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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Something I used to do way back in the day was answer related questions on forums and have my website in my signature. It worked pretty well.

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Wonder if having a "signature" on reddit (or even HN!) like this would get you banned...

Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high rep folks start selling signature space for advertising/influencer marketing.

I'm sure it would. They have mod bots monitoring how many of your links are to your own stuff. I run a totally free public education nuclear site (no ads, no cookies, plain old static HTML) and used to answer nuclear questions on reddit. I'd often back up what I was saying with links to detailed writing on my site, but I got banned from a few huge subs for self-promotion. Lol. So for the most part I just stopped answering questions on reddit.

Having self promotion "rules" under the guise of "protecting communities" when it's really to force you to buy Reddit ads. As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...

I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to (tastefully?) promote in my comments

As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...

As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.

As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're someone else. It would be better to encourage people to stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine line there).

Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have something to contribute to forums but love to read about people's projects. I've been in the position before of actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it just feels like such a slap in the face from a community that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into arguments with mods about it and eventually just having to unsubscribe. It hurts.

In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.

But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.

Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel. In my experience the vast majority of the people who were banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear from their histories that their entire purpose in using reddit was exclusively promotion.

They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.

I went snooping in your HN profile to find the link, and that is a really well done site. Clean design, relevant pictures, and interesting material. It's probably going to cost me an hour or two of productivity today.

Link for people lazier than me: https://whatisnuclear.com/

This is an amazing website. It's horrible that when asking educational questions you will absolutely never see these websites. Just the same horrible quality ones that are trying to take all your data and advertise to you.

I see lots of people with links to a home page in their user profiles (on HN, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc...) I may be in the minority here, but if I find someone particularly insightful or interesting I sometimes click through to see if they have a link.

Hmm, that does sound like a good idea!

Not only are you helping the community by answering questions, it also gives you some trackback links that Google used to weigh higher (not sure if it still does).

@dang

Sigs on HN soon pls?

Click on user name to see their profile.

Please no. Too much noise.

It was said in jest but I think everyone is taking me literally. I liked sigs on older phpBB forums when they were 2-3 lines and just some userbars. Cool back in the day, but they wouldn't really translate to the more minimalist HN.

tbf it wouldn't be a bad signal for search engines that can understand forum markup.

A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends what, you basically rely on the topic and words.

From my time in the dying days of Usenet, I can remember there were compact codes so you could fit as much about yourself into your signature as possible. Something like the old dating ad codes, e.g. GSoH = Good Sense of Humour, but more geeky.

GeekCode, see, eg. https://geekcode.xyz/geek.html

I enjoyed yours.

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