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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

hey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is work.

So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.)

Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.

I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.

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I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.

hm. What do you think of the other suggestion, a "submit this to hn/talk about it on hn" link that asked a user to do the submission for me? does that make it any more or less spammish, in your opinion?

While it may be a bit spammy, with the frequency you updat your blog, I personally wouldn't see it as such. However, you're tying yourself to HN for discussion (typically a good discussion), but I see it as "setting precedent" for others.

You remember the web rings? It reminds me of that. Perhaps a single platform for managing discussions of articles/posts/blogs similar to news list sites, but specifically for discussion of the posts, not specifically for news. I mean, we could all find a majority of these articles on our own if we wanted (eventually), but the community discussion about the topic/story is what really adds to it.

In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

>In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

hm. well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't do it? I mean, really, what I want is to outsource the 'community management' stuff. As far as I can tell, hacker news has (for now) has the best community of any similar site I know of.

I could set up my own community site that other bloggers could use for comments... but that would defeat the point for me, as I wanted to outsource the community management bit.

Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently, but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.

hm. neat... and it wouldn't spam up the rest of reddit? hm. I don't spend much time on reddit, so I don't really know of the culture, well, much, but that might be the way to go, I mean, if that sort of thing is acceptable within the cultural norms of reddit.

I think that a "submit this to HN" link is less spammish, because if someone clicks it, the implication is that your blog post was actually genuinely interesting to someone. The issue I have with doing it yourself is that you're not competent to judge whether your own post is any good or not. Someone else is.

Yes, but my mother reads my blog.

My point is that if I put a 'submit to hn' link on my blog, no matter how low-quality my blog entry is, /someone/ is going to click the link, especially if that is the only way to comment.

Frankly, I agree, but I feel like my objections to this are so far out of the mainstream (in a world where every webpage is slathered in "Twitter/Digg/Reddit/Facebook this" links) that I am not even going to try to champion them.

Don't automatically submit each article to HN. Have your hypothetical reader click a "comment" link which, if the article is not submitted, prompts them to submit it (and then leave their comment), or if it has been submitted, goes directly to the existing discussion.

Yeah, I see that sort of thing a lot... "submit to digg' etc... It always seemed kinda funny to me, asking others to submit it rather than doing it yourself. But it does seem to be accepted practice.

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