these websites are bad and they should feel bad

why block these sites?

Valleywag

“On March 4, 2014, Gawker's tech-focused subsidiary Valleywag published “Startup Flying Dateable Women to San Francisco Like It's Imperial Japan,” stating, “A startup called The Dating Ring has taken its inspiration from an unlikely source: the ‘comfort women’ of World War II.”

Gawking At Rape Culture by Kiriko Kikuchi, Mike Kim, and Dorothy Kim, Model View Culture, April 7th, 2014

Hacker News

Hacker News is a popular news aggregation site that is often unfriendly towards views that don't fall in line with heteronormative patriarchy. Its moderation standards are entirely opaque and beyond reproach.

The mechanisms and implementation of moderation are completely shrouded from us. The subtle tools of content and conversation massaging unknown.

People are hellbanned for what often seems like capricious, abuse-of-power reasons. People are slowbanned at varying levels of forced aggravation, presumably to encourage them, passive-aggressively, to get lost.

The Rise of Hacker News Is Bad News for the Tech World by Dennis Forbes, Dennis Forbes… Professional, March 31st, 2014

The people with the power to endorse and ignore comments are the people with the most deeply vested interest in Hacker News continuing as it has up to now. People who see significant problems with the Hacker News community, whether they’ve been quiet members of Hacker News for years or they’re just joining, have no power to voice their opinions without the active endorsement of multiple Hacker News oldsters.

"Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments" by Jonas Wisser, March 22, 2014

Alternatives

lobste.rs — Featuring an entirely open source, transparent moderation policy, and small but active community, lobste.rs is my go-to Hacker News replacement.

Code Babes

Code Babes appears to be some sort of misguided learning site that combines explotative imagery of women with content.

There are no redeeming qualities to this site. If you want to learn to code, check out MDN or Khan Academy or Codecademy or dozens of other learning resources online.

Hot Tech Today

Hot Tech Today is a tech news site that thinks you need to objectify women while you catch up on news. Avoid.

Try Cooper Press for curated links based on technology interest, Wired and Engadget for general interest tech news. (Disclosure: the maintainer of this site is an AOL employee.)

how to block

the-list is easily added to your own hosts file by curling the-lists's text file.

By running this command in your terminal, the contents of list.txt will be appended to your /etc/hosts file.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/llkats/the-list/master/list.txt >> /etc/hosts

The flags are there to handle error cases more gracefully and safely handle redirects. See man curl for a more comprehensive explanation.