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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> Another 100% free technique that still requires effort and time to set up is to answer Quora questions where your website and product will be the answer.

No wonder Quora is such garbage now. It's basically a self-promotion platform.

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Yeah it was great when I started reading it, but after a while I noticed that kind of thing happening all of the time. Often, the promotional "answers" weren't even helpful! It really did cheapen the platform immensely.

This post is an ad for his product, too.

And we all walked right into that one...

I guess "how to successfully do X" of the type of clickbait HN readers enjoy.

There's no expectation otherwise when you click on the link, whereas Quora always starts with a question and the advertisement can't be unbiased if the author has any stake in it.

Sure the questions need to be legitimate questions that people need the answers too. But, if the questions are legit, then what's the problem with answering that question with a product? as long as it's relevant and solves your problem, then you should be greatful someone took the time to respond to your question (whether you wrote it or not), and even gave you a solution

Common practice is asking these questions yourself under second account, make sure to word it right for the bots aka seo, since it will rank high on Google. Shilling is everywhere, just look at the reddit front page and accounts that have posted these viral things. The vast majority of them are just marketeers mixing their customers with other "stolen" material or reposting.

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