
Hacking Engineers and Engineering Media - exolymph
https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer
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pitb0ss
Some great points. It is always important to remember that everyone has an
agenda (especially in the current era of "fake news"). If we need to be
skeptical of news seem on Facebook and other common places, why not be
skeptical of things on Hacker News ... etc. One more current example (related
to non-hacker news) would be that I've yet to see anything in the "trending"
news section on Facebook about the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Just shows that
they curate that for their agenda.

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acobster
These are good guidelines for spotting any kind of bias in media. I get that
this is targetted at engineers, but aside from the tech-specific examples this
advice applies to all kinds of content/reporting, and I wish it were taken
more seriously in digital literacy curriculum (in the US anyway).

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nemild
That's a great point, I'll make it clear in the intro that it is for both.

I wrote it initially for engineers, but then kept finding examples in other
fields.

For engineers, you can read part 3 in my MongoDB series ("The Marketing Behind
MongoDB") to see a common playbook at dev tool companies specifically:

[https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html](https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html)

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airfreak
Content marketing for SEO is everywhere. It's quite easy to spot, the author
will explain why the practice of XYZ is great, in a pretty generic way, and
then sprinkle in a couple of links to the sponsor that provides a product or
service around that XYZ.

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beaconstudios
Bad content marketing is obvious, good content marketing hits the front page
of HN

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gcb0
would be great if it had actual real examples for each item

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nemild
To anyone reading, please do send a pull request (or an email, see my HN
profile) with examples. I put this together in my free time, but would love to
crowdsource more examples and general points.

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juststeve
what about astroturfing?

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scribu
It’s mentioned as “troll armies”.

