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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this obvious list-building promotion for a company (Fennel) that sells recommendation systems?

"Fennel AI: Building and deploying real world recommendation systems in production Launched 18 hours ago"

Caveat reader.

Nothing wrong with some content marketing. They provide value to people in return for getting exposure to their brand. Simple healthy quid pro quo

I'll never understand why people think this is a valid criticism of an article, rather than pointing out an issue they have with the actual content of the article. There's nothing inherently wrong with a company sharing info about the space they operate in. In fact, it should be encouraged as long as what they share is useful.

It's a short-hand for the treatment of the subject being pretty shallow and non-descript, which seems to apply to this article exactly. I read this and didn't learn anything.

Do you work on recommendations or something similar as part of your job? I don't and I found the article interesting.

Saying the article is "pretty shallow and non-descript: is much shorter and more useful than what they posted.

Right, but then it starts a meta-conversation about why the article got posted, or even written. It doesn't have the down-the-rabbit hole trait of an individual project of passion, or the sort of authoritative voice of a conference talk or even a Netflix blog post, it doesn't really speak to specific actionable technologies so it's not the kind of onboarding a Toward Data Science post would be. And that meta conversation inevitably leads to, oh, it's a marketing funnel. So just saying "this is content marketing" I think is a shibboleth for the entire conversation that starts with "pretty shallow and non-descript".

Of course I didn't write the original comment and there's something to say for flag-and-move-on or whatever, and other people did enjoy it. I'm just saying I understand the impulse to short-circuit the entire tedious conversation!

> So just saying "this is content marketing" I think is a shibboleth for the entire conversation that starts with "pretty shallow and non-descript".

I'd disagree with this pretty strongly since there are many examples of content marketing that are also very useful pieces of content.

It provides more information. It's shallow and non-descript because it's an ad is the argument. I don't know if I believe that here. It's a blurry line with sponsored content.

Well then it's not "short-hand".

It's short hand because the argument being conveyed is long and has nuances. That you can present part of it in a shorter way is irrelevant.

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