[neeson]

Well this is interesting. Third story from the top is about how Reddit is kickbanning a bunch of sites (e.g. the Atlantic) for nasty SEO, then a5seo submits an Atlantic story, his history is full of submits by the Atlantic, and he has steady stream of submissions with zero comments. Joke? Art? An SEOer not paying attention?

[graue]

The OP looks like a legitimate user to me. Thoughtful comments on other stories, and recent submissions from a wide variety of sources, with no publisher clearly favored.

I immediately thought the same as you when I saw an Atlantic link, though.

[tptacek]

There are a bunch of users like this on HN. Look at any "ITWorld" story that hits HN; odds are, it's been submitted by a single-purpose account that submits only stories from ITWorld. Torrentfreak has had similar users.

[anigbrowl]

Yeah, I think OP owes us some explanation.

[a5seo]

I'm the OP. So here's the deal... I read The Atlantic daily. I actually wrote a script to check their feed and score the stories via the sharedcount API and email me the best-of-the-best.

If something is interesting to me and I believe it would be useful to other startup hackers like me, I submit it. It's that simple.

If there's something to be gained from doing this (aside from hopefully spurring an interesting discussion on HN), I'm not smart enough to figure out what it is.

The people who are anti The Atlantic should re-read the posting guidelines which describe as on-topic, "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

Interested in behavioral economics? Government policy that affects startups? Human psychology that we should accommodate in our apps? Technology trends? Yeah, I'm sorry to say but The Atlantic, Salon, Wired, etc. are some of the best at covering that stuff.

If this content is no longer welcome on HN, we need to get a LOT more precise about the Guidelines.

[anigbrowl]

Look, I like the Atlantic too, but your username looks a bit weird - SEO rubs a lot of people on HN the wrong way.

[a5seo]

> SEO rubs a lot of people on HN the wrong way.

It's too bad. The bottom line is that what SEO means/does is pretty wide ranging, and my idea of it (making content usable/understable for bots) is very different from the dismissive circus caricature conjured by the masses.

But my bet is that I'll win the meaning battle in the long term. patio11 and randfish are good examples of people who are moving the perception toward reality.

For all of the people on HN who bitch about how MBA types have idiotic stereotypes of programmers, it might be worth considering the view from our own glass house.