It's nice to know that Michael Arrington agrees that Valleywag is toxic. And, I also find Michael's tone regarding Hacker News is significant. It's pretty clear that he has tons of respect for the site and what PG is doing with it.
I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in the community voting. I think the site/system works quite well as it is. If there would be any tweaking it would be to attribute some kind of score to people/sites which will weight give them a handicap score which will work alongside the standard voting algorithm. I don't agree that they should be automatically banned though
I'm surprised Valleywag hasn't made a post about their banning. Perhaps they are still too busy complaining about how they were kicked out of the PopSugar-Techcrunch party.
Arrington doesn't really like Valleywag. Also, I think he does really like Hacker News. This post represents the synergy of those two personal interests.
I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and see nothing but "valleywag reports on techcrunchs comments on hacker news banning valleywag for too many stories on techcrunchs reporting hacker news considering banning valleywag."
Can't you see this is rapidly becoming one of those death spirals from which we could rapidly collapse into digg like mediocrity. In fact, the feedback from this might be enough to destroy the internet. Our only hope is to ban ban stories about banning valleywag recursively out to some bizarre order of infinity that only cantor understands.
