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Comment by brianmtully | Hacker News Reader

This is just link bait for raganwald to sell his new coffeescript book. Why do his blog posts always make it to the top of HN?

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In 1977, the movie "Saturday Night Fever" was link bait for Robert Stigwood to sell the sound track album. That same year, George Lucas released "Star Wars," and one of his business goals from the start was to "Build a Real Company," which he did by exploiting merchandising tie-ins.

"Link baiting" to sell a book is a kind of tie-in, just like sound track albums and toys. If what you say is true, then this post is an example of the pop culture it depicts. That would be pleasingly self-referential.

Alas, it isn't true. I wrote a different post yesterday, one about the I Combinator in CoffeeScript. That one was a deliberate tie-in to my book. Some of the feedback I got from /r/javascript was that the idioms were unfamiliar to the JavaScript culture, which provoked this post.

So yes, I do write posts with the thought of promoting my book, but no, this wasn't one of them. But yes, as long as I'm writing a post I include a link to my book. Why not? I read a lot of posts with advertisements on them. Why advertise someone else's dream?

I guess I didn't have much of a problem with you linking to your book, as much as the disconnect between what I read and how quickly it shot up the front page. You are apparently a rock star. It fits right in with your pop culture theme. I apologize for the comment. I will prepare to see your blog on top of HN for the foreseeable future.

I am somewhat loathe to break out the slashdot cliché "you must be new here", but it's apropos here. Reg is popular on this particular internet.

What I'm more puzzled by is why he seems to have written a Rorschach test instead of a post with a point. An awareness of the sociology of your chosen profession or discipline i think is a laudable goal and topic worth considering, but this post doesn't actually do anything to illuminate the subject or equip others with the tools necessary to consider the subject further.

Unsurprisingly, the comments resulting from the post are similarly lacking illumination.

I try to write a lot and experiment with different styles. This one was dashed off almost stream-of-consciousness. I'm not offended by the suggestion that it isn't my best work, and I'm grateful for the candid feedback.

Sure, also, don't take my criticism as an admonishment or lack of respect. From your posts that I've read, you and I agree on a great deal, and I aspire to write as prolifically and competently as you do.

Rock Stars come and Rock Stars go. I'm not counting on people liking my posts tomorrow, much less for the foreseeable future, especially if I can't do better than this one.

Just as an FYI, although this post did do well here on HN and get quite a few tweets, it had a negligible effect on my daily book sales. It's dangerous to generalize from n=1, but my conjecture (that needs some validation) is that posts need to be strongly related to the subject of the book to pull sales.

Why do his blog posts always make it to the top of HN

He writes well.

He often makes interesting points or expresses a provocative (in a good way) POV.

He has been a notable contributor to HN, trying to keep the discourse here civil and high-signal.

Good for him if he has a Coffescript book for sale. I'm not a Coffeescrpt fan, but I'd bet this book is good.

"Link bait" is perhaps the last thing that comes to mind when I see a post from Reg.

> Why do his blog posts always make it to the top of HN?

Because I like them. They are usually interesting and I even learned to recognize his nickname on HN because of quality of his writing. So I upvote.

Repeat that times 100 other HNers who think the same.

I think a lot of people upvote articles without reading them, but just because they like the title or the author. That, or more popular HNers get all their friends to upvote their blog posts.

I think a lot of people upvote articles without reading them, just because they like the title or the author. That, or more popular HNers get all their friends to upvote their blog posts.

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