3 ms·

Why is this being referred to as black hat? Everyone does this. You think the Heroku blog posts are written by Heroku employees? It’s really just online ghost w

• troydavis 6y ago
  > I don’t see how this is a big deal. It may not be a big deal to you, and that's fine, but it was a big deal to some of these publishers. Many of them take their neutrality seriously, to the point that they edited the articles to remove mentions and/or links when they learned about the undisclosed conflicts and the sockpuppet promotion. Also, many (most?) of the publishers hadn't seen something like this: for-hire operation, well-known startups, and getting distribution in some of the largest technical blogs. While that certainly doesn't mean it isn't happening, it does mean that there's value to publicizing the details.
• jbm 6y ago
  I was a Heroku employee until recently. I know the people who work on those blog posts, and I tried to contribute one myself. To my knowledge, employees absolutely do work on those; articles are edited and go through several rounds of review, but they aren't ghost written. Even the ones written by the management team seem entirely congruous with their level of product knowledge. There are external people (usually former Herokai) who contribute to the Heroku blog; their names / positions are listed on the byline of the article. I wouldn't see the point of having a non-employee writing the canonical description of a new feature; they wouldn't have the context necessary to do the best job.
  • deleted 6y ago
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