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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything around that lets me "ban" domains that I've chosen? I know I personally won't get anything positive out of a link from dcurt.is or 42floors, and I don't like rediscussing links from another discussion site (i.e. stack overflow), so it would be nice to be able to construct my own set of filters.

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StackOverflow is not a discussion site. It's a QnA site, and people who have had their question / answer removed or downvoted would vouch for that,

You think QnA isn't a discussion? Of course it's a discussion site.

You may think QnA == discussion, but the mods and general culture of the site say otherwise.

It's unfortunate, and the SE sites are notorious for being strict to the point of depression, but that's a discussion for another time.

At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already. - Jeff Atwood

If you are using Google Chrome, there is Autobahn extension http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/ by vlad, discussed few months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197062).

Here's an old userscript my co-founder built: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32404

I wrote a Safari extension a couple years ago when the number of Bitcoin stories on the home page was reaching epidemic levels. There's a link on there to a similar extension for Chrome. You should be able to hack either one to ignore specific domains pretty easily.

https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin

I use filters in my RSS reader to ignore anything Apple or Microsoft related.

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