Poll: Is self-posting ok? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Is self-posting ok?

79 pointsj_baker32 comments

There are some times where I'll write something that I feel would be of interest to HN. It always feels kind of self-congratulatory though.

The rules don't mention this, so I'm assuming the guideline is "if it's relevant, post it". But I'd like to get a feel for what the community thinks.

Do you feel that such behavior is acceptable?

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Why would it not be okay to get karma for sharing something you produced, but okay to get karma for sharing something someone else produced?

Some forums (e.g. MetaFilter) have rules against self-promotion. The main reason is that the authors are not in the best position to judge whether their own work is interesting or relevant. Of course, MetaFilter doesn't use HN/Digg/Reddit-style voting to filter items after they're submitted, so it relies much more on contributors' judgement.

Probably for the same reason you're not supposed to create wikipedia articles about yourself.

There are at least two reasons why this analogy is weak.

1. Wikipedia is a source of information that is supposed to be true. Thus, it has a need to eliminate biases and unverifiable sources of data, and disallowing self-promoting articles serves that goal.

Sites like HN, however, are sources of information that is supposed to be interesting. Here, biased sources of information are welcome, because readers are seeking the opinions of others--that is, the biases of others. So the need to avoid bias is lessened.

2. Most Wikipedia pages are rarely, if ever, edited, and even less often fact-checked. Thus, a self-promoting article there can last for a long time, appearing as legitimate as any other.

On HN, posting an article gives it only one vote. Articles only make it to the top after review by several readers that are not the initial poster. So even if the initial vote was tainted by self-promotion, the other votes, presumably legitimate, can offset this.

I think it's fine as long as you don't go overboard. Anyone who has ever maintained a blog knows there are average posts and there are times when you really hit a homerun.

As long as you limit it to the homerun posts I think it benefits the community.

This.

You'd be better off posting your thoughts to a blog and then submitting your articles here. I think it was mentioned somewhere that pg made the supplementary text a light gray color to prevent users from posting long pieces. If anything, it'd be better for you to have a blog to archive all your writings, rather than relying on HN where it's difficult to sift and search through everything.

That's what I meant. :-)

I'll usually post my thoughts on my blog then link to them on HN if they seem useful.

Yeah that's totally fine. How else are you going to drive up that CPC?! :P

Seriously, it's no problem.

If you only have three sentences of stuff to say, I'd rather you make a three sentence self post than pad the thing out to a five paragraph blog entry.

Yes, and if you have a good amount to say please make a blog post (even default wordpress/blogspot/posterous layouts are fine) just so you don't have to squint at the grey text.

edit: didn't notice kyro's comment which adds better points

It's all good as long as your self-post fits this criteria:

"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I submit my own stuff, but I also submit other stuff at a 10:1 ratio. IMO, It is a little tacky to use the site as another traffic generator. The nice think about HN is that is a real community and as such I try to add value rather than just pimp my posts. There are a few sites I know that only self post their stuff, never comment, and as a result they rarely get upvoted.

I agree. As you point out, you're destined to fail if you view HN as another way to get traffic to your blog.

On the other hand, I've gotten some really great insight by posting things I felt were relevant to HN.

I think there's some ambiguity about whether you mean submitting your own blog entry, or making a submission that consists of text rather than a link.

Literally, a "self-post" is the latter, and I see in one of your replies that that's what you meant. However, commentors have interpreted it both ways (and I thought you meant the former).

Perhaps you could clarify in the poll - though there are already 252+7 votes with the original text, so maybe a new poll is appropriate?

As for the poll: I think submitting a blog (the former) is definitely OK; but I don't have a clear conception on a "self-post" (the latter). It could lead to HN being a kind of mini-blogging service (blog > HN > tweet). Maybe that would be cool, but it's very different from what it is now; and it's too unknown for me to form a clear opinion, without some experience of it. Therefore, because I think you mean the latter, I can't vote!

However, someone commented that pg deliberately made the text of a self-post in a lighter grey, to discourage it... so he seems against it.

I caught on to the subtly of the lighter text as well.

I could kind of tell because when a Ask HN comes up with 3 paragraphs of text and its in that light color, the conversion rate form me actually reading it drops significantly.

I have first hand experience of that; and your right.

Yeah, it's been so long that I've heard "self-posting" used to mean the latter that I had forgotten about it. Isn't that a redit thing?

So... which one did you mean?

Your other reply * seemed to indicate the latter (as I say in the comment); but here you're saying that you'd forgotten about that meaning, so I guess you can't have meant it...

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875735 ah, now I see: the commenter gave two interpretations, and you replied "that's what I meant" without specifying which one. I didn't notice the ambiguity, and read you as meaning the "grey text in a HN post"; but it now seems you meant the other meaning ("linking to your own blog"). Wow. Confusion upon confusion, which I didn't notice even when asking about it. :-?

For extra goodwill points have an ad-free blog.

Interesting how a poll with 8 votes has only one upvote for the article. That happens a lot with polls.

If you feel remorseful about self-posting, you can do what jacquesm did in his post about his experience dealing with VC's (great post by the way). He just put the whole thing here.

I missed that.

Typically I don't even notice who posted it to HN unless I've really liked the post and never seen that domain before (and thus wanted to learn as much about that new-to-me site as possible), so I can't say I personally have any feelings on others who self post.

Relying on a small community on some of my blogs to post things I think will be of interest here at HN isn't effective, either.

I like getting as much input and conversation around my posts and posts of my contributors as possible. I view Hacker News as a way to bring new eyeballs in to deserving contributors (the same way I view Reddit and Y!Buzz, depending on the type of post it is).

As an editor of a group blog, I view part of my job is hunting down and finding the right audience for my contributors, and thus have little compunctions posting stuff from my blog that others wrote, as long as I think it has a shot at appealing to the community here.

I submit things I wrote roughly twice as often as I submit anything else (although both are fairly infrequent). My theory has always been that I add very little value by submitting an article to the NYT because someone here already reads that and if it is decent it will have already been submitted. My blog, not so much.

I think you nailed it with "if it's relevant, post it". The fact that you are thoughtful enough to ask the question, means you will probably make good decisions when it comes to submitting personal works. Don't be spammy, keep it relevant, and you should be good to go.

If you self-post something off topic it will probably get flagged and deleted. If you post something on topic that is no good it simply won't get up voted. If you self-post something on topic and high quality you'll get upvoted.

It seems to me that if you post something of average quality about a hot topic, that, too, gets upvoted, but it might just be differing opinions about what constitutes quality.

post it, if it's interesting people will vote it up, if not who cares.

Be honest about it and say in the comments that you're the writer.

Self-posting is cool. Self-posting and then finding 10 of your friends to up-mod is uncool.

Should you disclose self-posts?

Most of HN viewers are Objective.

If it's relevant, post it.

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