I’m wondering if this has happened to others on the HN leaderboard.
Jan 11th I was approached by Dana Oshiro from ‘readwriteweb’.
Initially it was just some friendly banter but after the third email it was pretty much an open door that the idea is that I post or write about the stuff that is sent to me.
So I stopped responding at that point because I definitely do not think it isn’t ok to try to game HN in this way, if you want your stuff posted simply make an account and post it yourself, the community will decide either way, you don’t need me for that.
Then on the 2nd of February it happened again, I’m getting fed up with this, so I put up a poll today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103021)) if I should out this company and person or not. The ‘ayes’ seem to have it, so hence this post.
Of course there is no explicit quid-pro-quo here but you can bet that if you ‘trade’ your HN reputation this way that you might be able to get some coverage for your own projects in return. I’d hope that people would look at the submission rather than the submitter so as far as I’m concerned this strategy backfires but by using ‘real’ HN’ers as stooges you can no longer see which posts are ‘self submits’ and which were posted out of genuine interest in a subject.
Readwriteweb has over 1600 URLs posted over the years here, I would think they really don’t need to go and solicit people to post more of them.
So, who else has been approached like this ?
Notice to readwriteweb.com, Dana Oshiro specifically:
It’s nice to be in contact with people that have their ear to the ground, but I really don’t like people trying to social engineer me in to doing their bidding, you are doing readwriteweb a disservice with this strategy. I will always look at readwriteweb stuff from now on as possibly influenced behind the scenes. It’s possibe that ‘that’s how it is done’, but not with me, and hopefully not with others on HN either.