Seems pretty lousy to take other people's recommendations and slap your referral link on them. This is honestly bordering on spam content.
Background: I run hackernewsbooks.com, and the only thing affiliate revenue covers is the hosting and mailing list costs (~$50 a month). It is a fun project I bought from the original owner to learn (and because I loved the idea). I want to add more visuals and unique navigation to it. I also run Shepherd.com, which is a much larger book website and we are not covering our costs yet, it is a struggle.
There is a tendency on H.N. to think everything is a scam; I'd love to see that moderated a bit so that people realize it's people like them building cool stuff that excites them.
web 3.0 looking good
All Google does is hijack other people's hard-written content and slap ads around it.
I am half-kidding, as I love Google, but I think your comment lacks some self-awareness about the reality of curation and what it offers to people. And how the world is funded. I mean how much of your house is paid for from ad revenue while you worked at Google?
Google didn’t make money on the curation, they made money from the separate ads on the side. I would have no problem if the author jammed ads off on the side.
The fact that you think ad revenue is the same as adding and replacing referral links from things that people already curated is pretty disturbing.
The creator of this project threw in some referral links, but he didn't replace them. And maybe he made $20 to $50 bucks for what was a huge chunk of his time to create this fun data analysis project.
Seems a weird thing to complain about.
I think most people who recommend a book do it to help the world and spread knowledge and would be glad to have their recommendation reshared.
That seems sufficiently transformative to make his referral links okay.
But as it is, I agree.