I personally feel this article lacks sufficient specific insight to not be linkbait, especially considering both the "list of n things" style headline (http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html) and suggestion to use the authors product - but understand that other people might see differently. If there was a "flag as linkbait" option I think this would reduce comments discussing whether articles are or are not linkbait.

False positives could be a problem: i.e. maxklein's posts - on initial inspection some of these could perhaps be seen as linkbait but they actually each generated interesting discussion. So perhaps a greater quorum could be required for a submission to be rated as linkbait.

I thought some of the points in last weeks Ten Steps To Ten Thousand Sign Ups Before We Even Launch Our Startup were much more thought out and useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571228

The recommendation about writing press releases is pretty accurate, though. Absolutely no marketing speak, write something concise the journalists could publish as is if they wanted to and put all the important information at the beginning. You know, kind of like a good news article is written. That way some lazy journalist (intern?) is less likely to accidentally cut some important point you want to make. Ideally you would make sure that cutting away paragraphs starting from the end always leaves an ok article (i.e. the first paragraph would work as an article, the first and the second paragraph together would also work, and so on).

That’s the story as far as old media is concerned and even if you do all that they probably won’t write about you. Not if you are just another startup. You will increase your chances if you have some interesting story to tell in that format. (You probably shouldn’t even bother writing a press release if you don’t have something interesting to tell them. It’s a waste of your and their time.) But remember, your product described with marketing terms does not an interesting story make. No journalist will want to write about the buzzwords and acronyms behind (e.g.) DuckDuckGo, even if you put a “innovative” in front of them. Tell the “David vs. Goliath” story. Or talk about privacy. That might just work.

That all probably doesn’t work with bloggers (or many online-only journalists). Many will probably react allergic to you spamming them with generic press releases. You will have to write more personal e-mails but being concise and telling your story still helps and your e-mail doesn’t have to (or indeed shouldn’t) look all that much like a press release. (You should probably still link to your press release, though.)