Ask HN: Is it frowned upon to post things on HN that I’ve written?

From the guidelines[0]:

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

If you're going to post your own stuff, it should be as interesting as the articles you would normally read and upvote on HN. You should be thinking "they'll probably like this cool thing I've been working on," not "I hope this gets my project more attention."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is no problem if you participate in HN as a real person.

That is, if you post comments and submit articles from a variety of sites that get some upvotes and slip in a few links from a site of your own that is great.

If you sign up for a new account and start spamming links from your blog that will get you in trouble.

I mostly agree with @PaulHoule... if you post some of your own stuff here and there, that's probably going to be fine. If you post nothing but your own stuff, and you post it all. the. freaking. time., then yeah, people are going to get annoyed and I wouldn't be surprised if you wind up shadow-banned or something.

HN has always had a culture of accepting a certain level of self-promotion, but on the other hand, HN is not your personal platform for pitching/espousing/proselytizing/whatever.

If you write something that we would love, or sparks an awesome discussion - it is your DUTY to submit it :D. The goal here is to find interesting stories, not get "white knight points" for refusing to post your own content.

I submitted many of my own articles here and they have trended. Frankly, it constitutes most of my submissions.

Since HN is the way I get information, it is hard for me to pitch anything novel since whenever I come with content that I want to share, I search and somebody already submitted it :/. It is a new years resolution of mine do post more of the "other" stuff

I rounded up my thoughts on what made my previous articles "successful":

https://piszek.com/2021/10/07/hacker-news-tips/

I tend do the reverse. On occasion I write a more detailed comment/answer here, I copy it across to my blog and update it to be an article there.

I figure if I spent the time writing something more detailed than typical of my comments I may as well leave it on my site too.

More generally I try to treat HN with more care than I would a reddit type site. Its such a great community and I dont like the increasing one liner jokes and glib/low benefit comments coming through. We really need to protect that.

I think posting to your own writings is fine as long as its openly what you're doing, not the majority of you 'contribution' and done for genuine interest vs trying to drive attention/traffic/work etc back to yourself as part motivation to why you doing it.

As an alternative, can't you post your writings on a personal blog and then submit to HN? As long as you are not spamming and blogging about topics that HN readers like to read, and submitting no more than once a week or fortnight - then perhaps it is OK?

HN is for interesting content. If you can make something interesting, then it is welcome.

I've posted several of my own articles and they've sometimes performed pretty well. I wrote some emotive anti-adtech stuff, some game of life stuff, a CLI journal, and recently a wordle solver!

Personally I think your writing should be interesting and novel, but I've not received any negative comments due to posting my own.

Yes it's frowned upon, but there is another guy who does it all the time, and once I commented on it and I got downvoted to oblivion for that, so shrug.