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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I have several problems with this:

First of all, creating an account just to submit a commercial link? That should be a bannable offense, unless we are cool with marketers selling their stuff here.

Second, I'm fairly sure this campaign goes against Indiegogo's term of use. I would expect an actual ban there.

Third, and more to the point: I could get behind such a campaign if the money went first towards legal access and second to production. The campaign may use as many nice words as they want, but ultimately, they are not putting their money where their mouth is. They "will support EmmaSofia's work to legalize recreational use"... after collecting a nice 300-600K, and only if people pay 400K extra for it. Call me skeptic.

And all of that without getting into the legal aspect of it, which I don't like either.

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I just want to clarify that I'm not affiliated with this project what so ever, I just found it interesting and worth posting here. And yes, it's my first submission.

> unless we are cool with marketers selling their stuff here. Do you not see this multiple times throughout each and every day?

People replying to threads with a small comment then squeezing in the link to their site "and we are http://blahblah.com have done this...." then paragraphs about their product

To be far this is HackerNews, a discussion board backed by a business accelerator program and home to startups and VCs alike.

If there's anywhere that should be okay with commercial promotion its here.

And that's what I like about the place. No where else on the internet can you find people at the ground level, promoting themselves and engaging in discussion. If you want to ask hard questions about the product, its hard to do it to a billboard in time square, but a lot easier to do against someone who's promoting it on HN.

Although I see where your comment is coming from, I think I should nitpick that the posts from actual startups backed by YC cannot be voted on nor have comments enabled. So unless they have the courtesy of showing up in an "unofficial" post, you cannot actually ask any questions, hard or otherwise. I wish I could link to it, but the best I can do is a screenshot[1].

More to the point: call me negative, but I think that fomenting a "post and run" style will lead to a situation in which you find it increasingly harder to talk to the actual creators. I'd rather not see "send link to HN" become yet another item on the self-promotion checklist.

[1] https://imgur.com/q7CsY0U

Isn't that just the hiring posts? YC companies do regular posts as well which can get comments.

To be fair, you're right post and run is a bad concept, but a lot of that happens already and its simply downvoted before it ever makes it close to the frontpage.

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