[jlgaddis]

Nice referral links on your page. I see from your comment history that you've spammed HN with it several times in the past as well.

---

Edit: To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with affiliate links. To me, though, it's the same as someone here mentioning their product or service in a comment without disclosing their affiliation.

It's one thing to tell another person "The FooBar 9000 is a good router.". It's quite another to say, "The FooBar 9000 is the BEST router on the market. Oh, look, here's Joe. He sells those and you can buy one from him right now.", without mentioning you have previously worked out a deal with Joe.

It's not the affiliation that's the issue. It's the lack of transparency about the affiliation. (And, in this case, for me personally, it's that the OP apparently tries to work in a link to his page anywhere he can in HN conversations.)

[Xylakant]

I fail to see the problem with affiliate links in that context. The site openly disclosed that they use affiliate links to amazon. The site provides a value, a ranked list of compatible devices. I might actually use it if I were shopping around for a device. Building and maintaining it probably takes some effort. It deserves to get paid. If you think that all for-profit pages should be banned from mention then this here would be a barren place, devoid of links to useful services.

added after the parent modified his post:

Even after you changed your comment, I fail to see a problem. The poster explicitly says "I maintain", openly disclosing his affiliation with the site. The site does not recommend a specific device as "the best", it provides a list, ranked by a disclosed set of criteria from which you can pick. You can actually change the filters and the sort order - cheapest, graded by performance, ... We can agree or disagree on the specific sort criteria picked or the completeness of the list, but the grandparent actually does sometimes engage into discussions about this, soliciting feedback (and I presume implementing it). It adds value over the device lists that LEDE and OpenWRT provide.

The grandparent does mention the page every time the context makes sense, but alas, when else would he mention it? Would you prefer if the grandparent just posts the link as a reply to each and every post? He built something that adds value, so why not mention it? It's not like it's the only thing the GP ever posts. Seems more like a lurker from the comment history, but come on, the last mention was 141 days ago, it's not like it's spammy.

All in all your comment comes off as being jealous someone built something that provides a little income.

[jlgaddis]

> The site openly disclosed that they use affiliate links to amazon.

Did it? I was on an iPad and only realized they were affiliate links after I clicked on one and it took to Amazon. Immediately, I looked at the URL to see if there was a referral tag in there. I then went back and noticed "DISCLOSURE" at the very bottom, in the footer, but I don't recall seeing any mention of it before that.

> If you think that all for-profit pages should be banned from mention then this here would be a barren place, devoid of links to useful services.

Did I say anything even remotely close to that?

[lovelearning]

I wanted to ignore this since I don't enjoy subjective arguments, but since you seem to be virtue signalling about disclosures, I'd like to point out that your own page with Amazon affiliate links [http://evilrouters.net/bookshelf/] does not disclose your affiliation to Amazon (which is itself a violation of section 5 of the Amazon affiliate program agreement), nor does your DISCLOSURE page (whose link is also at the very bottom right of your page). The other commentator's disclosure page (http://rooftopbazaar.com/disclosure/) comes across as a proper honest disclosure to me. Sorry, your comments seem like hypocrisy to me.

[jlgaddis]

Thanks for pointing that out. With the exception of a couple spontaneous, hastily written blog posts, that blog has been pretty neglected for about the last ~5 years. I've been meaning to remove the Adsense ads and add HTTPS for a long while too, but I haven't got around to doing either. Before just now, it's probably been several months since I even looked at that site.

Anyways, the "disclosures" page has no references to Amazon because I removed them several years ago when I quit being a part of the Amazon Affiliate program. I thought I had removed the affiliate tags as well but apparently not. They were still there but they haven't been valid for at least three or four years now (and, thus, not generating any commissions).

Here's a screenshot showing that the account was closed: https://imgur.com/c3rmZ5F

Regardless, I have removed them from the page. The page is cached and I don't remember the magic incantation to force varnish to purge the cached version but rest assured it'll get refreshed in the near future.

I'm sorry you had to spend your time searching through my web sites to try to find something that made me look hypocritical. Also, I'll point out that I don't go around posting links to that "bookshelf" page on HN comments. That is what would have made my statements hypocritical, not the fact that I had affiliate links on some random web page somewhere.

[Xylakant]

> Did it?

It says first thing on the top that links go to amazon. There's a link at the bottom to the full discussion. What's the issue if the links to amazon are affiliate links? It's not like they're forcing you to buy or that the value you get from the site is reduced by that. They don't hype a specific device either.

> Did I say anything even remotely close to that?

I very much understood your complaint about "spammy, since he links to a page that he's affiliated with" to go in the direction that nobody should link to a monetized service he's somehow affiliated with, yes.

[megaman22]

I'm of the oppinion that all links to amazon, for example, should be affiliate links. Somebody should be getting that cut.

[EwanToo]

Ideally I think it would be https://smile.amazon.com/ but I know it's never that simple..

[TheSpiceIsLife]

This is a great comment. It disrupts the whole argument and turns it on its head.

[mikeash]

It talks a lot about Amazon, but there's no mention of using affiliate links.

The issue is that there's a conflict of interest when a page that gives you advice on what to buy uses affiliate links. If they get a cut of my purchase, then they're incentivized to get me to buy the most expensive alternative rather than the best one, and to buy something rather than stick with what I have if what I have is adequate.

This is not an insurmountable problem, but disclosure is important so I know what's going on.

[alsetmusic]

> All in all your comment comes off as being jealous someone built something that provides a little income.

I don’t consider the comment as a display of jealousy. It appears (to me) that it originates from a dislike of self-promotion.

Note: I am not taking a position on the matter of self-promotion, but on the conclusion of jealousy.

[Xylakant]

I count single digit mentions in 1669 days that procotor is registered on HN. That would be lousy self promotion. I believe that proctor genuinely believes he built something useful and wants to share it. The snark in jlgaddis post rubs me the wrong way.

[dspillett]

> That would be lousy self promotion.

But still self-promotion if people want to be dogmatic about it. Some people, and some discussion forums, have an absolutely zero tolerance attitude to self-promotion.

I have no issue with it if:

* It isn't almost all that the account is for (caveat: personally I don't care enough in this case to have checked the account's comment history), i.e. the person contributes usefully to discussions noticably beyond what is needed for the self-promotion.

* The posts are at least relevant to the discussion at hand (which it appears to be here)

* The page/post/other is sufficiently honest about the affiliate links, because otherwise they could represent a conflict of interests (recommending what makes most out of affiliate relations rather than what is actually best by a good objective measure). This last part can be quite subjective, and again I've not looked at this particular case myself yet.

[Xylakant]

> But still self-promotion if people want to be dogmatic about it.

If you want to be dogmatic about it, then no links to your bio, no mention of the good work you do, no link to a company that employs or employed you, no link to your blog, ...

[pbhjpbhj]

Make sure you use a different username, and keep yourself anonymous!

[pbhjpbhj]

I shared a link to my blog the other day, we had a discussion on p2p internet and I recalled Opera Unite and linked a page I wrote about it some time ago.

That page has affiliate links, IIRC, which you probably block with ublock/adaware, should I not have shared it?

[dspillett]

If it was relevant to the discussion, and you actually included some of the content in the discussion (i.e. quoted the relevant parts with a link to the fuller article for people who want to check greater detail, rather than just a link) so people didn't have to jump off-site to read your contribution, then I don't see a problem with that.

[alsetmusic]

> I count single digit mentions in 1669 days that procotor is registered on HN. That would be lousy self promotion.

Lousy of not, it’s still self-promotion. This is true whether it occurs once or many times.

> I believe that proctor genuinely believes he built something useful and wants to share it.

I agree.

> The snark in jlgaddis post rubs me the wrong way.

Clearly. However, you aren’t defending your accusation of jealousy. Jealousy was the key word that I was addressing.

[Xylakant]

> Lousy of not, it’s still self-promotion. This is true whether it occurs once or many times.

If a few mentions of something you built counts as self promotion, then even the description and the link to the blog that jlgaddis has on his profile page is self-promotion. It promotes a blog that he writes, possibly to further his professional career.

> Clearly. However, you aren’t defending your accusation of jealousy. Jealousy was the key word that I was addressing.

Ok, let me rephrase that to be more clear: It rubs me in a way that makes me personally believe that something more than "I don't like self promotion" is at play. And I believe that it's jealousy. You obviously don't, but that's personal perception I guess.

[jlgaddis]

It's really not "jealousy" but you're free to believe that if you'd like.

Would you feel better if I removed the info in my HN profile?

Note also that blog has been mostly neglected for the last ~5 years.

[stordoff]

I agree that the use of affiliate links isn't a huge issue, but I'm not sure I'd agree that the site _openly_ discloses the use of Amazon affiliate links. To learn that information, you have to notice "Disclosure" in the footer (which doesn't indicate what sort of disclosure it is), and even then the resultant page doesn't have a straight-forward statement along the lines of "This site makes use of Amazon affiliate links".

I also feel like the following is possibly _slightly_ misleading, or at least intended to induce the use of the provided links:

> By using any link on this site – affiliate or not – you will get a better deal by purchasing a corresponding product through that link than you would by going directly through the linked company’s site

[jeroen]

The previous comment mentioning the site is 141 days old, and the one before that 451 days. A bit much to call that spamming.

[faeyanpiraat]

What’s wrong with monetizing your stuff if you provide value? (Haven’t checked out the linked page, this is more like a generic question)

[falsedan]

Nothing wrong with monetization, it's how you do it that's important.