Ask HN: Is it ok to submit your own stuff to HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it ok to submit your own stuff to HN?

20 pointsjv2222210 comments

I can't quite work out if it's ok to submit your own stuff to HN or not. I have been submitting my own stuff, but I'm just wondering if this is frowned upon?

For example I was about to post this:

http://justinvincent.com/page/743/dont-confuse-self-worth-with-entrepreneurial-success

But then I wondered is that what got my other jv2222 account banned from the system?

And if it's not ok to submit your own stuff, would it be ok for say... Derek Sivers to submit his own stuff?

All thoughts and advice welcome!

View on HN

From the FAQ on "What to Submit":

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Link: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Whenever I spend time and write a blog post that I think is interesting, I'll share it with the community. Sometimes, people think it's a good article and sometimes they don't. Votes decide that.

So, if you think it's an article that is interesting, go ahead and submit it :)

Thanks for the clarification :)

For me, self submissions are a large part of the reason why Hacker News is interesting. A lot of smart people come here to share their thoughts. Without that we would only have the Times blogs which aren't hard to find in the first place.

I am by no means representative of the Hacker News community, but I would guess that other people would say something similar.

Plus when you submit something, you get the feedback of the hivemind, which is usually quite thoughtful.

I don't make the rules, but my feeling is that content should be judged based on value, not who posted it.

The last thing I would want to see is a Digg-like divide between content super-sharers and content creators, trying to get their content seen.

I think it's awesome that we have smart people on HN creating good content, and we should embrace that, not mute it by frowning on self-posting.

personally i'd prefer the original author posted about it than a 3rd person so it's relevance can be discussed in the comment thread right here.

Quite a number of links are self-submitted, and it seems to be well accepted. What isn't accepted is self-submission of link-bait / pointless / off-topic articles, especially when your submission history shows that those types of links are all you submit. That frequently gets called out in the comments, and I'd imagine could lead to banning if it continues.

Thanks everyone. That makes me feel much better. I like to think that most of what I write is relevant to HN, and I'm happy for people to judge it on a post by post basis.

Most of what I write doesn't get promoted and I'm happy with that.

As Calacanis says, Jordan missed over 50% of his shots for his entire career!

I self submit on occasion, as long as it's relevant and you're not overdoing it, I doubt anyone will really complain.

I say submit away. Banning is arbitrary and opaque, I've never heard anyone answer the "why was this killed?" sumissions, so just roll the dice and hope that the censors are in a good mood.

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