Ask HN: How Important is HN cred? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Important is HN cred?

2 pointsTomOfTTB7 comments

In a recent thread HN I criticized a guy for being a user who had never done anything on the sight except submit his own article. Then another user here, lliiffee, called me on it saying...

I think you are wrong to criticize him for submitting his own post. This is the only thing he has submitted, so it isn't like he is spamming the new page. It would be trivial to make a sockpuppet before submitting, so I think we should applaud the honesty.

Now to be honest I don't know if I'm right or wrong here. I understand people with a blog are going to mostly post to that blog and if they happen to think the audience here might enjoy one of their posts I have no problem with them putting it up. My issue with the guy in question was that he'd signed up 3 hours prior meaning he hadn't even been a member before submitting.

That bothers me. If you have a blog than you need to go looking for links to comment on or at least stories to inspire posts. So why not use HN to do that and give the posts an up/down vote while you're at it. HN has the lowest threshold for signing up that I have ever seen. So it just seems like at least signing up and participating in some way should be a pre-requisite to submitting your own stories.

Anyway, any thoughts on the issue are appreciated

(Disclaimer: I'm in no way involved in the management of HN and my power here is limited to acts of virtually no consequence. I'm just curious from a "what the community thinks" view)

If the article was good, I don't mind. Now, if he continues to only post links to his stuff, that's another story.

i'll give people one free pass on creating a new account and then submitting their own stuff. but after that, i expect participation and/or non-self-serving submissions. multiple submissions without contribution is where i start to criticize.

I agree with this - I think a lot of people lurk on HN (like me) and only join when they've got something worthwhile to say. It's when it's all take and no give that it becomes a problem.

Welcome aboard Matt, and you don't need to "do something worthwhile" to be our friend, you already are :-)

The only question I have with this is that I don't see why you wouldn't just register. I think most people contribute to HN simply by voting things up or down. I don't have the actual figures but I strongly suspect those people rarely if ever post. I don't have a problem with that.

But those people are "giving" with their vote and the people who don't register are "taking" albeit taking something pg is clearly willing to give (bandwidth). So when all you have to do to give back to the community is create a password and click the mouse on a few arrows why wouldn't you.

I was looking at a user account just this morning. Only 30 days or so old, and everything he submitted was from the same commercial site. There were a dozen or so submissions, and no comments from him at all.

Something funny about that.

I'd rather have people post their own stuff than having people peddle commerce sites. After all, I think the point of the board is to form a community of hackers, not just sit around talking about the latest PR event by Microsoft or Google or whatever.

You're on to something there Daniel, I would say that it's fine to submit articles from your own blog, I do it, and you do it. But we don't do it for commercial gain, we do it because we know the community and think they might appreciate the posts. And probably a wee bit of vanity.

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