article or source that explains the story, company, etc better.