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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

Feels like a submarine ad for Netflix.

The article is definitely capitalising on the show, but I think it's more of an ad for the Internet Archive and the value it brings. A lot of people will be searching for that game after the show, and it makes sense for them to post about it.

Clearly your comment is the real submarine ad here to rectify the fact that the article didn't mention anything about how to watch the documentary.

What's a submarine ad?

An advertisement that entices you to buy a submarine.

Actually, it's a reference to Paul Graham's observation that when news articles start to appear about anything almost simultaneously, it might be the result of a deliberate effort on someone's part to sell something along with all the generated talk: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Isn't this just native advertising?

Close but not quite.

A native advertisement is an ad, dressed up to look like news.

A submarine ad is news. It's true, it's newsworthy (though that seems to be a low bar), it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be published as news. It just... happened not to be discovered by a journalist. Instead it was discovered by a company who hunted for possible news stories that would make them look good or would mention their product, found one, and presented it to a journalist. All nicely researched and ready to go; an easy story. (If this doesn't make sense, Paul Graham explains it better.)

That's my understanding, at least. I'm sure there are tons of shades of grey and no clear boundaries between these things.

Thank you for the clarification. I can see this being a pretty blurry boundary between the two but I think the distinction does make sense. In one sense I wouldn't really call native advertising lazy, but it seems like that is a defining feature of submarine ads (if we use "lazy" in this specific way).

Sponsored content.

It comes from an essay by Paul Graham as far as I know: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."

I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".

>"not for profit" and "not an adverticle"

Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.

Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game.

(In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).

Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that.

But.

The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.

The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).

Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?

(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)

There you go. Thanks for the trust.

Thanks for responding with that clarification. I'd like to clarify, in turn, that my original post was intended more as observation than accusation. No malicious intent imputed!

One thing I would like to add, that I think we would both agree on, is that regardless of everyone's exact motivations and the actual causal chain of events, the post is still, de facto, part of the miasma of publicity for the series. Anyway, I appreciate your work, and that of archive.org.

I think there's been a discussed theory that if something gets public attention, and people respond to it, even if they're not intending to, that they're contributing to the promotion of that item. That goes back many decades.

I don't mind that discussion but I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry; we simply put into a formal entry that we've had this for a while. A popular awareness of something we do helps a non-profit, so we'll clarify the context of it. I think we're both in agreement the more people know of our work, the better.

>I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry

Certainly; archive.org has been singularly beyond reproach in that regard.

Thanks for the clarification! I definitely consider you and the Internet Archive part of the "good guys", and well deserving of my trust.

The causal chain is obvious: the documentary surfaced interest in the game; this led to a call to try to locate the lost game; it was located and uploaded on archive.org (a library) for preservation's sake. You can consume the game with or without watching the documentary or subscribing to Netflix and no one was compensated.

Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opposite way from what you propose.

Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.

During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.

Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.

Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.

Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)

Out of curiosity why are you searching for that? Like if that's your only comment it makes it seem like the possibility of it being an ad dilutes the message they are writing about?

Many articles are sponsored. Many are ghostwritten.

Protip: Often times the second company/solution in the article about the solutions is the one that paid for it.

Who cares?

You want the FTC to step in with an "AHA! #AD!" banner forced on everything?

Well, it's an important concept to know when something is an ad or not and to, even in general, know or be able to reason about the motivations of the writer of an article. I think that's why it's important. This is especially relevant when it's a submarine ad, as the person to whom you're replying mentioned.

In any case, your comment seems very aggressive.

"I agree with people when they manipulate me only when I agree with them"

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