Ask HN: Are you allowed to use HN as a comment section for a blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you allowed to use HN as a comment section for a blog?

I'm wondering hypothetically, if it's acceptable when I write an article to always create a related HN submission to gather comments.

Does this go against the rules of HN?

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I'm not sure if it strictly violates any rule or not, but I will say that I've seen people who do this, and it has been accepted. But I think the key may be that the handful of times I've seen this allowed, was a situation where it was very low volume. Like, maybe a couple of times a year or something. If you're blogging every day, every week, or even maybe once a month, I suspect you'd wind up getting your wrist slapped (so to speak).

And as others have said, another factor would be if the only thing your account posts is content from your own blog. Doing that is definitely frowned upon.

But if you're really curious, it would probably be best to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask. Note that the site guidelines[1] do say:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

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

I wouldn't recommend trying to affirmatively create an HN submission for each blog post because they'll end up getting marked as dead (and your account could be negatively affected as well). What you could do that would be preferable would be to have a discuss/discussion button at the bottom of your blog, and when it's clicked it creates an HN submission. If the submission already exists, then it takes the person to the existing discussion. I believe I've seen this on someone else's blog.

But to be honest, I found this to be somewhat shady, since it resulted in an logged-in user creating/upvoting a submission without them realizing that's what would happen. If you could give notice/consent with your button label, that would avoid this shadiness.

Are you saying that a link/form on a third-party site can create a submission? That sounds like an XSRF bug in HN.

I'm 95% sure that was the case. I tried remembering/looking for the site that did it, but I was unsuccessful. The site had a number of very popular submissions, partly because people were inadvertently submitting the page every time they went to go look at the discussion on HN (so they thought). It's possible @dang shut down whatever method they were using. I assume that submissions count more than upvotes in the algorithm, so this would be deceptive/unfair.

I'm not technical, but wouldn't it be the same as using the submission bookmarklet?

I don't know what bookmark you are talking about but I would expect that it just pre-fills the URL and title but would still expect it to require user interaction on HN afterwards.

I don't think those that post only every single one of their blog posts are much liked. The auto-dead kicks in.

It's no problem posting your blog posts to HN so long as you post a lot of articles from other sources. If you only post links from your domain you'll get banned.

I really like how HN submissions work and thought about building a platform where the entire purpose is to create threads like those on HN but with the goal of being linked to one's blog or website or whatever else. I'm thinking of it like a linktree but for threads. Are you aware of anything like that that already exists?

Anyway reading the comments I'm not sure how much the proportion between your links/other links is ok to not get banned.

>I really like how HN submissions work and thought about building a platform where the entire purpose is to create threads like those on HN but with the goal of being linked to one's blog or website or whatever else. I'm thinking of it like a linktree but for threads.

I feel like you're describing one of many subreddits?

When the content is “HN worthy” (whatever that means), then submitting the blog post and linking to it with something like “discuss on Hacker News” has a long history.

Of course, the HN guidelines are all in play as well as all the secret sauces for voting rings, anti-spam, user flagging, and the front page crapshoot.

There are perhaps better alternatives for high quality engagement with your audience because few audiences are going to be exclusively a subset of HN users.

This means that some of your audience will have to create accounts to participate. And new users will tend to be less familiar with HN community norms.

I did that for some times. My blog (padiracinnovation.org) has a very low traffic, and HN is the only internet place were I post links to my own posts. I posted every weeks.

The first time there were 22K visits, but it declined in next posts, not quickly about after two years my HN post brings only ~200 visits so I stopped doing this.

I am not sure why it should interest the random HN reader, because it's a blog about neurodegenerative diseases and I have no credential, no experience on this subject. It's only my personal interest because of some familial reason. So I understand the lack of interest.

There might be an argument that the text of the article could just be added to HN as a text post. But yeah I think it's fine either way.

One of the rules here: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

Not that I agree with it, but I think it would fall under that. And all your post will end up "dead" automatically when they flag you as a self-promotion user.

An issue not brought up yet (it seems) in this thread is that the HN commenting window for a post closes after 14 days.

I think it's fine.

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