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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News.

That could certainly be implemented (either on Hacker News, or by the site owner doing a redirect to a permanent 404 based on the referrer).

But that seems like a loss. It's a loss to HN if links to scripting.com were forbidden. Also, within the thread that he is talking about there was a great deal of meta-discussion about the way in which HN was reading the article and reacting to its author.

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Does it matter whether it's a loss to HN? When people/groups abuse their privileges, taking those privileges away is not a bad thing. Maybe having a few good sites block HN would cause commenters to think more carefully before posting vitriol, or upvoting it. I missed the thread the first time around, but I looked it up, and it's pretty disappointing. Despite there being lots of top-level comments about the actual content of the blog post, the highest top-level comment is just a mean personal attack. I see it on a lot of other HN posts too, and I don't get it. How does it contribute anything to say that this or that topic isn't worth talking about and, by the way, the author smells and he has a funny name?

Linking is not a privilege. If you put your stuff out on the internet you can't choose who gets to discuss it.

I don't approve of HN's conduct at all, it's one of the things I detest about internet communities, and HN, though the best of them, is no exception. But asking HN to change because someone was offended by the most predictable behavior is silly.

As jgrahamc mentioned, you can choose to block incoming traffic with HN as the referrer (although this is not foolproof for a number of reasons); you do not have the right to download other people's content without restriction. Also, you do not have the right to have your discussion hosted on HN; if pg chose to, he would be well within his own rights to implement a feature like this.

> Also, you do not have the right to have your discussion hosted on HN; if pg chose to, he would be well within his own rights to implement a feature like this.

I agree; I wasn't taking a stance on whether or not HN should do so. I was simply pointing out the irony of a blogger protesting about being linked.

It seems like there are some more subtle ways of doing it though. If Dave had a mechanism for proving to HN that he was the owner of a particular URL (e.g. by adding something to its html), then perhaps he could tell HN what to do with that url: Don't allow links to it at all; Link, but don't have a comment thread, etc.

Come to think of it, if it was successful this could be generalized to a mechanism that all forums could be expected to support, just like search engines are supposed to honor robots.txt

What’s wrong with using robots.txt directly or possibly something like fora.txt, following basically the same syntax as robots.txt? – allowing you to forbid all aggregators/social somethings/fora/a specific whatever to link to you.

Not that I would be particularly fond of a web where you have/are expected to check with a given site in order to be allowed to link to that site…

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