This is blatant advertising on the front-page of HN. How did a post about a generic keyboard rise so high in such a short period of time?
Skepticism is good, but you should also be skeptical of the first conclusion it leads you to.
I spent about 3,000 hours over 5 years writing the content on my site asking nothing in return. The affiliate sales on my site help pay for hosting and I don't think it's scammy to drop them in when it applies. I also think it would be a little weird if I started every article that has an affiliate link with a 5 paragraph disclaimer to justify why I am using that link, but maybe I should write a post about that and then drop a 1 liner link somewhere.
Literally opening a lemonade stand as a grown man would be more profitable than what I make on affiliate sales on my site if you factor in hourly rates.
As a reader you wouldn't be weirded out if the first section of the article was to justify why an affiliate link was used?
That would annoy me as a reader a lot more than having an affiliate link used without mention. I mean, I'm not sitting there trying to trick people into clicking links. The blog post is just an honest look / opinion on the keyboard. If you decide to click and buy one, that's cool. If you close the article in 5 seconds after skimming around, that's cool too.
Nope, and as the flagging of this article shows, it's worse without disclosure.
It's not just an ethical requirement, it's a legal one. (I believe Amazon's affiliate program guidelines requires disclosure)
Good call, I just found it in their agreement in section 5: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...
Technically I do mention it on my site but maybe it's not clear enough since I only wrote about it once or twice in a comment on a different post.
I'm working on something now to make this more apparent on all pages that have an affiliate link (which is less than 10 out of ~300 pages).
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/if-influencers-are...
You've established the article is just about the Amazon Basics keyboard; just refer to it as the keyboard for the rest of the story.
Way too clickbaity/SEO method of writing it.
I did that because I talk about other keyboards through out the article and when people skim it gets hard to track what "their" or "the" really means (especially if they are clicking links).
If you do a search for "the keyboard" you'll see I use that phrase 9 times and "their keyboard" twice. When combined together that's more often than I use "Amazon Basics keyboard", so I'm not just spamming phrases for SEO. If anything doing that will de-value your page rank for keyword stuffing.
I mentioned the keyboard by name the least amount of times to keep the article skimmable and making it clear that when you click a link, it's leading to that keyboard. In other words, it's a UI feature not a bug!
I don’t know why all that would be needed. Even if you just stuck in a parenthetical “(affiliate link)” mention after the link, i would have a hard time saying there was anything scammy going on.
As someone who is naturally skeptical, I will keep in this mind more. Thanks.
It feels easy to be skeptical of others, yet much harder to be skeptical of one's own thoughts - for me anyways.
If you're a professional who uses the keyboard regularly, unless you have some special needs or wants, why wouldn't you go with an ergonomic keyboard as the base option.
edit: apparently there's an affiliate link. Didn't see it on first read. Still a good keyboard imo though...
I'm the author of the post. I've used this keyboard for half a decade before I decided to write about it.
If you read a few paragraphs of the article you'll see I am using this "generic" keyboard because it's great.
Typing is also a pretty important thing for programmers and I've seen plenty of like/dislike posts about various keyboards. It very much applies to developers.
Actually posting this taught me a pretty good lesson on how hard it is not to be anonymous on the internet. That and I need to drop a 1 liner in the very few posts I have that contain affiliate links.
That said, I'm not sure why anyone is too upset at you for this. From my experience running many sites that use affiliate links, I can't imagine you're making any significant income from the affiliate links anyway, not to mention that's obviously not the purpose of this article.
This is a personal message, and not openly sponsored. There is an affiliate link used, which is to say, the blog author likely hopes to make money off his post (even if that's not the primary impetus for his writing.)
As people that use products such as keyboards, I think we're receptive to well-documented personal messages about the products we enjoy using. I don't imagine anyone will get rich off this blog post, and I doubt that was the reason it was written.