I say an intersting title in the new section and I clicked through to this article http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/06/23/how-my-startup-went-ipo-and-skipped-vc-funding-a-story/<p>To my shock and dismay sitting right between the share this on Facebook and Stumble This! was a button for submitting to HN?!<p>This I feel is the beginning of a slippery slope, now I'm not saying that people shouldn't be free to submit content to HN and obviously I understand that this button is merely a link to the "submit to news.ycominator" page, but buttons are the first step towards people gaming HN en-masse.<p>Am I the only one who feels this way?
I'm not so concerned about people gaming HN with the button, but rather a decline in the quality of content which gets submitted.<p>It seems PG does lots of algorithm work to keep the community active and engaged with data that is actually of interest.<p>Is there some way we can flag links that are sent via a button link and compare the number of up-votes to those submitted directly via the site. That may give some insight into the value of the share buttons to the community.<p>I'd prefer to not jump to conclusions re: the effects, lets get some metrics and see what is happening.
Something I’ve considered but never implemented: A "Submit to HN" button that is only visible if the HN frontpage is in the visitor's browser's history. (Yes, this is possible: <a href="http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html" rel="nofollow">http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html</a>)<p>Benefit: Avoids mainstreaming HN.<p>Drawback: thafman & similarly-minded users would react the same way to the button on blog.fairsoftware.net; that is, it's begging for social media promotion.<p>Thoughts? (PG?)
Hi, you're talking about my blog. I use a plugin for wordpress, which as far as I know (I'm no expert), has been around for years. This is just one of many plugins that all offer to post your blog post to various sites. The list of sites they support is crazy, maybe reaching a hundred.<p>It's the job of the blog author to filter to the sites that make sense based on the content they publish. In my case, I cut down the list to 3 sites I like, that's it.