Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?

17 points by yankees1 18 years ago | 26 comments

I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed and already have plenty of visibility to everything posted there. If you want to comment on the TechCrunch post, doesn't it make sense to do it there? I'd rather see activity here around more obscure news and posts.

tonystubblebine 18 years ago |

I read the TC comments to gauge public opinion and the comments here to get understanding, perspective, and ideas. Whenever I'm on TC, I feel like I'm at a horse race surrounded by people who are passionately debating which horse is going to win. But no one there seems to know how I could become one of the horses. That's why people should keep posting TC articles here.

mark-t 18 years ago |

Maybe instead of trying to change everybody else's behavior, you could just solve the problem and move on. If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter. If you visit the front page, write a greasemonkey script. This is not a hard problem.

I also subscribe to steve yegge's rss feed, raganwald's, jeff atwood's, joel spolsky's, paul graham's, xkcd's, TED's, and so on. It would be ludicrous to try to get people to stop posting links from all the sites I subscribe to.

BSeward 18 years ago | |

I've put together a Yahoo Pipes mashup that filters TechCrunch stories. It's accessible at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1ML... ; you should be trivially able to look at its source and modify it to filter whatever sites you don't need. Easy and fun.

You should be able to subscribe to the RSS directly at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1MLe...

yankees1 18 years ago | |

Really wasn't trying to change anyone's behavior, just asking a question hence the "Ask YC" prefix.

xirium 18 years ago | |

> If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter.

There's an easier technique with no code required. Access http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/ and list all of the terms that you don't want, for example, -alleyinsider -codinghorror -techcrunch ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... ). Then subscribe to the RSS.

rms 18 years ago |

Techcrunch posts NEWS. About software startups. They are the preeminent news source and incredibly relevant here, even when they are talking more general business (like Yahoo/Microsoft) Get used to it and please stop complaining, at this point it is just annoying because Techcrunch is not going to be banned. There are greasemonkey scripts to filter out domains from this site if you never want to see Techcrunch again.

http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-...

jonknee 18 years ago | |

> They are the preeminent news source

Except when Mashable writes about something first and TechCrunch refuses to follow.

rms 18 years ago | | |

Does anyone here read Mashable?

tlrobinson 18 years ago |

In his book (The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership) Steven Sample (the president of my alma mater, USC) talks about how he doesn't read newspapers, but rather gets his news from his peers.

He figures they're a pretty good filter, and if anything important or interesting happens he'll hear about it through them.

I take a similar approach with Hacker News. You guys are my filter. 90% of TechCrunch articles are uninteresting to me, but the other 10% usually get posted to Hacker News.

Same with a lot of other sites. I prefer lots of niche blogs/news sites to the more mainstream and high traffic sites.

RyanGWU82 18 years ago | |

I'm the same way -- I don't browse TechCrunch myself, but I appreciate links to relevant and interesting TC articles.

s3graham 18 years ago | |

Ditto. When I hit the main TC page, most of it seems like banal self-involved crap. But, if it gets past you guys first, it might be worth reading.

I'm certainly in the 10%. I bet >10% here don't even open/visit an RSS reader every day.

aneesh 18 years ago |

Reading a TechCrunch article on HN is different than reading it on from TechCrunch; the discussion generated on Hacker News is often very interesting and high-quality, and I think is the reason most of us visit the site in the first place.

lpgauth 18 years ago | |

True, and Chris (from TC comments) is not here.

volida 18 years ago |

TC has many stories, if a TC story submitted to YC gets points it means it's worth it to read it.

If your "90% guess" is right, then if the story gets points in HN, then the fact that "is worth it for a read" is only increased.

I don't see where is the problem.

Oh, you know I guess the 10% reads Paul Buchheit blog, or 105% reads Paul Gragham essays from his site, 60% reads Philip Greenspun's blog, 25% reads Aaron Swartz blog. With the same logic no story should be submitted.

I am sure you are going to say but their posts are not subbmited every day. Well that's because they don't write so often something of general interest, which means that TC because of the fact that is writting too many stories they have higher potential of hitting something of general interest more often...

I don't see where is the problem

andreyf 18 years ago |

I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed

I'm guessing it's closer to 10%...

nertzy 18 years ago |

I'd like to see the threshold for the front page raised just a bit. I think there are too many stories making it to the top, and personally I find it hard to assume a TC post is meaningful when it has a score of merely 4.

This is true for news from other sources by the way. I see the problem as an infoglut rather than any sort of predisposition towards one source over another.

PI 18 years ago |

I make it a point NOT to read TechCrunch.

flipbrad 18 years ago | |

as do I. the important stuff hits techmeme (which I pull the RSS feed to) and/or HN.

I do however read TC:UK, @mbites does a pretty good job there without pollution from mike arrington's insufferable soapboxing/linkbaiting

I'd love to be able to just pull Eric Schonfeld's TC material and leave the rest to rot

yankees1 18 years ago |

Thanks everyone, I really wasn't criticizing anyone, just trying to get different view points. Lots of great feedback.

reazalun 18 years ago |

I totally agree. The reason why I unsubscribed to TC is because the news there will be echoed in so many places. Digg, Reddit, TechMeme and Hacker News.

Raphael 18 years ago | |

Why not get it directly from the source?

mhartl 18 years ago |

I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed

I'd guess it's much less than that. I used to have TC in my feed, but there were so many articles it was hard to keep up. I've found that, at least relative to my interests, the signal-to-noise ratio at TechCrunch is too low; Hacker News is my filter for picking out the signal.

dbrush 18 years ago |

There seems to be a growing trend of proclamations and conjectures against the quality and quantity of items on this site. However, I'll dissent and say that I'd rather see more activity around those items than items like this discussing how there aren't enough of the right kind of items..

aaroneous 18 years ago |

This issue has been raised before, to which some said they don't follow TC and appreciate those stories showing up on HN.

Personally, I agree with you. I think it's pretty lame that almost all of the daily TC stories get posted here, regardless of what the article talks about.

thomasswift 18 years ago |

I often ask myself the same question, BUT I am glad they do because it opens up the conversation here and the techcrunch comments are filled with 'firsts' and 'fake someone famous'.

jakewolf 18 years ago |

Because there's always a greater fool. Not that I don't enjoy reading TC, but come on, we don't need duplication just to keep a couple of non-TC readers happy.