Link disintermediation:

https://medium.com/@phila_31297/why-a-land-value-tax-is-inev...

(And reputation and trust matter.)

Oh, that's a legit reason to change the URL. We've changed it now from https://www.progress.org/articles/why-a-land-value-tax-is-in..., which points to this. Thanks.

I hear you, dang, but I’d rather not spend my time on a site that also hosts those kinds of articles. I don’t want to support them. I don’t want them to gain credence because they happen to have an article that’s not filled with harmful paranoid delusions. I don’t want my pageview to give them credibility capital.

In other words, I don’t think it’s possible to completely separate an article from its site, and so why I understand the spirit of that rule, I think it’s idealistic and naive, and it doesn’t consider the consequences of promoting a problematic site like this.

One problem with this argument is that users don't agree on what sites deserve that description. If we were to ban the union of all sites that some people feel this way about, that would be a lot of bannage. I don't think HN would be better for this.

The main thing to understand about HN is that we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I'm not saying that other things aren't valuable, such as the considerations you're raising—they are. But we can't optimize for one thing without foregoing other good things.

We do ban and penalize some sites on HN. We ban the ones that are clearly off topic or spam, and penalize ones that are quite likely to be off topic, or whose popularity/interestingness ratio is too high (which is basically almost all major media sites). But even when a site is banned, when a particularly good article appears there, users can vouch for it and upvote it. All of this follows from what we're trying to optimize for.

I’m not sure what argument you are asserting I’m making; it sounds like you’re saying I’m suggesting this site should be banned. I’m not. I’m merely stating my reasons for not reading the article, and why there are negative consequences of HN boosting the profile of sites like this. And that the “prefer article quality over site quality” rule is idealistic because it pays insufficient (if any) consideration to consequences of using this platform to boost theirs.

You frame this in terms of optimization, but I’m framing this in terms of acknowledging there are negative consequences are of boosting problematic platforms (and perhaps having a discussion in terms of what negative consequences we as a community will accept).