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Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore! Get in line!

More seriously - call me a cynic if you will, but when I see people offering help with the Twitter API or with SEO or tax advice or even help with RoR, well, I don't know, something smells fishy to me. That help is freely available on numerous forums to anyone who's looking for it, and it is a pretty standard model for those industries to offer free consultations before reeling you in.

Of course, I'm not saying that's specifically the case with these specific offers, but I'm sure we can all see where this is going.

> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore!

Man, I submitted my application to the Secret Cabal a while ago, and I keep getting held in probationary/review period. I really gotta knock off yelling at people to make more money and advocating imperialism as a good foreign policy, I'd like my SCSHNW card.

> More seriously - call me a cynic if you will, but when I see people offering help with the Twitter API or with SEO or tax advice or even help with RoR, well, I don't know, something smells fishy to me.

Alright, seriously on my end - maybe some people have mixed intentions, but that's fine with me if they're doing good deeds. Like, is part of why Bill Gates is doing his anti-malaria work to better his legacy? My answer to that is "Who cares? Not me" - if someone's doing a good thing and also benefiting in reputation, contacts, etc, that's great. Now if someone doesn't deliver the goods and then tries to pitch people who email them, that'd be really lame. But if they're legitimately good deeds, I don't really care about their intentions.

Also - to shed some light on it, I tend to write all over the place, "Drop me a line if I can give you a hand" - pretty much anywhere. My reasoning? Out of 100 people, 90 will be ungrateful after you do something for hem, 9 will say thanks and nothing more will come of it, and 1 out of 100 you'll become great friends with, or become colleagues, or otherwise do amazing stuff together. I try to spend a lot of my entertainment time connecting with strangers, figuring for every 100 times I do it, I'm going to make 1 pretty amazing connection. Also I figure, what else am I going to do with my entertainment time? Watch TV? I like solving problems. Heck, I don't have anything to sell. I just try to do right by people when they ask for someone, cause why not? I always find it cool when I drop someone a line and they get back to me, so I try to do the same.

I'm digging the Offer HN trend and hope it continues - I wouldn't even mind if a quarter of the entries on the front page at any time were Offer HN. I figure I'd read the interesting ones, skip the boring ones, and I could always click "Next Page" to see other entries if I want more general stories.

I think you're addressing a problem before it's arrived, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I agree that this isn't sustainable, and at some point, the offers are going to become less genuine and less valuable. However, after looking at the bloggergirl copy deck suggestions, I want to clearly state that she (and other offers) don't fall into this group. Great work.

I'd encourage users to ask for help. We're already doing it in the form of "review my ..." Good posts with time invested in describing the problem and asking for very specific help will bubble up from newest, and those that are looking to get out of doing work won't hit the front page.

On the contrary "Offer HN" posts are hard not to upvote...for now.

Thanks, malbiniak! I agree that, as interesting as Offer HN could be, the real opportunities to help others will be in continuing to read Ask HN posts and offering your services there, where there's a good match.

As someone mentioned already, you can give your services away to a lot of people, and possibly only 1 will really need it, be grateful, and pay it forward. So why not save your free services for that 1 'special' HNer who asks for help? Just a thought...

My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.

It would be pretty awesome if I was wrong though, and that a new spirit of collaboration across multiple communities was the end-result, but I remain skeptical.

For me, my offer of help in the RoR Offer thread was motivated out of two things. First, just because I like helping where I can. Second, I might get the opportunity to work on something cool, or meet someone new, that I might not otherwise have.

Volunteer on http://railsmentors.org - we'd love to have you.

> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore! Get in line!

If there's any secret cabal activity happening here, it's a conspiracy to maintain top-ten leaderboard positions by means of random sensationalistic debates.

I can't agree with you more. Maybe there is a compromise somewhere.

In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839394 I suggested that the offering person summarize advice and findings and puts it back in the thread. Effectively, the thread becomes a reverse Ask HN and can be incredibly useful. The information persists, and it is available to future HN users. You're getting tips/advice/reviews specifically applicable or tailored to someone like you, a member of Hacker News.

In the ideal case, a reverse Ask HN has participants post a link to their content, and the user (hopefully an expert user) would reply in that comment's thread with content instead of in private. If some privacy is preferred, then a summary can be posted to wrap up all the advice they gave to HN users.

I summarized all of them in a blog post, and I'll keep it up to date. If someone wants to 'retract' their offer due to being swamped or for some other reason let me know and I'll unlink the link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839747

I am not talking about supporting the admin or listing those services, I am talking about opening the content of individual consulting sessions. Summarize the content of the advice of one or all the sessions, and put it back in the thread to make it worth something to people that didn't participate. It will be worth a ton because it is advice tailored specifically to your demographic, a user of Hacker News.

A compromise also could be a hn irc channel, people ask for help there and people qualified (or otherwise) can help them out.

  How could you possibly suggest that those doing this are doing it out of a secret 
  need to build their public profile. That's a pretty cynical worldview.

I think it is a valid concern. I don't say for all of the 'Offer HN' threads but some of the them just don't sound right. (I would be the first one to admit, I am not the best when it comes accurately judging intentions from just a couple of written lines.)

Case in example - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839507

Sorry if I misunderstood this poster, but from a genuine offer to help in one thread, it quickly went to offering of services here. (I hope the person corrects me if that really isn't the case.)

The title of the site is "Hacker News." That is to say, it's a news site, as stated in the title. A random individual offering their services for sale is not, and probably never will be, news. These posts are just topic drift, and they belong somewhere else - maybe reddit.

Disclaimer: I also spend lots of time on reddit

So what's your take on Ask HN: posts and Rate my startup ?

Such as ? Angelgate ? Blocks of Ice ? Parachutes ?

So your solution to the spam problem is "Let's add more spam, since we've already got lots?"

No, I would not qualify the Offer HN threads as spam, rather the opposite, ham of the finest variety.

Some spam may eventually occur, but we already have a pretty good way of dealing with that, I'm sure the 'flag' option works just fine on Offer HN type posts that are not above board.

>That's a pretty cynical worldview.

Cynical or skeptical? Or both? Does the fact that his worldview is either of these remove the possibility that it's true, at least in some cases? Does the risk of a drop in overall quality of HN as a result of promoting 'offers' outweigh it's potential benefit? Who knows, but I'm with swombat and can't help be a little skeptical. Personally I'd like to hear some ideas for how one might minimize disingenuous posts before plunging into this thing.

It's possible, but I think such criticism should be leveled at those specific cases where it is applicable, preferably clear cut cases.

To take a general stance like this against a whole class of submissions many of which were clearly done from an altruistic point of view is just not very friendly at all.

Whether they're all 100% altruistically motivated or not, if they are providing legitimately useful help for free as offered, I don't see a problem with it. As a possibly familiar example, speakers come to users groups/meetups to talk about things -- there are obvious benefits to the speaker, but we certainly don't vilify them for that.