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Comment by derpaderp | Hacker News Reader

Is this a spam post? I can't tell. The comments all look like spam, dropping weird praise for this half baked reddit/hn clone.

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Hey Derpaderp. It's not spam a few of the comments are from friends of ours and early users that have been using it for a while and enjoy it, that's where the praise is coming from. Would love to know what you think can be improved?

Hey - it's not a spam post.

Curious why you think it's half-baked. Would love some feedback on how you think we could make it better!

This entire post and thread looks like a coordinated social media campaign.

Well, you don't tell us how it is at all different from other social link sharing sites. (Digg, reddit, postrank, the social bits in google reader, facebook, delicious, etc etc etc)

That and the comments in the post are really bizarrely positive, all from accounts that are either brand new and have exactly one comment to their name... or are old and have exactly one comment to their name. Organic HN comments tend to be either neutral, relating solely to the technical merits of the article; or strongly negative, relating to the technical merits of the article.

In contrast, this post has a cheering section. Suspicious...

It's very similar to Hacker News but you use your real identity and there are many topics. You subscribe to the topics that you care about and things bubble up based on whether you follow the people who posted them or not.

That way you get content from the people that you care about but you also get content that the crowd cares about as long as it is in a topic that you follow. You get both the socially relevant content and the top crowdsourced content.

Yah - just to follow up on what Kareem said, you could imagine sharing tons of programming links on The Shared Web - and it would never bubble up for all your friends who don't follow programming, but for those of your friends who are interested in it - they would get it.

You as a reader of content also get a wider variety of content - and you're encouraged to post as much as you want, and repost lots of content (as that helps us pick out the good content from the bad), and we have various techniques to avoid duplicate posts at the same time. (A Repost counts like an upvote essentially)

In terms of the cheering section, we did mention to friends that we put this up on HackerNews, and to give a shout out if they like the site. Those people in the comments are all real people, who do actually log in daily, and like the site.

We really just wanted to get the word out to the HN community and to get feedback on what works and what doesn't.

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