3 ms·

I've been collecting examples of people who at-a-glance submit mostly their own stuff or stuff from their employer. It's not short. https://gist.github.com/461

I've been collecting examples of people who at-a-glance submit mostly their own stuff or stuff from their employer. It's not short. https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 https://gist.github.com/461a1a7ab5cc82df02d5 I don't personally think it's a bad thing to submit one's own stuff (who doesn't like DanielBMarkham's agile posts or Jeff Barr's AWS stuff?); I just like to keep lists.

possibilistic 14y ago
I'm kind of unnerved by this. What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion? You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned. Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?
_delirium 14y ago
I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.
- boopsie 14y ago
  The problem with such policies is that the definitions are squishy. How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"? If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1? How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio. These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.

possibilistic 14y ago

I'm kind of unnerved by this. What if I want to submit one of my own links one day--will I wind up on your list? And if someone out the loop happens to stumble upon your list, will they think that I am a self-promoting spammer due to my inclusion? You should probably change this list a little. Adding a comment or two about its purpose would be welcome, and including statistics such as submission ratios by each username would be nice and help to avoid such confusion I have mentioned. Finally, how does someone get 'off' your list?

_delirium 14y ago

I don't think it's always a bad thing, either, but there are better and worse ways of doing it. A regular HN user who sometimes submits something they wrote, when they think it would be of interest to HN, is quite a bit different from an account that exists solely to auto-submit every post from a blog to HN, without otherwise participating.

boopsie 14y ago
The problem with such policies is that the definitions are squishy. How do you define "regular" and "sometimes"? At what point do you decide someone is "participating"? If someone submits, say, 10 links to other (presumably interesting) sites for every 1 link to his own site, is that kosher? What if it's 4:1? 1:1? How interesting do the other sites need to be? At one extreme is neat stuff that everyone likes and makes it to the home page (which benefits the "my own stuff" not at all, but certainly helps with karma). At the other is junk thrown in as filler to make that 10:1 ratio. These are not idle questions. Especially when I think everyone in the HN community is aware of journalists' and bloggers' need to attract attention to their articles (which they, at least, believe are relevant). The question is how one can be an accepted member of the community _and_ also let people know what he created.