Hacker news bans Valleywag

There is a certain amount of Humor here as chinks in Gawker media begin to start showing up outside the organization. We still think that this is “on the road to deadpool” information. Techcrunch is reporting that Hacker News a Ycombinator group took an informal poll to see if people where interested in a banning news from Valleywag. The answer was “yes”.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “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.” Source: Techcrunch

There is a certain amount of humor here. Earlier we reported that there is something seriously wrong with the Gawker Media numbers for their web sites. While the media empire building might be fun, there are obvious lines in the sand that people are willing to draw.

Techwag might not ever be the most popular blog on the face of the planet, but when you have intentions of running a media empire, it is about traffic, it is about deep linking to articles. Those deep links are what provides the long tail, systems like Hacker News, Digg, stumbleupon and others help with those deep links by providing an alternative search process.

Being banned by one startup system is not going to hurt valleywag, what will hurt is all the news now being generated by the ban, good for hacker news, and a good traffic spike for valleywag, but in the longer run, already the damage is being done. People will go find out why, and never go back, remember that Valleywag’s average time on site is 14 seconds last month, that is not enough time to even register an advertisement.

This is where things get interesting, for us 87% of our traffic is on site for 30 seconds or less, 3.7 is on for upwards of five minutes. We love every one of you who actually stayed on site for those five minutes. We use digg, stumbled upon, etc when we have time and energy to do so to highlight what we think are the best articles. But even that process can back fire like it did for Ask the Admin, who also got banned by Digg in a row similar to what is happening on Hacker News with valleywag.

Bans happen, people get over it, and in the longer run ATA (Ask the Admin) was not damaged by the event, they went somewhere else. That is the charm and beauty of Web 2.0, being banned by one social service is not the same as being banned by Google. There are others, and Valleywag can shrug this off, what is interesting and more important for valleywag as a whole is that people are actively willing to boycott the site. That is what they need to fix, the attitude is cute when you are 2 years old, but the older you get, the harder it is to think the attitude is “cute” or valuable.

Keywords: Ask the Admin, ATA, valleywag, ycombinator, hacker news, techcrunch, banned, ban, traffic stats, blogging, blog