Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

For the record I just want to point out that this post is yet-another trojan horse style advert for Hirelite.

They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.

Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the my part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.

Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.

Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see child comment below...

View on HN

Oh, and by the way you might be interested to learn that the person who submitted this post to HN is the founder of Hirelite.

He is also responsible for submitting all of the Hirelite posts that have appeared onto HN, which perhaps proves these submissions are purely for self-promotion rather than curated content for the benefit of the HN community:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nathanh

I just want to call this out because it feels to me as though HackerNews is getting played here.

I try to make sure Posterous attributes them to me (see the end of this post for an example).

If people don't find them interesting, I can stop posting them. I had been under the impression that self-posts were fine. Most of the time, we're trying to be an advocate for job seekers (currently just developers) in a market that is very company friendly.

Nathan, you're clearly very clever at intentionally writing copy that will pique the interest of hacker news crowd, which presumably is your target audience.

I think where you fall down is that submitting all the articles yourself. It removes a lot of the authenticity from the notion that someone independent to your company thought your post had merit to be on HN. That is also why usually it's frowned upon to submit your own blog posts to HN.

Also the anecdote to pitch ratio of your phone screen post makes it feel to me that the only reason you crafted the content was to be able to make the pitch in the first place.

It all feels like this the discovery of your service is being being done by force not osmosis.

Thanks for the feedback Ben. I post the articles on HN when I publish them. Maybe next time, I won't publish them to HN and see if the readers do it on their own.

I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.

I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.

There's nothing wrong with the odd self-post, especially if it is a Show HN/Tell HN or whatever. But almost all of your recent activity of your account is promoting either your company, your event at SxSW or your personal blog.

How many self-promoting posts do you need to make before it becomes reasonable to ask whether you are fairly contributing to the HN community? Perhaps you could use your ability to identify successful content to curate and promote the work of others too by submitting more content created by others?

It's one thing to self-post.

It's another thing to do practically nothing but self-post, only about a single topic, with links to only a single site -- a site that is selling a product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com