Ask HN: Does spammy self-promotion drown out real hacker news?

6 points

14 years ago

I've noticed that a lot of interesting news submissions never make the homepage. I think it's because a lot of companies post a blog entry that's really just pumping their own brand and get all the employees to vote it up. Meanwhile, the interesting news post doesn't have the manufactured upvotes so gets lost in the shuffle. My former company even figured out how to game the system and get by vote filters (it's fairly simple).

Looking at the HN homepage now, many are what I would consider blatant self-promotion and border on spammy. Granted, I have no problem with someone wanting feedback on their site or offering a really in-depth look at internal technology (e.g., this is how we handle failover and scale to 1MM uniques/day), but a lot of companies just manufacture reasons to blog solely to boost traffic (company memo: thanks for the blog ideas and upvoting our post, HN gave us 10K hits today! good leads!).

HN page as of now (50% are self-promotion, several IMO are legit): 1. Neural Networks for Machine Learning (coursera.org) 3. Keccak wins the SHA-3 competition (nist.gov) 5. Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites (linkdaq.net) 8. Lockitron: Keyless entry using your phone (lockitron.com) 9. Software on Steam (steampowered.com) 12. Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It (mailchimp.com) 16. Online Python Tutor: Learn programming by visualizing code execution (pythontutor.com) 18. How We Doubled Our Android Install Rate in One Hour (dwellable.com) 20. Show HN: Meet your cardboard buddy. (foldable.me) 21. Filepicker.io launches Alfresco, WebDAV, & FTP integrations (filepicker.io) 22. Show HN: Summaries of interesting content, written by people (tldr.io) 24. Lead Product Engineering at OrderAhead 27. How to Model Viral Growth: The Hybrid Model (linkedin.com) 29. Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows (macfound.org)

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