Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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Is it me if does it seem like Cloudflare uses HN as a marketing channel? Pretty much anything they post gets voted to the front page. This post is just an extension of the press release-type article yesterday discussing the workers. I don’t have much opinion on Cloudflare other than my absolute disdain for them using Google reCAPTCHA and thus compromising user privacy. Other than that, I don’t give them much thought. I’m sure they’re reasonably great people. However, HN’s front page seems almost like it’s curated by Cloudflare. Multiple employees from the company presumably upvote the articles, and definitely comment on the articles. I wouldn’t be surprised if when the CTO posts something on HN that a chat/email doesn’t go out to let everyone in the company know to visit the article on Hacker News with the unwritten but implied suggestion to upvote it.

I find it hard to believe that the normal HN community is just dying to know about Workers two days in a row. That these articles are being posted by Cloudflare employees and presumably upvoted by same, it just feels inauthentic and seemingly violates the HN rules about organized article voting or at least the spirit of the rules.

Of course, this comment will get downvoted, which just proves the point.

I wouldn’t be surprised if when the CTO posts something on HN that a chat/email doesn’t go out to let everyone in the company know to visit the article on Hacker News with the unwritten but implied suggestion to upvote it.

That would be a bad idea as HN has a voting ring detector. If you look at my post history you'll see which Cloudflare blogs got upvoted and which went nowhere.

> Of course, this comment will get downvoted, which just proves the point.

No, it really doesn't "prove the point." Your entire comment is violating HN guidelines[1] left and right, so of course it is getting downvoted (and flagged), but not because you've uncovered some grand conspiracy.

The cloudflare posts that get upvoted are just actually interesting to the HN target audience, myself included.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The cloudflare posts that get upvoted are just actually interesting to the HN target audience, myself included.

And it would have been fine, if it was you who submitted them, not the CTO, who uses HN primarily for promotion, which is something guidelines explicitly forbid [1]. But mods obviously allow corporations to violate the guidelines and it's getting pretty annoying.

[1] Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to submit your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

As far as "vote rings" are concerned, the CTO (and others) would emphatically remind people not to upvote to ensure we didn't end up getting flagged.

I thought Cloudflare switched to hCaptcha?

hCaptcha's accessibility is poor. You have to make an account to login and set a cookie if you're unable to work with their image captcha.

HCaptcha founder here.

We think this is by far the most accessible solution: for example, audio captchas discriminate against all the people with auditory processing difficulties as well as some visual impairment.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere on the widget that actually tells people to go to your website and register.

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