

How I used 2 YC companies to quickly raise money and awareness for a recent injustice - acgourley
http://www.digitalkarate.net/?p=59

======
willarson
It seems the crux of this post is that "while I don’t know the exact donation
totals, I bet the site has raised a thousand dollars in a couple days." Or to
summarize slightly: something almost positively probably happened, and by god
I'll use this event that may or may not have happened as linkbait.

I really think we should refrain from posting our own content unless it is of
particularly high quality (a fairly long--and edited--essay, a project we have
been working on for several months, a redesign of our company's app). If I had
to summarize this concept into one rule it would be "Don't post things that
might appear to a reasonable individual to take longer to read than to write."

~~~
acgourley
How is it different than posting a long block of text instead of a link?

~~~
willarson
I am interpreting this question to mean "How is posting this link different
then posting a new topic on HN with the same text?" (Please stop me if I have
simply misinterpreted a snarky remark about the value of my comment. ;)

I wasn't intending to address that distinction in my comment, but the
distinction is important because additional traffic to your website has the
potential to benefit you far more than posting "a long block of text" on HN
does. This is why most low quality submissions come in the form of links
instead of text submissions: because the submitter wants readers to visit
their website for nefarious sundries.

The point I was trying to make, which applies equally to submitted links and
printed text, is that they should be of higher quality than this submission.
To me this submission feels like its raison d'etre is to serve the submitter,
and does very little in way of sparking interesting or meaningful discussion
for the HC community.

To be more specific, it fits into the mold of the variety of submissions that
I find to consistently be of the lowest quality: short (and often unedited)
posts submitted by their own authors. When I joined the HN, posts of this kind
were virtually unheard of, but recently they have become rather common. A
simple test for these kinds of submissions is "If someone else found this
entry, would they submit it to Hacker News?"

I have to apologize though, my comments here are really directed at an
undesirable trend, of which your submission is only one example, and not an
egregious one at that. So, I hope you don't put too much weight into my
critique.

~~~
acgourley
Well, two replies I suppose:

1) I don't have advertisements on my site and my previous blog post was months
ago. I'm not exactly on my way to be a full time A-list blogger. Sometimes
people just want to host content they have written online, not build up an
online phenomenon.

2) It's a social news site for the precise reason that people will vote for
the content they like. I felt like sharing how it was possible to get a large
burst in traffic using a specific method, and peopled liked it enough to up-
vote it, despite my questionable writing ability. Every social news system has
its holes and flaws, but I don't think my post is exploiting one of these
weaknesses. For that reason I don't think it warrants special protest.

Still, I'll assume that you were lashing out from tiredness of other, more
egregious, examples of self-posting, and not take it too personal.

------
nazgulnarsil
new business model: capitalize on popular news stories by claiming to be
related to the people involved and then setting up fake donation sites.

being an asshole is mandatory.

~~~
acgourley
Heh - well I saw enough proof of her identity. Besides the personal
correspondence, I saw a photo she took combining her student ID, a photo of
her and Tracy, and a coin someone had requested. I don't deny that the whole
thing could have been elaborately faked, but its past the threshold where it
would be worth it. The author of the reason.com article also confirmed her
identity.

Nonetheless, you're right that an unscrupulous person could probably gather
some non-trivial amount of money by basically copying what I did.

------
Prrometheus
>Even some of his family refuse to believe the police could be so wrong

That is a problem. I have a hard time explaining to people that don't read
Radley Balko's work that police kill many innocent people every year in the
name of stopping people from getting high. My non-libertarian friends just
assume that the dead person did something wrong, otherwise why would the
police shoot at them? They never question the authority of the state, and
whether or not police should have the power to knock down doors unannounced on
the basis of anonymous tips in the first place.

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Sam_Odio
Add news.yc to that list.

------
thingsilearned
also add tipjoy.com to the blog :)

------
slapshot
This is shady.

