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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Summary spam stuffed and tagged with SEO spam.

http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2012/08/use-any-credit-or...

Ironically, I posted that link immediately after we posted the announcement and it didn't get any traction. I think people like the editorialized versions better, or something.

I think HN's policy of requiring the article title be used as the submission title really hurts here. Blogspam reposts generally have snappier titles than primary sources like company blogs (even to the point of outright lying in many cases).

This is a hard problem that no social news site has solved. One idea would be to allow users to connect stories to each other through some sort of collective voting mechanism, so blogspam submissions could be linked to each other and the primary source even after they hit the homepage.

I think HN could easily solve it - they don't need anything from these sites, a moderator could just replace their URLs and it doesn't matter if the content farms don't like it - it's not like digg and reddit where their widgets made it some sort of (probably massively lopsided) traffic and link exchange.

I am so in favor of this approach. If HN wants to maintain high quality, it needs to make a commitment to primary sources and ban secondary sources.

Articles that are replies to articles should be fine, but articles that summarize other others really have to go unless they (1) do a remarkable job of shining like on the subject or (2) provide a novel viewpoint/opinion amongst the summary.

We should call seo spam summaries "spummary" or "spammary".

Any chance of being able to link Dwolla to this in the future?

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