[rsmiller510]

Joshu, I'm not sure what exactly you're complaining about. The person who posted the link is not the same person who wrote it. They just happen to work at the same site with oh 50 or 60 other writers. But even if the author had promoted her own story, so what? I can tell you that as a writer, I promote my own work on social sites because being read is a goal of mine and also because page views make my editors happy and keep me working. I make no apologies for that. It's actually part of what any good writer should be doing. After I publish a post I usually spend a good 20-30 minutes promoting it on social sites--so people know it's there and actually read it.

[jaredsohn]

I didn't think this was the consensus on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401332).

It seems more honest to me to visibly self-promote than to create a sockpuppet account to make it seem like the community likes it.

Update: Meant to reply to grandfather post.

[joshu]

self-promoters have awfully mixed reasons for promoting their own stuff. this leads to problems.

- they are free-riding, not helping the community. notice that OP doesn't really post things they are not involved with. i notice you do the same.

- they do not disclose it is self-authored.

- the behavior is often looked down-upon by communities. i certainly feel bad about doing it.

- when authors are chasing pageviews and not reputation they are often submitting everything rather than attempting to curate good stuff.

- there's an incredibly fine line between this and spam.

when someone submits something that they found, they are saying "this is good."

when someome submits something that they wrote, they are saying something subtly different: "please look at this"

it's forgivable when they are part of the community, because at least they know what the community is about. i notice that your first comment on this site is about self-posting.

you are unapologetic about submitting your stuff but the vast majority gets zero upvotes. wrong audience, probably.

[rsmiller510]

joshu, The fact is that the writer of this post and the person who posted were two different people, so regardless of what you think of self-promotion, it simply wasn't relevant in this instance.

[joshu]

the submitter works for the submitted blog, thus it is not completely irrelevant.

[hn12]

I'm the submitter. I'll write a little of what I know.

joshu, you wrote, "notice that OP doesn't really post things they are not involved with". In this case, I think you intend me when you write, "OP". At this point, http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hn12 seems to tally sixteen items I've submitted to HN. The first fifteen were to pieces I'd written: the tiny minority of all I'd written in the past couple of years that I thought would particularly interest HN, but certainly related to me. The sixteenth, and most recent item, was the one which spawned this thread. In my mind, I had nothing to do with the piece on introversion, and know nothing about the author, but it's true that I write sporadically for the same site.

I submit rarely to HN in part because I don't understand it. While I scan it, I don't feel familiar enough with its ethos even to qualify myself as a lurker. I frequently post--mostly pieces I have not written--to Reddit, DZone, Stackoverflow, and so on, because I am far more comfortable with what "works" there.

My main personal conclusion from my submission is that I'm surprised--astounded, even--and pleased with the quality of the comments that have followed. I've found them more meaningful, in aggregate, than those for any other submission I've read in HN. This encourages me to believe that there must be much more to HN than I've found, and I simply need to approach it some different way.

joshu, in a nearby comment you suggested I "disclose". Please provide detail: how do you recommend I have submitted the article on introversion?

joshu, in a nearby comment you write about "chasing pageviews and not reputation". When I posted the piece on introversion, I was "chasing" neither pageviews NOR reputation; as I've suggested above, I understand the latter only dimly. I thought the article would interest HN readers.

I underline: rsmiller, hn12, and the author of the introversion piece are three different people. I suspect the three of us have never met each other, although of course I'm in no position to be certain of the other two.

I'm unsure what you mean, joshu, by "the submittor works for the submitted blog". I occasionally write for the HPIO site. It's possible I'll never do so again; I certainly am not an employee or otherwise related to HPIO with a duty to submit articles from the site to HN.