Hacker News Reader

Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

Don't bait him. His SEO technique is to spam more popular blogs/forums with links back to his, and to get into these types of arguments, producing more link opportunities for him. Worse, we may get more of his constituency moving in. (There goes the neighborhood).

The best method to protect the site from being inundated with more stuff like this is to try to stay as hacker-focused as possible, perhaps relegating the race/gender/IQ trifecta to the same status as religion and political discussion, or to accept the likely degradation in discussion.

View on HN

"Worse, we may get more of his constituency moving in. (There goes the neighborhood)."

We should do everything we can to keep out these immigrants.

The best method to protect the site from being inundated with more stuff like this...

You may be right. It may not (yet) be possible to have a sincere public discussion that isn't drowned out by PC ideologues on one side and racists and xenophobes on the other. It's not always easy to tell who's who, either: sometimes uttering "what you can't say" is an act of courage, sometimes it just means you're an asshole. Intentions and emotions are part of this, and they're harder to read outside the personal sphere.

I'm assuming if your comment has negative karma its links are necessarily nofollowed?

edit: Then the strategy aswanson alleges occam is pursuing is totally misguided. Maybe a little note on the bottom of the comment box that all links are nofollowed would prevent any further such attempts.

All links in comments are nofollowed.

...would prevent any further such attempts.

Presuming he is smart enough to understand the implications.

>perhaps relegating the race/gender/IQ trifecta to the same status as religion and political discussion, or to accept the likely degradation in discussion.

I'd prefer to accept the degradation. "X racial subgroup is better/worse in some way than y racial subgroup" is one of the unnamed Things You Can't Say and I see no need to censor it here, even if the discussion makes me uncomfortable.

Right, sweeping it under the table is never a good idea, but I don't know what else can be said about it that hasn't been beaten to all hell and back here and everywhere else. It's not like opinions are going to change, and I, for one, get nothing out of it.

It is informative to know how other people think about these things, so you have a point. I do worry, though, about what type of people will be attracted here by this type of meme.

Nofollowing isn't enough to stop determined SEOs with lots of time on their hands. A nofollow link is still decidedly better than no link at all, because it gets a couple of clicks of traffic and maybe, maybe will be picked up by someone else as a follow link.

Surely there is a technological solution to this. Perhaps a thought purifier?

I don't see how this is SEO. Secondly, I disagree that race, gender and IQ should be banned from discussion along with religion and politics. Ban trolls, not subjects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com