As others have said, totally ok. Everyone should have a chance to make some money from a project like this.
Shameless plug: check out http://viglink.com to get it done. Sign up, one piece of JS, everything gets automatically affiliated. CEO is a major HN addict (and friend, in the interest of disclosure).
There's a strong entrepreneurial spirit on HN and that's why a lot of people are telling you that "It's okay to make money".
Personally, I think it would cheapen the whole thing. Websites that contain nothing but affiliate links to "Products I might like" are already a thing: it's what all those millions of parked domains such as testing.com are.
I have to (respectfully) disagree with you. There is literally no difference between what you see as a user whether there are affiliated links or not. So how does letting the guy monetize his project cheapen the thing?
It's not just a random list of products - the site is still the same - a cool list of products determined algorithmically by their mentions on HN. So why not let the guy earn a few bucks for putting it together?
I'd actually argue this is in many ways the perfect use case for affiliate links. The site owner has no bias - he's written a cool script to extract "votes" from the HN community itself, and as a reward for doing so, he should have the right to get a commission on sales. He provides value to the end user by aggregating product mentions, and he provides value to the merchants by highlighting products that might otherwise go un(or, less) noticed.
A site that doesn't use affiliate links in their recommendations seems more honest, and with that in mind, deserves to earn some money for essentially selling the product on behalf of the vendor.
A site dedicated to affiliate marketing has a disingenuous scent on all their recommendations; Are they actually recommending the product or are they just promoting it to get their cut?
In this case, it's a pretty fancy project that took plenty of time to construct, and I completely feel he should be able to take his cut for putting it all together. I immediately clicked the title expecting to see referral codes on all the links, and was surprised there weren't any. Then to read his comments asking if that was ok, it made his intentions seem really authentic.
As long as you are not putting some shady redirects, I think you should put some affiliate links. People will buy it for the same price, the difference is that you get a cut for the trouble :)
I certainly don't see any problem with it at all, though I didn't understand the dust-up when pinterest was re-writing links to include their affiliate code either.. so maybe there's an argument there that I'm unaware of.
If you do upfront disclosure is the best way, if you can imply that the funds go towards something cool you are working on or towards even better. Alternatively you can just say its an experiment and direct people to comment here. But yes tell visitors upfront if the links are affiliate.
I had the mistaken impression it was against Amazon TOS to call attention to the links. After reading the TOS again, though, I think that would be ok from Amazon's perspective. There's a line between saying on the page "click these links so I'll make money" and saying the links are Amazon affiliate. Amazon TOS here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...
Nice page, though. You should make money from it. How are you extracting the references to books from HN?
Thanks for your feedback! I use HNSearch API https://www.hnsearch.com/api to get submissions and comments. And then Amazon API to normalize and get meta info.
Yeah, just mention the affiliate links at the bottom of the page and have a little link "Click here to remove" and have it run some javascript to change the links.
This is generally a pretty heated debate topic, and there's no clear answer. Some people will be outraged; how dare you try and make some money!
But in general, if you're upfront and honest about using affiliate links (put a friendly notice in the footer about it), most people should be OK with it. I certainly am.
Don't over-think it. It's not sinful to make a bit of money from a helpful tool. Don't even bother with the switch to remove the affiliate code, if your users can't grant you that, they can copy-paste the link and remove your affiliate code manually - that is, if they don't already have a browser plugin that does that for them.
My thought is as long as you're not editorializing it's fine. If you're recommending products and affiliate linking then people have to question the legitimacy of your recommendation. If you're simply linking to every book mentioned on HN then there's no conflict of interest.
On mine, if you pick a book, say "Four Steps To The Epiphany", you get a review, a video, and about half-way down in a tabbed box called "the buzz", an up-to-date synopsis of what hackers think about the book from all the major sites. http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Four-Steps-To-The-Epiphany...
Bunch of other sites with similar (and sometimes better) features. I wanted to collect a list, but never got around to it.
The "questions" widget is broken. For example, on the Four Steps page there are three links, all ending in 404 like this one: http://hn-books.com/v1Main.htm#Q=1&Q2=1
The whole website is static, a templating engine which runs in f# on mono generates it. I haven't rebuilt the side in, gosh, a year? Two?
Looks like I had some bad data. Thanks for the heads-up.
Note that you can still use the "AnswerQuestions" page to create your own book lists and share them. So, for instance, if I wanted to give you my top 3 books for smart people, I could link like this: http://www.hn-books.com#B0=29&B1=161&B2=133&BC=3...
So the home page is working. Must be something else.
Hmm... Well I don't have a book but I did launch a premium 15x25 square-less wall calendar. It's at it's lowest price $6.99 since calendar buying season is over and I'm overstocked by 200. So it's quite a good deal considering similar calendars are $15 at Staples, OfficeMax, & OfficeDepot.
OoooH. I thought the HN store was a collection of products / books that HN members have MADE or WRITTEN. I didn't realize it was just a curated list. Nevermind about my calendar then.
I extract ASIN (Amazon ID) from URL and then use Amazon API to get so called "parent ASIN" (to acount for different editions like paperback, ebook etc).
One quick plug: the Hacker News Sidebar under Chrome WebStore hasn't been updated since 2011 and doesn't work any more. My fork of it is more up to date:
Sweet! I wonder if there's a way to gauge public opinion on these links - one of the apps obviously has some awful reviews on iTunes (Vapor). It'd help keep people away from apps that are doing malicious things like stealing contacts and uploading them to their servers.
A link to where the item was mentioned would be cool too, in addition to popping up the mention.
This is fantastic. One thought - once you have some data on the top 20 (say over 3 months) you could keep track of items that regularly come up in HN discussions. Show them as popular or regularly mentioned.
This is an index of all the links to Amazon/iTunes/Google Play/Chrome WebStore on HN (submissions and comments). You can click "# mentions" to see relevant HN stories/comments.
