[caslon]

"The point" is because it's fun to farm points. This is the same reason people play in competitive video games, or even why people posted videos of themselves online before there was a financial incentive to. It's fun to do something inherently collaborative, like being viewed by an audience.

Hacker News fills the same niche for me as competitive video game tournaments do (during a certain time of the year, an easy way to predict whether or not my account will post during any given month is to see how tournaments are going in the game I play most). Hacker News is like a video game you can play at work.

That said, you can also pretty easily monetize farming points. It's pretty obvious when people are doing this, but I also don't see it as mattering too much, so I've never minded it, even though I'd never do so.

[noduerme]

Would monetizing points here really be worth it? Even if you had a ton of points and made the front page with your new startup for a whole day. If it wasn't actually an amazing piece of code, or truly original, you would get endless amounts of blowback. Arguably this is the worst possible place to debut anything. You have to be some kind of masochist. And if you spent a dime on farming for it, God Help you. I mean, I love seeing MBA CEOs suddenly jump onto HN to try to do damage control after launching/promoting something here that they thought would get easy hits. That's like my favorite HN sub-genre... the wildly freaked out brand-new CEO. Someone should make a compilation of those.

[caslon]

It absolutely would be, and a lot of people get away with it quite well. It's more subtle than what you're thinking, though, because it doesn't mean just posting ads.

It takes root in posting really good content, at least for a while. You get your points up, get seen as a contributor, and then you start posting your own blog posts. Nothing explicitly an ad at first; you're just trying to get people to start thinking of your blog as something that usually has good reads, and that . Then you eventually post about a thing you made that you think the audience would want to buy, and, not exactly shockingly, they do!

By framing it using something like "My startup failed... again. An analysis," or "Just got the first few bites on my product, after years of trying," you let the audience escape the feeling of being advertised to despite the motive being entirely profit.

There was one user that was so good at this they were on the front page nearly every month of last year and they sold $60k worth in units because of it, never getting called out for what they were doing. To be generous to them, the content was good when it wasn't advertisements. You have to remember that what's popular on Hacker News on any given day will also circulate around a bunch of tech sites that are bad at coming up with their own content.

One person that I actually know built a complete business out of subtly using HN for advertising.

This takes root in even smaller ways, though. Like someone popping up in every thread that's remotely relevant to say, "Hey! We're building a product that does this at lazyfiveletternamedotio! Check it out, it seems like it fits your use-case." Sure, they'll get criticized, sometimes. But they'll also get bites. And when you're selling software as a service substitute for $600/mo, it doesn't take very many bites to make being criticized on Hacker News worth it. Doubly so when you're taking venture and need to up your numbers for the next round.

[noduerme]

Gotta say btw, reading back on your HN posts, this one was freakin outstanding http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong