[ivanca]

This is a perfect example of the cynic snarkiness for the sake of snarkiness that plagues Hacker News; the guy of the article only has written one article besides this one[0] and that's it. He doesn't even have a profile pic or a clickable profile as most journalist in the NYT have. And he seems to spend his time as the director of something called groceryships not creating support groups for money addicts or selling self-help books. So much for an attention-seeker.

  [0]http://www.ocregister.com/articles/obesity-596818-food-stress.html

[CreakyParrot]

"Cynical: believing that people are motivated by self-interest." Call it a plague if you like, but I'm OK with it.

And I wasn't being sharply critical (snarky) for the sake of being sharply critical. Honest.

He's pretty actively promoting himself, his story, and his business (which is what it is) online, and he just successfully SEO-bombed his way to the top of the charts. You may think it's out of an abundance of goodness, but I think that's as naive a view as you think mine is cynically snarky. (Or snarkily cynical.)

[ivanca]

Because his name is not clickeable it means 100% of the people that is interested in him had to google him. So it's pretty easy to measure it's impact.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%20SAM%20POLK

So it's impact augmented by a factor of 20; if he was searched 10 times per month before it means now he is being searched 200. So not that much but even if it were your point still doesn't make sense to me because what difference would there be with anyone writing anything? I guess that your point is not that everyone should write anonymously right? So, what is it?