Ask HN: Is this all it takes to get flagged as spam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this all it takes to get flagged as spam?

4 pointsdanso6 comments

Context: I submitted this URL earlier today: Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance, which was briefly on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789547

One user declared it spam, and as I was writing my response (which is submitted as a comment below), I found that not only was the submission pulled (which, fine, lots of things get pulled), but now I can't even comment on it because it's in some special spam deadzone. One user who is apparently well-versed in exercise declares it to be "bullshit fluff piece" with Amazon product links and so that makes it spam? In my response which I couldn't submit, I explain how I came across the piece and why I enjoyed it. But on the merits of the piece itself: There's more than 2-3 thousand words, and according to this Unix script:

    curl -s http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/ | grep -o amazon.com/gp/product/[[:alnum:]]* | sort | uniq | wc -l

35 Amazon product links, 16 of them unique. Is that a lot? I guess? The OP (according to my ublock) loads only the Amazon URLs and a Google banner at the bottom. Do I wish that the author, when linking to "creatine", linked to the many studies and discussions on its efficacy (and also, rebuttals to it)? Sure. But he covers a lot of ground here, and I didn't see the focus as the science, but him describing his exact steps as a blueprint that worked for him and the context of those steps.

My response that I had originally written talks more specifically about the relevance of the OP and why I find his fitness routine interesting is posted as a separate comment below:

The submission was [flagged] by other users, not [dead] by the spam filter.

Regardless, there's not much tech, or intellectual knowledge in that post. The get-fit culture is one of the reasons why people outside the bubble have difficulty taking tech culture seriously.

> 35 Amazon product links, 16 of them unique. Is that a lot? I guess

Yes, that is a lot.

The OP is a computer science professor at the University of Utah. He is currently a visiting professor at the Harvard Medical School (according to his homepage) [1], presumably for his independent research for the sake of his newborn son, who he later found was the first ever recorded patient with a rare disorder. Presumably, what he describes is his workout routine while raising his two children (as alluded to in his intro: "Then, after realizing I was too weak to lift my son and his wheelchair in and out of the car, I spent just over a year gaining strength and muscle."). It lacks a lot of links to scientific research and deeper discussion, so I read it as a testimonial of how he fit fitness into his academic routine.

His life situation is not what I normally associate with the tech "bubble" but I guess if I'm in that bubble I obviously wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

[1] http://matt.might.net/

Above, you wrote that you were the OP.

The OP (to HN) is not necessarily the content author. Did you mean content author in this comment?

--

OK, now that I've read it, I can see why it was flagged.

The guy talks in absolutes with little to no modern research and gives a lot of bad (and some dangerous) advice (e.g. suggesting lifting to failure at every session).

If the advice is bad and dangerous it would've been nice for the comment thread to still exist so I could've read the warnings and found better advice.

In response to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789658

> 28 points (and counting) for a bullshit fluff piece absolutely filled to the brim with Amazon product links. Tell people they can be fit with no effort on their part, add the word hack, bump up the upvotes with friend's accounts to get started, profit.

i don't think it's a fluff piece for people who are wondering how to start, though yes, for people who are already experienced, it probably might not contain many revelations (I was actually interested in the equipment used)

FWIW, I stumbled on this article because I was revisiting some of the author's past work, particularly his writeups on how he, as a computer scientist, tried to figure out the scientific medical research relating to his son's rare genetic disorder:

Hunting down my son's killer: http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/

The followup in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/one-of-a-kind-2

It's possible the author is a good writer when it comes to comsci and medicine and a total self-promoting-spam-douche when it comes to writing about fitness. But at the very least, I am interested that he was able to maintain a fitness regime while pursuing his academic and personal computer science goals.

By the way, the same article was not considered spam 993 days ago, with a long discussion on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5504129

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