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You may want to make clicking through a habit when commercial & project interests may be involved. HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such di

by gojomo 5y ago

You may want to make clicking through a habit when commercial & project interests may be involved. HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such disclosures all the time - but making them available in bios is practical. You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts may exist whenever there's no bio info at all – as with your user page. Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their affiliations declared for when they're flacking their company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but things to think about.

fwip 5y ago
They don't need to add the disclosures all the time - they've got a lot of posts that aren't about Matrix. But bringing up that you're the project lead of the project your discussing seems like an obvious step.
judge2020 5y ago
Clicking through to everyone's profile is only occasionally useful and an impractical suggestion.
- gojomo 5y ago
  When a commenter takes strong stands on the relative merits of projects or commercial products, and there's a whiff of involved partisanship, a clickthrough is pretty easy & wise. And, it often has the added benefit of more useful credibility context than just revealing blatant conflicts. It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for every comment, "how much involvement in these particular topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on topics for which the commenter often comments, or multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion - where such a standard would be onerous for both the author, and the readers. Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're covered for comments related to those affiliations, as it's then easy to check for anyone observing any partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading with redundant disclosure-noise.

by gojomo 5y ago

fwip 5y ago

They don't need to add the disclosures all the time - they've got a lot of posts that aren't about Matrix. But bringing up that you're the project lead of the project your discussing seems like an obvious step.

judge2020 5y ago

Clicking through to everyone's profile is only occasionally useful and an impractical suggestion.

gojomo 5y ago
When a commenter takes strong stands on the relative merits of projects or commercial products, and there's a whiff of involved partisanship, a clickthrough is pretty easy & wise. And, it often has the added benefit of more useful credibility context than just revealing blatant conflicts. It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for every comment, "how much involvement in these particular topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on topics for which the commenter often comments, or multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion - where such a standard would be onerous for both the author, and the readers. Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're covered for comments related to those affiliations, as it's then easy to check for anyone observing any partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading with redundant disclosure-noise.