Whatever you think of TechCrunch or Twitter (personally I think they are both bullshit factories), boycotting company X for advertising on a site that exposed some documents from company Y is beyond pathetic. This is not important. Twitter's internal documents are not a worthy cause. Flagging this nonsense.

The site linked to says nothing about boycott. In fact, it says that TechCrunch's advertisers are "good companies and they're good to their customers". It's just telling people who disapprove of TechCrunch's story to let the advertisers know they would rather they not advertise on TechCrunch.

This whole "good companies and they're good to their customers" is ridiculous. Why are they "good companies"? Because they didn't publish anything about Twitter? Why were these companies selected, anyway? Because the ad server happened to pick their banners when whoever built this browsed TC?

Come on, there are much better causes to put your energy behind than some company's internal documents. This is just incredibly pathetic.

(Edit - less than a minute from posting, this comment is already downmodded. Hello, Reddit.)

Being a vote-driven (democratic) site, I think its an indication of how people feel about TC at the moment.

You may not like the link being there, but the majority of the community seems to be up voting it rather than flagging it, or it wouldnt be at #1.

Since there's no way to downmod a submission in HN, the "majority of the community" numbers exactly 14 people at the moment.

Isn't flagging something effectively 'down modding' it? Sorry I don't know much about the HN ranking algorithms.

No. Flagging brings it to the attention of editors, who decide what to do with it. If they kill it it dies, and if they don't it lives. It has no impact on its rank on the front page if the editors don't kill it.

Stories are auto-killed after a number of flags, and there's been no sanity check against the number of upvotes (pg commented about changing that)

Honestly? I recently gained downmod arrows on individual comments and had assumed they would arrive for topics with more karma, but that's not the case?

Honestly. The downmod arrows are only for comments. No amount of karma enables you to downvote story submissions.

Eh well thanks for the info.

I have no idea why this is being downvoted. Seems like a logical argument to me.

Hacker News hitting new lows...

Hacker News is best when people keep their eyes open for quality content and their views ready for quality discussions. If you want to help bring HN out of new lows, let's give it a stimulus package and introduce some new quality material. I keep having to remind myself to check the "new" tab.

If you read the information posted, it's nothing that really matters. It's nothing that the competitors weren't aware of already. It's nothing that hasn't been rumored, and in actuality, it just keeps the rumors alive. This stinks of smart marketing more than it does of bad ethics.

Ugghhh.... i hate this kind of crap. Please disregard it

Jeez don't boycott their advertisers.

Boycott techcrunch.

This isn't calling for a boycott of anyone.

The wall of shame site states: "They're good companies and they're good to their customers, but their logos are being displayed prominently next to leaked Twitter documents."

I agree: boycott TechCrunch.

But if even one major advertiser leaves to save face, this will cause far more harm than any boycott.