HN seems to have what amounts to a systematic ban on buzzfeed, even though their news org helped break this story (and many others).

Of course we don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com. Two of the biggest HN stories from the past two days alone were from Buzzfeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075336, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992. Usually the complaint I hear is "why is Buzzfeed on HN".

Buzzfeed is one of a class of sites that produce a lot of dreck as well as the occasional high-quality article. There are many such sites, mostly media outlets. HN's solution is to penalize them (a little) by default, but take the penalty off under different circumstances, such as if a moderator sees than an article is good or the submitter has a solid track record.

This has proven to be a reasonable compromise. The alternatives—not penalizing these sites at all or banning them altogether—are a lot more problematic, which is how we arrived at this strategy in the first place.

Buzzfeed has proven itself by now to be a legitimate news source, even if the money is coming from the other division (clickbait). And not just tech stories: when big-name publications cut their education coverage entirely, Buzzfeed hired a reporter dedicated to it.

I would expect similar penalizing treatment of other "mixed-quality" sources like Quora, Forbes, Techcrunch, Business Insider, etc.

The problem isn't the legitimacy of Buzzfeed; it's that the low-quality content comes from the same domain as the high-quality stuff, and so if you do nothing to penalize that domain, you get cat pictures on the front page. It's not a moral judgement, but rather a practical measure.

> it's that the low-quality content comes from the same domain as the high-quality stuff

But is the low-quality content being submitted to Hacker News? To my knowledge, I've never seen a traditional listicle in the /new page.

Not recently, it doesn't seem. Maybe the penalty should get removed. I'm glad it's not my job to figure this stuff out.

We had a techtalk from the head of Buzzfeed's quizzes -- those annoying ones that overran Facebook about a year ago.

One of the things he said is that internally, Buzzfeed is actually three different groups.

One of them is a team of straight-up, legitimate investigative reports.

That's why every once in a while Buzzfeed break a big story and everyone sits around saying "Buzzfeed?"

It's really funny. People say Buzzfeed? And I'm like, who do you think is making money right now, our national newspaper or Buzzfeed? Who do you think is hiring instead of being forced to let go of high quality journalists, our national newspaper or Buzzfeed?

Look beyond the brand and into the details and the journalist. Buzzfeed News is legit. Unlike a lot of media sources, they've found a way to be profitable and output quality articles.

Buzzfeed's curious chimaera of its trademark virally-targeted fluff content and a burgeoning hard news organization probably merits at least some kind of reconsideration of the penalty applied to submissions on HN.

It would be nice if Buzzfeed had something like a separate subdomain for its non-trivial content, but I'm not aware of any such thing that would enable automated differentiation.

There are several highly voted and discussed Buzzfeed articles in just the last couple days:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=buzzfeed&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...

The previous increment of the Zenefits saga was one of them.

I guess given that many of their articles aren't real topical here there is probably a penalty for the site, but it doesn't stop everything.