Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool. This morning when I checked HN there was 4 advertisements on the front page excluding the official yc hiring notices - exitround, envato, statuspage.io, aws.
42floors' the other week described HN's front page as part of their SEO campaign - we're literally being exploited just to boost their visibility on google.
It's making HN unattractive to me at least.
Note: I'm not talking about "Show HN" posts. Those I like because they generally tap HN for feedback.
At the same time, I'm quite glad the OP reposted a few times. I may not have seen this app otherwise. The hustle required to delete and repost doesn't feel spammy to me. And, furthermore, the original post made it to the front page and retained its location per the algorithm, which gives a lot of power to time.
I think the value prop for a lot of HN readers here isn't so much about whether or not this was an ad - I think it was more about "this is a cool idea that could spark other location-oriented ideas" in the thread, and quite a few folks did treat this as a Show HN.
It's a fine line, for sure, but it's also a gamble - will people look past the outer layer of "spammy" to the inner layers that can be learned from? I felt this way about the Envato article today too. Disclaimer, I write articles for their tuts sites periodically. But I knew when that article hit the front page, it would be received as spammy.
We need people like you (benologist and the clear-headed readers of this comment) to maintain a strict hold on what is considered valuable on HN, certainly while simultaneously appreciating and giving space to the efforts of other programmers in the space.
Right, because of all the spam and overposting. You visit "New" from time to time and know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.
Historically, there is no solution to this outside of moderation and banning, so it's just as likely that HN has jumped the shark for most individual purposes and people will have to move on to other venues that are not being clogged by The Verge and Business Insider using them for spike traffic.
I think it's pretty easy to separate - this is a place where people like patio11 might tell you why you're doing it wrong, that's the value of HN. If all you want is traffic you're just wasting this opportunity.
Not to mention this is bad traffic for most purposes. There was a site that posted followup numbers the other day with I think 70 trials and 1 paid customer out of 15,000 visitors... you can't build a company that way.
>Most of us aren't here to be the audience for whatever startups and sites that treat HN like a marketing tool.
In a very literal sense that's exactly why we are all here. HN is ad supported just like most every no-cost website.
Never forget that HN is YC's marketing apparatus. HN is incredibly valuable to YC the VC firm (an incubator is a sort of specialized VC firm), to the YC startups, and to Paul Graham personally. HN is one of their most valuable strategic assets. And that value is derived from us, their adoring audience-participants.
The other side of this coin which makes me uneasy is: if HN is the only place that get traction for certain projects, what does that say about the value proposition of the project? In other words, is what we have here a self-validating pyramid? Do non-HN people actually have a need for new software that isn't already supplied by the big 4?
42floors' the other week described HN's front page as part of their SEO campaign - we're literally being exploited just to boost their visibility on google.
It's making HN unattractive to me at least.
Note: I'm not talking about "Show HN" posts. Those I like because they generally tap HN for feedback.