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Comment by rymohr | Hacker News Reader

Judging by the post and your pinned tweet, I think you would like what we're doing at Kumu. http://kumu.io/manifesto

What's with the down votes?

We've built a platform that helps people diagram, explore, and share the complex systems Donella talks about. Her work has been a major influence on Kumu and we even have a quote of hers on the manifesto.

My guess (I didn't downvote) is you would have fewer downvotes if you a) addressed the comment readers in general rather than the poster of the article in specific, and b) explained "what we're doing at Kumu" that is relevant to either the article or the audience.

Your linked manifesto shows that you care about similar issues to Donella Meadows and the OP, but doesn't shed any light on what Kumu is or why the audience would be interested in it.

I had to browse to your front page to discover that you appear to make a diagramming tool for causal loop diagrams along other things, which is relevant and potentially useful to people interested in systems thinking. I've bookmarked it and will try it out sometime!

Your follow-up comment protesting the downvotes was a lot more informative than the comment being downvoted :)

Self-promotion / employment solicitation is generally strongly frowned on. I'm finding your comment relevant and have moderated accordingly. Providing a bit more by way of detail on what you're doing and what specifically you're focusing on would be helpful -- the website's a tad vague on that.

It's also almost always an error to comment on downvotes themselves on your own comments or posts.

Strongly disagree: people here are OK with capitalism in general, and with promoting things we have worked hard to create, as long as it's appropriate for the conversation.

There's pitching an idea or work that you've done, which seems to work, even where it goes against the HN hivemind (see especially @idlewords / Maciej Czeglowski), where good citizenship's been established.

I thought there was a general guideline against submitting employment posts, though I can't find that in the HN guidelines or FAQ. Either it's mentioned elsewhere, has changed, or my weed's too good.

As for the response -- I'm commenting on what I've observed over years. Some forms of more direct promotion seem to provoke the negatives. Sometimes I agree, sometimes not.

It's pretty much always been ok to promote yourself here when you've worked hard on something, and the promotion is relevant. What no one wants are spammers, but it's super easy to tell the difference in most cases. You look at that guy's posting history, he's not just pushing his site.

Again, I though the moderation was unfair and unwarranted.

Just trying to 'splain.

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