It's fascinating from the standpoint of ethics and journalism. Internet journalism to boot. It's fascinating from an IP law perspective, something people here tend to deal with a lot. It's fascinating from the computer security/social engineering perspective. And it's just a fascinating look into Twitter's deepest darkest secrets. It's possibly unethical (I don't think so, but that one's above my pay grade) but even if so it's still very interesting.

The wall of shame link is just a political rant reducing a complex First Amendment issue to a diatribe. It's mean-spirited (though perhaps warranted, depending on your viewpoint, but that's irrelevant here). It's not more interesting or relevant than if it were asking us to boycott Rush Limbaugh's advertisers. It's unlikely to be fruitful. And it's not in any way relevant to the tech topics usually discussed here.

I am distressed by the (seemingly new) policy where no comments are allowed on [dead] topics. Even if something's kill-worthy, interested people should be able to finish conversations. Also, as some topics go back and forth between [dead], there needs to be some way to discuss borderline cases. On the topic itself is better than followup stories (like this one).

I don't think it's fair to shame these people for conducting business and attempting to bring in customers. Are they suppose to pull their advertising every time TC posts a controversial article? They're ads would barely show up at all.

If you hang around long enough, you're going to get articles flagged and marked dead. If enough people in the community flag an article, because they think it's off topic, it disappears.

I didn't flag it, but I think it was off topic, because it's advocacy and not necessarily hacker interest. It causes drama and doesn't really contribute to the conversation.

By the way, I think this post itself is off topic. From the HN Guidelines: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. source: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wasn't exposing anything at all. You can go to techcrunch.com and find the advertisers. It amazes me how fast all of you criticize TechCrunch as being a piece of shit, yet it is the top domain here which everyone constantly upvotes: http://top.searchyc.com/domains . Feel free to criticize what they did with the twitter docs, but people are justifying it with silly comments like "TC is Perezhilton" or "Fuck techcrunch". It's also a site that most startups here would love to get on. Lastly, as a whole I'm quite sure TechCrunch has made the startup world a better place, and we'd rather have it than not have it.

Hacker News isn't a place to bitch and whine about things, especially those with minimal merit. I enjoy coming here because there's tons of intelligent conversation and amazing information to consume. That article brings none of that to the table.

Oy. There are days when HN seems determined to jump the shark, and the only reason it doesn't is that the editors heave it back.