Ask HN: What can we do about explosion of self promotion in HN comments | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can we do about explosion of self promotion in HN comments

9 pointsdominotw14 comments

Every comment thread has turned into this

> Thoughts about X

>> X is great but checkout my shitty vibecoded project on github

Turn off the ability to add hyperlinks and use words instead? Is that what comments were intended for anyway? Seems a bit convoluted, but limiting comments, to comments, would be fairly natural. It'll get subverted anyway, but likely affects. A policy could say don't use hyperlinks, feel free to say where to go. Which would be an interesting policy to technically enforce, and still have the discretion to operate on.

I guess its more about trust in comments. I am reading every comment now with a sense of suspicion.

example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411166

I see more of these comments now but it's not enough that it's bothered me. I wonder why our experiences differ.

A bit of self-promotion does not hurt anybody. Stop whining and skip such comments. The assault on self-promotion on Reddit has already buried countless good projects and startups.

I am guessing you have one 'good project' that you vibecoded :)

edit: Looks like you have tons of these spamming on HN

https://tendayweekcalendar.com/

https://codemindmap.com

https://meetingglass.com/

https://blackscreen1.com/

This really sucks. Hate these so much.

You comment history is not 'A bit of self-promotion' wtf. you do not give a shit even if ppl are calling you out for being disinginous and passing these off as something you discovered.

Yikes.

The first page of their comments go back 7 months. I don't agree that reaches the OPs bar for an 'explosion', but you do you.

People seem to forget this is a developer news website attached to a startup accelerator. Self promotion has long been a component of the ask page...

Downvote and/or flag and move along.

But I've already read the comment at that point. I dont want to read these bait and switch comments.

It's a team effort, you flag some, I flag some.

unfortunately flag button is somewhat hidden on hn so most ppl dont go through that extra step for this to be effective

Maybe that’s proof-of-work?

And probably a feature because downvoting is usually enough.

Downvote and move on

Set RoboDogs on the swine. But a RoboDog needs a hostile and violent OS, checkout this shitty project I vibecoded on GitHub ....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com