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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

Its really quite ironic that this article was submitted by an account that is 33 days old and submits daily dot articles exclusively without ever commenting.

I pointed this out once before, the last time they wrote an article and submitted it, and that was about the same thing too.

View on HN

The submitter is the Asst. Managing Editor of the Daily Dot.

That being said, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with accounts that exist specifically to submit a given site's content (even programmatically), since that content must be still democratically approved by the user base. I think vote-brigading is a much more serious issue, and one that HN seems to deal with well.

Agreed, it sounded like the Atlantic guy banned eons ago was actually a good community member. At some point the Reddit restriction of "submit any content but your own" feels very artificial.

> submit any content but your own

Plenty of people submit their own content. In fact, it's encouraged. You have reddit confused with digg, somehow.

"Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, and it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content."

From reddiquette.

It's definitely not encouraged on Reddit, one of the old notes of Redditquite is "if more than 10% of what you submit is your personal content, then you're probably a spammer."

Once, someone submitted one of my blog posts about a rather interesting bug in a AAA game to /r/programming. Over 1,000 net score. Out of curiosity, I submitted the same post myself to /r/games. -7 score.

Your last example could be bad timing and/or the r/games audience not caring about programming etc

True, although once a credible news source made a post with similar, it hit the front page of /r/games quickly.

Actually, Reddit's FAQ[1] says:

> If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content, you're almost certainly a spammer.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3F

Your own content != be a corporate shill / spammer.

I'd go further and say it's misguided. I'd like to think that a single account's submissions can be thought of as a "channel", as on YouTube.

I've always found that attitude of not promoting your own stuff annoying. If you took the time to write it and think about it, you should be proud of it! If you're just spamming, people will see it and vote accordingly.

Submitting your own stuff is fine. It's when you mechanically submit everything that appears on your site that we start having problems.

Sure, and I think the difference is pretty clear to most reasonable people. What I take issue with is the idea that self-promotion is "bad".

Except HN blocks that I guess...

At least I try to always make good submissions, and usually HN only let me submit twice every month...

I'm curious about the submission throttling that you have experienced. You have 4 submissions from the last month (last 30 days) and 9 submissions for the two previous months. What is being throttled?

I don't know, but I rarely can submit new stuff...

When I joined HN I submitted a lot, but suddenly I could not submit for two weeks, then sometimes I can submit twice or three times in a week, and then have to wait two weeks again...

curious why, though. If it's good, it'll be pushed upwards. If it's not it won't be.

Why does it matter who does the submitting?

It matters heaps - links submitted by community members with no affiliation to the source have been judged worthy for submission based purely on the content's merit.

Dailydot, extremetech, pcmag, geek, macobserver, betabeat, itworld, bostinno etc have collectively operated dozens of acounts to spam their own stuff, none of which met an actual community member's standards for submitting a story.

Individuals submitting their own blog posts and especially with success are usually so low volume they're not even noticeable unless they overdo it and inevitably get called out for it.

What do you mean "judged worthy of submission"?

A submission from a real user implies one of us thought the rest of us might like this. They judged it worth submitting.

So a one person difference?

Think about everything you see online and don't submit. It matters.

>Dailydot, extremetech, pcmag, geek, macobserver, betabeat, itworld, bostinno etc have

I prefer to say "could" instead of "have" unless you have definite evidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567427

Plus dailydot are just getting started with the OP + 'sexyalterego'.

Exactly. A part of me was kind of sad that Digg's final phase of being a direct aggregator of news without "submission" but instead sucking the news straight from RSS feeds and pumping it into the hivemind upvote/downvote system... that this system tanked so badly and was so poorly done. Requiring that the "submitter" be some legitimate member of the community seems forced, as long as it's not high-frequency spam.

I don't mind that, but it should be posted transparently in the 'about' field of his HN profile, along with a link and contact. If you're on HN to promote your brand then journalistic ethics, as well as basic respect for other community members, suggests that disclosure of interest is appropriate.

Thanks for the comment. I’ve had extensive dialogue with Hacker News moderators about submitting Daily Dot stories. It’s something we do sparingly, with great caution, thought, and discussion. We take HN very seriously and want to ensure that we only contribute quality content that’s in line with the rules and standards. We value the community here, and we’ll make more of an effort moving forward to submit links from other parts of the Web.

Don't hesitate to join the discussions too.

I'm fine with it, but you should put your affiliation in your profile for everyone else to see. Mods - this ought to be a requirement of using HN as a promotional outlet.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Adding it now. Good suggestion.

Thanks! I know HN is so minimal that it's easy to overlook.

And what will you do for this blatant spam account?

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sexyalterego

It's a shame the mods didn't shitlist your domain entirely, you're obviously here just to exploit HN.

I thought for a second that they might be changing, but this basically proves me wrong.

Well, we will see if they add the disclosure in the about field.

Do you have definite proof of who operate the account?

The number of people outside of dailydot that care about improving dailydot's mind/marketshare on HN is somewhere between 0 and delusional.

But I will concede it could be some random, unaffiliated person who just really, really, really, really wishes we would get our news from dailydot!

Or just playing around or trolling for fun.

For 7 months.

That definitely sounds more likely than spam on the internet.

He's most definitely not Jay Hathaway, AKA sexyalterego on reddit, currently "assigning editor at the Daily Dot".

https://www.google.com/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=You+...

I for one am shocked it wasn't some random unaffiliated person who just really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted us to get our news from dailydot.

To be honest, a reminder is definitely good. I was just worried about making definite claims without evidence. And just because one spam account can be explained like this don't mean it can be applied to all of them.

Point taken. I've updated my profile to reflect my affiliation. As Austin pointed out, it's not our intention to spam—we only submit stories that could actually be of interest to the community. We'll make sure those stories are coming from a variety of sources in the future, and also contribute to discussions.

Thanks.

The sad thing is that reddit don't even support it. I posted this on r/ideasfortheadmins to fix both problems: http://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/xmsan/add...

I don't mind seeing an editor submitting links, but if you don't participate in the discussions, I would tend to think you are spamming HN.

You could add a lot of value to the discussions and to the DailyDot if you were to participate to some extent in the discussions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com