Pay it forward, HN style | Hacker News Reader

Pay it forward, HN style

jacquesmattheij.com

47 pointsjacquesm12 comments

This is turning HN into a spam forum rather than being something for the better.

I could post an offer on HN, touting my wares and waxing phantasmagorical about my coding and consultancy skills. The first hit is free, but after that I only want to see the color of your greenbacks. It might even boost my ranking in the social graph somewhat. But I'm not going to. It would be undignified, and frankly it's not what I come to HN to read. I hope other people will think similarly and take their boosting activities elsewhere.

This idea of people only doing it for themselves is cynical. I agree that it is taking up space on the home page; maybe it should be a sub-section (edit: and now it is).

This notion reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg's recent quote at Startup School: That others (Hollywood in this case, but I think applicable here) can't see to grasp the idea that people would build things just because they like building things.[1]

[1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178321

It has the potential to, sure. Do you have any evidence to show that any of the existing offers are motivated by increasing their professional reach or increasing business? Seems cynical.

But I agree, I'd prefer if it were in a subsection and didn't get mixed in with everything else.

As PG said, it's interesting to watch a shift in how a community interacts and evolves.

This might help: http://searchyc.com/Offer_HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/offers

http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless

Wow! Has this always been there?

Oh! Got it. Here where "offers" and "offerless" came from:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839857

Better still ...

http://searchyc.com/submissions/Offer_HN?sort=by_date

At this rate, I see an "offer" link coming between "ask" and "jobs".

Didn't you offer HN subdomain names?

Yes, but it was for a 24 hour period only, so I decided not to include it. Besides I think that was relatively easy for me to do, I think todayiamme deserves some credit for putting out a basically unlimited offer and starting the whole 'Offer HN' meme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com