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Comment by epo | Hacker News Reader

But isn't repeatedly promoting your own stuff spam? I mean if not, then what is?

Leave it to others to decide if your posts are worthy of promoting on HN.

I think the issue is that these posts are interesting, do gather votes but are kicked off the front page anyway.

+1 Except AFAIK Des only ever wrote 2 posts that were in any way "promotional". And even at that, they're pretty damn classy posts. E.g. this is the other one and it's been one of the most popular posts on the Intercom blog to-date: http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/ But isn't any post on a company blog a promotional post in some way? (Maybe not.) Disclaimer: I work at Intercom.

Des has submitted dozens and dozens of his own articles. How could say that he only ever wrote 2 posts that were in any way "promotional"?

Moreover, I think Des himself knows the commercial value of all this promotion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974542

Blogging has been our most effective weapon thus far. We'll give advertising a go soon, just to compare. But right now it looks like a good article that's related to the product drives readers, which we try to then funnel into the site.

By promotional I think we're talking about "selling a product", so when I write a post like this say: http://blog.intercom.io/retention-cohorts-and-visualisations... there is no "Buy now" proposition, it's just me explaining something that I've invested considerable time into researching.

I think everyone wins when this happens.

Because he is concerned that it isn't being left to the people and instead is being artificially dropped. In general this seems like a valid concern because I've seen a lot of "whoa why did this just die" questions over the years. A little bit more transparency might help. I dunno

> it isn't being left to the people

We do know how many people upvoted. We don't know how many people flagged. Perhaps very many flags are needed to drop a story.

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