Tell HN: readwriteweb.com Canvassing HN'ers for their 'HN Love'

http://jacquesmattheij.com/readwriteweb.com-canvassing-hn-members

by jacquesm • 16 years ago

101 79 16 years ago

Ah shoot. RWW and VentureBeat were the only blogs I really trusted in the startup space. Needless to say, all respect lost for RWW. And it's not like RWW could be added to the banned domains list, because they actually write a lot of stuff people are interested in.

gyardley• 16 years ago

Eh, I'd support adding them to the banned domains list. Why don't we have another poll?

If not the banned domains list, perhaps pg could nofollow their links for a while?

jlees2• 16 years ago

One bad apple does not a blacklist make, surely?

zitterbewegung5• 16 years ago

Wolfire regularly approaches me to post their blog posting to HN. The blogs are really interesting and seem to be very popular so I really don't feel bad about posting it for them. In fact I don't do much distortion either I mainly just post it with the regular title.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Didn't you ever wonder why they don't post the stuff themselves?

zitterbewegung5• 16 years ago

I don't know why they kept on approaching me. I am old friends with the person. I started posting for him on reddit.com . They could have done my job with their own account.

chaosprophet2• 16 years ago

Even wolfire? Why can't they just post the stuff themselves? I mean I find the wolfire blog to be very very very interesting, and I don't really see the need for them to use a proxy to post for them. The articles would be quite popular on their own merit.

zitterbewegung5• 16 years ago

I am old friends with the person who created the site. I don't know why they went though me apparently I have a good track record for posting.

jeff18• 16 years ago

I will take full responsibility for this. I felt weird submitting my own content, so I asked my friend to submit it on my behalf, which is obviously much worse. I have since learned that submitting your own content is encouraged, so I am basically a dumb ass and humbly apologize to the HN community and to zitterbewegung for asking him in the first place.

-Jeff from Wolfire

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Spoken like a man, thanks for that.

niyazpk2• 16 years ago

What is the big deal here?

It is a very well known fact that in most of the social news websites people always contact the users with the most reputation ask them to submit/upvote their articles.

If you want to get featured in Techcruch or RWW or any high profile blog, you have to send them emails to get their attention (opposed to they noticing you because you are a promising startup).

This is the way the world works. There is no point in blaming someone who comes from that world for contacting you privately. If you think it is against the spirits of HN, great; now let Dana Oshiro understand the same by telling him this privately.

There is nothing black hat in what he did. It is what they always do. It is their standard operating procedure - contacting powerful people in other fields and build a reputation from there.

I don't want to sound as if I don't care about the quality of HN. I do. I just want to suggest that people from outside may not know these norms and it is not polite to disgrace them in public like this.

wheels3• 16 years ago

I suspect the disconnect may be much simpler. In many online communities, unlike Hacker News, it's seen as imprudent to post your own stuff.

With HN's roots in the startup community, it's much more in the DNA for people to have an angle they're trying to hustle and there's never been a vibe of don't-self-promote. It may just be that the relative outsiders don't know that it's all good to post their own stuff here.

robin_reala• 16 years ago

If it’s not a big deal then posting this isn’t ‘disgracing them in public’ surely?

niyazpk2• 16 years ago

"Hi John, over here there is no need to talk so loud to get attention"

"Hey everyone, did you ever notice John talking loudly to get attention?"

mnemonicsloth• 16 years ago

I'm glad this was posted.

Articles have been written about this sort of thing -- and more direct vote-swapping -- on Digg and Reddit. If I'd stopped to think about it, I'd have realized it's bound to happen here to some extent. But I didn't.

I feel sorry for Dana Oshiro if this is ventureblogging SOP, but maybe the threat of exposure will make attempts to manipulate rankings less attractive in the future.

petewarden• 16 years ago

> If you want to get featured in Techcruch or RWW or any high profile blog, you have to send them emails to get their

> attention (opposed to they noticing you because you are a promising startup).

I don't know about Techcrunch, but RWW started featuring my company without me contacting them at all, and with zero PR push other than word-of-mouth. It's possible to be too cynical about the process.

Psyonic7• 16 years ago

Color me naive, but I didn't realize that was SOP. Good to know though... good to know.

kylec2• 16 years ago

It's possible that it's more insidious than simply trying to get high-profile users to submit links to their articles. When you try to submit a duplicate link, the system will redirect you to the older submission and cause you to automatically upvote it. If you can get a handful of people to 'submit' the same link, you've managed to boost your article's ranking and likely will get it on the front page.

zitterbewegung5• 16 years ago

I am not that high profile and I have been approached because I have a midrange karma.

kylec2• 16 years ago

It doesn't matter how much karma you have though - the top users were probably targeted because the leaderboard was a convenient list of active users.

iamelgringo• 16 years ago

I've been on the leader board for a couple of years, and I do get plenty of random requests about starting HN meetups (I host Hackers and Founders -- Silicon Valley ). I also get a number of random pings to give feedback on people's sites, which I'm generally happy to do.

That being said, I've never been approached to submit a post.

patio112• 16 years ago

When people ask for marketing advice on HN, one of the things I always suggest is getting to know bloggers in your niche because, hey, help them help you. This is generally fairly well-received advice here, and has been practiced by many folks successfully. (I really like Peldi's pitch emails. They're on his blog somewhere, and are very worthy of emulation.)

I am unsure in what relevant respect contacting someone to post something to HN is different than contacting someone to post on their blog. Is it that we have a reflexive allergy to being marketed to? I find that people generally don't mind, as long as they're buying what you're selling. For example, every once in a while I get an email from startups about the new foozit they're working on, particularly for A/B testing.

Heck yes, I want to hear about that. Please, send me email. I understand you're not sending it to me because you woke up this morning and decided "What can I selflessly do to brighten Patrick's day?" That's OK -- we're all businessmen here. If you know my name and have given enough individualized attention to believe I will like it, I'll at least give it a looksie. (Running /bingo/ against whois records does not count as personalized attention -- and no, I'm also not impressed that you have a fake female persona do the letter.)

While it is extremely unlikely that I'd ever submit something from ReadWriteWeb or your tech blog of choice (simply because if it was worth reading y'all would all have already seen it probably days in advance of me), I wouldn't feel particularly dirty submitting something that I discovered via an email. I mean, since you guys are my main source of startup/software/etc news, and I don't submit duplicates, eliminating the "somebody told me about this" route would pretty much mean that the only way to find something to submit would be to write it myself.

Not that I have a problem with that, either. :)

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Accounts are free, what stops someone from posting it by themselves? If it's good it will float to the top (or at least, it should).

By asking 'well known' people in the community to submit stuff for them they're trying to ride the reputation of others in order to maximize their exposure, while at the same time hiding the fact that these are not 'natural' submissions.

It's like using other HN users as your personal sock puppets.

patio112• 16 years ago

Rather than using an identifiable person for my example I'll use non-existent Bob. Suppose Bob has been here for the last 3 years and has a bazillion karma and is well known to everyone as The Freaking Man on the subject of email marketing. (Sidenote: Do we have a Bob here? We could really use a Bob here. Show yourself, Bob!)

Anyhow, suppose some random email startup convinces Bob that their thingee is worthwhile enough to post about. Yes, I would trust that endorsement more than I'd trust randomHacker123's post. That is because Bob's endorsement matters to me, because I can use it as a filter for things I am likely to enjoy.

I understand they're using Bob's endorsement to maximize their exposure. I'm just not troubled by that. Bob's endorsement matters to me, at least on the subject of email marketing. He's doing the work sifting through the email marketing pitches so I don't have to. Yay! Bully for Bob.

swombat7• 16 years ago

"Natural" submissions? What are "natural" submissions? Submissions that arose naturally out of the movements of the Great Magnet? Every article that ends up on here ends up here because someone (whether the author or not) has deliberately submitted it, and other people have deliberately upvoted it. This is true whether or not the person who submitted it was the author, and whether or not they were asked by the author if they would be willing to submit the article. Who are you to declare one set of articles "natural" and the other "unnatural"?

I think you need to get off your puritanical high horse about "keeping HN pure". You're doing more harm than good. So far, the main HN problem I see with "canvassing" or "voting rings" or whatever other cabalistic conspiration theory you think up, is the fact that you're polluting HN with these pointless finger-pointing exercises.

There's far more a problem of awesome posts getting zero upvotes than of crappy posts getting too many. Far too many times I stumble on something that is a great, great post, I submit it, and I find that it was submitted 2 days ago and got no upvotes. This sucks.

* TO CLARIFY:

If anyone runs a blog and thinks their last post is AWESOME and they reckon HN will love it, but for whatever reason they don't wish to post it under their own nickname, please DO send it to me. I will read it, and if I like it and I feel it is indeed an AWESOME post worth putting up on HN, I will post it.

PS: I will not post things that I don't think are in fact worth posting.

PPS: If you can't figure out my contact details by yourself, then you can't send me stuff.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

> If it's good it will float to the top (or at least, it should)

I think that's part of the problem. (not that it justifies things).

Asking a mate for a bit of support or to help (see wolfire comments below) is fine IMO. But contacting fairly random individuals with the aim the build a relationship and get you to post stuff is clearly well over the line.

(ironically they can't have done much research into the community because anyone who did would realise that your a poor target for this kind of social engineering :P)

Incidentally I've had some completely unrelated contact with the French part of RWW and I find them charming and ethical. :) Could be just one bad egg?

maxklein• 16 years ago

You're getting a bit meta here. I disapprove of this post, and the post asking if you should post this. Just post it on your blog and that's it. Don't create discussion that contributes little - this is not a tabloid.

icey• 16 years ago

All of these meta-police postings are starting to get ridiculous.

I get that you're outraged because someone asked you to read or post something, or vote for something; but come on - surely you have a little more faith in the intelligence of the people here that you don't think that we're just going to blindly submit things because someone has asked us to.

This sort of submission doesn't accomplish anything except starting arguments. Even if a thousand people vote this up, nobody is going to stop asking other people to vote for their submissions, nobody is going to stop emailing people from out of the blue and asking for them to submit stories, nobody is going to stop posting links to their submissions from other sites with a plea to upvote it.

Instead, the top story is now about how someone was once again done wrong by the dark and terrible forces of the internets, conspiring to destroy the very fabric of Hacker News.

It's the sort of story where everyone can weigh in, because there's no barrier to entry for having an opinion. You can already see the race to the right margin starting, and this has only been up for 2 hours.

Good content has its way of making it to the front page. I can generally tell when I submit something if it's going to make it to the front page; I haven't had to ask anyone for any votes and yet they get there.

I guess I'm a little irritated about the insinuation that we don't have the capability to make decisions as to whether or not we vote or submit something. The suggestion that we can't is just getting old.

makmanalp• 16 years ago

Also, now there is a story about the site on HN. Congrats, free PR. Leaving it alone would have been better.

robg• 16 years ago

I find the drama tedious. There's already enough of it in the world. Why hype more?

This site is very simple. Post article/comment. Get feedback. Post more. Why make it more complicated than that?

Psyonic7• 16 years ago

Because if we allow this type of behavior, that formula no longer works. Those who simply post an article will never make it to the front page, because they don't have the clout and/or group to get their post voted up.

TrevorJ2• 16 years ago

As several people have pointed out, the core 'problem' is that it opens the door for less scrupulous activity in the future. I think we all have a mutual respect for the intellectual capabilities of the current HN'ers in regard to not blindly submitting or upvoting stuff.

However you can't ignore the fact that as HN gets more readers there's more skin in the game for startups. Getting your story to the front page could get you some of the momentum you need to attract that first angel investor, or to find your first seed group of alpha users. There are plenty of forces that will tend to corrupt the process as HN gains more readership.

We can't just consider the issue at hand, you must also consider the precedent this sort of thing sets and how that could evolve in the future.

Edit: I find it a tad ironic that the people saying this stuff isn't happening are also linking your comment in IRC and asking for it to be upvoted. Point being: it just rings false to 'lobby' for votes. Nothing personal, just an observational, I get that it is at least partly tongue in cheek.

bhousel• 16 years ago

I'm not so sure that a dangerous precedent is being set here. Don't you think it's far easier (and more harmful to the community) to game the killing of stories than to game the promoting of stories?

marshallk• 16 years ago

Dear HN folks, Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead writer at RWW here. Just wanted to let you know that we're reading your thoughts here and looking into this situation. We like HN not just for the readership it has sent us over the years but also for the quality content from other sites that we find here and the good discussion in comments. I just woke up and don't know what more to say about this right now, but please do know that the integrity of the collective news discovery and promotion process is something we think is important.

Psyonic7• 16 years ago

You do realize that your comment was essentially a meta-meta-policing comment? And you wrote nearly as much as he did.

Angostura2• 16 years ago

The fact that a company - any company - is not posting material on its own behalf suggests that it is attempting to rely the poster's reputation to get it promoted rather than pure the merit of the article quality.

I don't particularly see anything wrong with this as long as there is a degree of transparency and the poster adds an initial comment to the effect that:

Bob from example.com asked me to post this and since it is clearly neat, I have.

Bob from example.com asked me to post this and since he paid me $500, I have.

... as appropriate.

harpastum• 16 years ago

The issue there is that unless you're posting a link to a blog entry you wrote (that allows you to make that such a disclaimer), HN will only display the link. I don't think we should start encouraging content-less blog entries that allow us to fully disclose that we're being told to post something. Just post it if it's worth posting, don't if it's not.

ericd• 16 years ago

It's easy enough to drop a comment, if it's highly relevant, it will be upvoted to near the top of the heap.

Angostura2• 16 years ago

Post the link. Add an HN comment.

J3L2404• 16 years ago

I think all the valid points have been made; maybe it's time to flag this out of existence(meta).

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Just a data point: I'm in the top 100 (though not top 10 likes jacquesm!), know a couple of people at RWW (not the person involved with this, though), and I've never been approached by anyone randomly at RWW or anywhere else with the intention of gaming or posting to HN.

tripngroove• 16 years ago

I think it's naive to assume there's anything that happens on HN that isn't socially engineered in some way.

Sounds glib, but render down the actions and incentives of participation on the site. In a business-focused environment where there's opportunity to influence a large group, whether for direct commercial gain or reputation-building, competition will necessarily arise.

We're all socially engineering each other all the time.

Take away posting attribution and karma and it mightn't be that way, but those are big incentives for continued participation, once a person is invested. Could the site exist without them?

suzyperplexus2• 16 years ago

Hey Jacques, I just read your post and as per my email, I sent you my article for feedback. I DO want to do a better job in writing stories that are useful to the HN community and this is why I reached out in the first place. It was never my intention to undermine any aspects of the community, if anything I asked you for your advice in honor of your position as a community leader. I have no problem nominating my own stories, but your nomination and feedback tells me if an article is a good resource for entrepreneurs and programmers. Thanks in any case for your initial email on trends. For those of you who do want to let me know what stories you'd like to see written in 2010, I'm grateful for your feedback.

Dana Oshiro

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Hey Dana,

Thanks for posting here.

I'm not a community leader by any stretch of the imagination, as I already wrote to you, just someone that in episodes spends way too much of his time on HN.

My 'nomination' will never be given to stuff I'm asked to submit because that already stacks the deck, I'm no longer unbiased towards what you wrote.

I'll post the stuff that I find on the net while surfing, irrespective of the source of my relationship with a source.

As a rule, if someone mails me their submissions I'll read but not upvote, unless it is excellent stuff.

If I come across readwriteweb articles that really interest me - and not through my inbox - then I'll definitely post it, or upvote it, but otherwise definitely not.

I understand that the pragmatic view is that 'everbody does it' but I simply don't feel comfortable with doing this.

It suggests some kind of collusion, possibly in the long term a quid-pro-quo and I like to be independent.

Over the years I've had plenty of press on my projects but not once was there any kind of behind the scenes dealing going on, and I frown on the cozy relationships that some press people build with people in the industry. Having press contacts is one thing, getting too close is imo not good.

As for HN, I'd expect readwriteweb.com content to be caught by enough people to be submitted anyway if it warrants that, I doubt you'd need to go out and solicit it (I could be wrong there), so for that you really don't need me or any other HN user specifically.

The best 'nomination' you can get here is to simply post your stuff and see what sinks and what swims. It's far from perfect, good stuff will fail plenty of times and fluff will rise to the surface but on the whole it is better than anywhere else, and to carefully read the comments, there is plenty of really good feedback there.

best regards,

Jacques

suzyperplexus2• 16 years ago

Thanks Jacques. I appreciate the discussion and I've learned a ton about the community in this process. Thanks HN.

Tell HN: readwriteweb.com Canvassing HN'ers for their 'HN Love'

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