[Udo]

The ask section was probably not created to give people an additional opportunity to promote themselves extra hard, it was probably created for putting actual questions in front of the HN community. People who abuse this facility know this and do it anyway because they think their links are deserving of more visibility than those poor schmucks who just post a Show HN URL on /newest and watch it disappear with 0 upvotes within 30 minutes.

Posting an Ask HN to query whether you should do a Show HN strikes me as incredibly superfluous at best, and at worst it comes across as a pretty obvious scheme to post your link twice.

The answer to "should I post my project on Show HN" will always be "yes", so there is absolutely no legitimate need for an extra ask thread.

> It seems to me that it has more to do with tradeoffs than an actual policy against it.

At no point was I talking about policy. I was talking about decency, humility, fairness, and restraint.

[wikiburner]

> Posting an Ask HN to query whether you should do a Show HN strikes me as incredibly superfluous at best, and at worst it comes across as a pretty obvious scheme to post your link twice.

Easy tiger, I'm sure if I was looking to spam HN I would have figured out a way to worm a link into my last comment. Anyway, I assure you that's not the case. It's a perfectly legitimate question, given the debate you and I are engaged in right now, and the fact that there's almost no guidance on this from PG in any of the site docs.

Furthermore, the text form clearly isn't intended just for Ask HNs because it's not labeled as such, and because there are Tell HNs, Warn HNs, Ask PGs, Tell PGs, Dear HNs, I'm sure a few other variants I can't recall now, and posts with no labels, and tons of Show HNs that no one (except you) complains about. It's a reasonable question.

[Udo]

This is about people who like to post Ask items simply because they get more exposure (and I linked several examples above). I don't believe it takes guidance from the site owner to see why this practice is bad. It should be very clear to just about everyone that it's sneaky and does not enhance overall HN content quality. Not every example of sneaky, degrading behavior should need to be explicitly addressed in the FAQs.

As for the question if it's a good idea to Ask HN whether you should Show HN, I don't see any legitimate reason to do this. If your project is bad and unworthy (or just unlucky), it will get ignored and/or flagged. I know, because it happened to me, too. Several times, actually. It's a great signal to stop working on a project.

But chances are, your project is actually pretty nice and it will end up on the front page. There is absolutely, positively no need to ask whether you should show - other than to increase your visibility and circumvent the duplicate link mechanism.

> tons of Show HNs that no one (except you) complains about

I realize that in this, like in many other things, I might be utterly alone and that posting fake Ask HN items is actually considered a great hack to improve your exposure and everybody thinks it's just awesome.

That's OK. I'm just a random guy stating his opinions. I tried to explain why I think it's bad and why I think people who are doing that are abusing the system. While I would never personally upvote or engage with such an entry, it's totally possible that nobody else sees a problem here. In fact, I'm pretty sure pg and admins don't see a problem there, or measures would have been taken to prevent it. Nevertheless, I feel the need to say what I believe is right anyway.

It's up to you to decide whether I'm right or not.