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.

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.

He's wrong because for most people, their friends and their social life are more important than the rest of the stuff on the internet. You can't google your friend's birthday. You can look it up on Facebook. You can't google for photos of what happened at the bar last saturday. You can look it up on facebook. Oh, you didn't get that cute girl's number last night? She's a friend's friend right? Sweet, she accepted the friend request. You can't do that on google, and previously, if you forgot to get her number on the spot, you were out of luck in real life, too. You can't google for "what should I do friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might be doing. If you are already anti social and simply sit at home in your boxer shorts, then yes, Facebook makes no sense. But if you actually have friends and do stuff with them, it is a very useful tool. I'm almost certain that 90% of anyone that went to college in the USA in the past 5 years has 2 sites they visit every day: facebook and google. There is no other way at the moment to use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

On the other hand, the applications can be overwhelmingly irritating. The news feed is a blessing and a curse. I like to know when there are new photos of my friends to check out, but I don't care about what Zombie they just became. And regarding the app signup notifications in the feed: there are some things I'd rather not know about my friends, and one of them is how much time they are spending goofing off on Facebook...

Note to startup hackers: if you're on facebook and more than 50% of your news feed is your CEO's random facebook activity, it might be time to look for a new job (or start your own thing.)

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

Is it just me...or is this a little over-the-top? This essay makes PG out to be the second coming of Christ. YCombinator is great...but it's not the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Keep building your product and pounding the pavement. As Coach K would say...next play.

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.

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.

I thought of that, but the goal here is not to evolve into a site that's everything to everyone, like Reddit or Digg. We want to have the best collection of links for hackers. So we can't duck decisions like this.

We shouldn't expect never to have to ban a site if both (a) we want to make News.YC be about a specific topic, and (b) there are sites with a deliberate strategy of linkbaiting.

When you have over "65 billion page views per month", you don't need to focus on more users.

You need to focus on getting paid. Fast.

EDIT: In other words:

if Money In - Money Out > 0: Success

if Money In - Money Out < 0: Fail

The number of users doesn't matter.

He's not dismissing it or saying that it's not valuable.

And, for the record, AOL had a staggering percentage of eyeballs at their peak.

I think the distinction is that Google is a technological advancement/phenomenon which seems lasting. Facebook is a SOCIAL phenomenon which (to Matt) does not.

I'm inclined to agree with him. I think we'll be talking about Facebook in a few years the way we talk about AOL right now.