There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.
But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?
Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
I'd guess because they're a part of the community and simply want to share their findings. I see no malice here. Having your work (whether writing or a new product) on the front page of HN for a couple hours is a great feeling and gives you a boost of motivation to continue your work.
They did mention the SEO benefits. Nevertheless, they are linking to a post on Indiehackers (not Simple Analytics website) which doesn't help them much in this scenario.
> Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
As an HN reader, I come here more for comments than the articles themselves. If the article stirs an interesting debate on a topic that I'm interested in, I personally don't care if the authors used some "strategy" to get on the front page or not. Bad and uninteresting spammy content usually doesn't stay on the front page for long.
How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.
Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.
I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.
You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community.
That is a win win imho.
plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...
Do you think its possible for generated content to hit frontpage. I thought most of the stuff it generated is pretty prosaic. Also not sure if have an objection to chatgpt content hitting frontpage.
The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm.
I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.
There seems to be a cognitive bias where one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases [1]. If so, then everyone has a "shill threshold": the amount of difference-of-opinion past which you will feel like the other person can't possibly be speaking honestly. When someone's posts exceed my shill threshold, I will feel that there must be some sinister reason why they're posting like that (they're a shill, they're an astroturfer, they're a foreign psy-op, you name it).
The important thing to realize is that this shill threshold is relative to the perceiver. It's the limit of your comfort zone, not a property of someone else's posts—no matter how objective the perception feels. It always feels objective—that's how we get phrases like "obviously a shill". (This also explains why people, even people who would agree with a statement like "this site is full of obvious shills", can never agree on exactly which posts are "obvious shills": it depends on your own views, and those differ.)
A forum like HN includes so many people, with such different views and backgrounds, that there is a constant stream of posts triggering somebody's shill threshold or other, purely because their views are sufficiently different. Thus the threads are guaranteed to fill up with accusations of abuse, even in the absence of any actual abuse.
[1] I bet it's nonlinear. Quadratic feels about right.
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At the same time, real manipulation and abuse also exist, so there are two distinct phenomena: there's Phenomenon A, the cognitive bias I just described, and then there's Phenomenon B: actual abuse, real shillage, astroturfing, etc. These are completely different from each other, despite how similar they feel. (The fact that they feel so similar is the cognitive bias.)
Phenomenon A generates overwhelmingly more comments than Phenomenon B—way more than 99%—and those comments are poison. They turn into flamewars, evoking worse from others (who feel unjustly accused and therefore within their rights to strike back even harder), and destroy what we're trying for in this community.
What's the solution? We can't allow Phenomenon A (imaginary perceptions of abuse) to destroy HN, and we also can't allow Phenomenon B (actual abuse, perceived or not) to destroy HN.
Our solution is to forbid users to accuse each other in the threads (because we know that such accusations are usually false and poison the forum), but to welcome reports of possible abuse through a different channel (hn@ycombinator.com). This takes care of both Phenomenon A (you can't post like that here!) and Phenomenon B (we investigate such reports and crack down on real abuse when we find it).
To fight actual abuse (Phenomenon B), we need evidence—something objective to go on (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). It can't just be the feeling of "obviously a shill", which we know to be unreliable. And it can't just be people having vastly different views. Someone having a different opinion is not evidence of abuse, it's just evidence that the forum is big and diverse enough to include a wide range of opinions.
We need to find some trace of evidence in data that we can look at. Some data is public (e.g. comment histories), other data is not (e.g. voting histories and site access patterns). We have a lot of experience doing this and we're happy to look when people email us with their suspicions—partly because fighting abuse is one of our most important functions as site managers, and partly because we owe it to users in exchange for their (hopefully) not slinging such accusations in the threads.
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(There's also the question: what about real abuse that we can't find traces of in the data? Obviously there must be some of that and we don't know how much. I call this the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator problem. I've written about that in various places - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725, and more via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., if anybody wants it.)
Exploiting possibilities and capabilities to see what can be faster, better and cheaper takes a certain degree of positive, resourceful unreasonableness that finds a way to find and connect the dots that matter.
Skepticism, cynicism and doubt worshippers who validate their beliefs by painting it on others are rarely hackers, or folks who chase the risk of creating interesting, useful or remarkable items if only momentarily.
Haters and talkers are usually busy doing nothing themselves so a culture on HN to build and share is so critically important.
If you can’t explore something with excitement knowing it mah not last and there may be a dead end, I think some of the ability to learn through passion and interest can be stifled around naysayers.
Fanboyism and chasing shiny objects has its caveats too.
Innovation just isn’t a purely logical pursuit or skill. It has creativity, emotion and other human skills that are critical to learn or miss out on at one’s own peril.
All this article says is that hackernews likes interesting, informative posts that actually tell a real story. And I for one am here for that all day. So yes, everyone take this strategy and make great content.
On the other hand, the parable of Frogstar World B warns against self-reinforcing focus on a local maxima at the expense of diversity.
Fortunately I doubt we’re at risk of passing the Marketing Content Event Horizon just yet
I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.
I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.
I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
> Step 3: The secret sauce We always end with a section that is called: Final thoughts. This is your moment to shine and drop a punchline that talks about your product/service.
And, there it is.
I've bounced back and forth between engineering and DevRel over the years and whenever I create this kind of content I'm careful to provide the interesting and valuable part up front. And I try to make the pitch at the end gentle and easy to skip or ignore if that's what the reader wants. I never want someone to feel like they were tricked into reading a sales pitch.
I see this as one way of trying to stem the tide of shitty articles and blog posts that have been proliferating for the past couple of decades and are kicking into overdrive now.
Companies should also consider, on the other hand, that writing interesting things and then not making a pitch at the end can be even more valuable. This kind of content is becoming very rare because it takes time to deliver impact, and that impact is hard to measure.
I think that's why creating great content without a concluding product plug is the ultimate mic drop in an era where many marketers are running scared and dropping easy-to-measure milquetoast bunt singles because execs mention 'operational efficiency' twenty-seven times during every all-hands meeting.
To be clear, I'm not advocating inefficiency; I'm just saying thoughtful posts that don't immediately and directly shove a percentage of readers into your funnel might be the current Moneyball of marketing to engineers.
It helps get my name in front of people (since my username is my real, legal name).
This is a long-term strategy; I am building a business, and the more people that know my name when I start announcing things, the better.
Yeah, I have an ulterior motive too, but I'm okay with it if that motive drives me to do actually good things.
I wish more people produced content like the ones they've mentioned (about an interesting, current topic, with their own take).
Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
That article does look great — gave it an upvote if it helps.
Yes, anecdata: A number of my own highest-quality finds have sink with barely a ripple on the "new" page.
> ... so you can try the same post again. Don’t overdo it. I would say max 2 or 3 times.
Most legit posters have better uses for their remaining lifetime minutes of brain activity than to game HN in such a tedious exercise.
Various software mitigations to recover credit for otherwise lost quality posts occur to me, but the coding effort looks substantial.
Maybe we could send repost invites to put them in the second-chance pool! (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35116604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34882140
I don't even understand how that's possible. Every time I tried to post a link that was already posted (by me or someone else), it redirected me to the original post (and upvoted it if I wasn't the author).
After observing that behavior 2 or 3 times, I assumed HN had some kind of deduplication system.
Anyway, their strategy is one of the popular ways of content marketing. But each step has something new in detail. Good takeaways!
You can hop onto a lot of freelance sites and find writers that will write under 1000 words for not much.
Yeah, some parts are perhaps copied/pasted. As you say, their tips include the way to shorten the time of creating an article. That should be the reason they expressed not "write an article" but "create an article".
It feels like HN moderation is mostly focused on getting the comments interesting, not about getting the stories interesting.
HN needs to step up its game here, IMO. There's way too much gamed crap reaching the front page. It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep.
I wouldn't say moderation is more focused on interesting comments than interesting stories - at least not consciously or intentionally.
Agreed, the people outside of the SV bubble submit and upvote different stuff and downvote the hell out of anybody who disputes their Eco-Marxist worldview.
Which is fine, just wish they’d be more open to debate instead of just squashing opposing points of view.
And someone doing that has certainly earned the right to include "one sentence that is the least salesy you can do" of self-promotion.
It’s quite amazing. I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too, and while I agree their “hack” seems laudable while also not offending anyone (they’re doing what we are looking for), they seem to forget one more reason why they keep getting traction - the product they sell is absolutely on target to HN audience at an emotional level so people likely upvote due to that reason as well.
Is less than once a month "very often?" Or do you mean "very often relative to how frequently one would expect a company that makes an alternative to Google Analytics" would make the front page?
I did think it was hilarious that they posted an article showing how to get to the front page of HN in such a way that you can sneak in a quick mention of your product without tripping the community's anti-self promotion bias, while literally did the exact thing they were suggesting doing.
next article: how we astroturf Hacker news. not too far-fetched given they're open to manipulating public sentiment on this platform
Put ChatGPT, RaspberryPI, Apple or Rust into the title.
What is a "CTA"?
That's not hacking.
That's how HN is supposed to work.
ok sure. Why not.
> and increase brand awareness […]
Hm. HN isn't Google. Brand awareness isn't always positive. There are several examples here where repeated coverage causes knee jerk negative reactions.
> SEO
Yes, that is a problem. If every time someone posts about grammarly or whatnot, if the Google algorithm doesn't care that people are vomiting with disgust in the comments, and treats that as "engagement", that is a problem.
Then again, you run the risk of having a page full of "omg grammarly is so shit" comments at the top of your Google ranking, so maybe that's appropriately Darwinian in a sense.
(No hate on grammarly, I just couldn't think of something more HN specific right now)
But you do get a ton of back links so that makes for go SEO(?)
I suspected that "indie hackers" are mostly hacking their customers, not their code. Here's a good data point in favor of my theory.
But seriously, create good, intellectually interesting content that people will upvote.
The tl;dr of the article is: provide value to the HN audience by highlighting articles of interest, possibly adding some extra commentary, and you'll get karma points. No gaming, no telling folks "vote for my post".
Kinda seems like the system is working!
From my perspective, I do post self-promotional links, but keep them to 5-10% of my posts (don't really keep track, that's more of a 'look at the last 30 posts and see if I have 2-3 self-posts'). Keep the self-promotional stuff quality, and you have to share other posts too. (I got a warning when I posted less than high-quality links and took it to heart. The mods are definitely watching.)
In fact, one of my joys is finding an interesting article from someone else and having it 'hit' on HN. It's such a gift to all the writers out there who are screaming into the void.
It doesn't always lead to something, but it sure is fun to have folks reach out and thank me for the HN spike. Plus the HN crowd gets exposed to the quality ideas.
As I said, the system is working.
The HN+community system appears to accurately measure value to its community. Of course we all knew that.
1. Be the guy that posts the news articles
2. Try the same post multiple times if it doesn't 'make it'
3. Timing is important - weekends are good opportunities.
