Tell HN: Please stop offering your services

There are thousands of HN users, each with their own areas of expertise.

Often, a good test of whether something is worth doing is "what if everyone did the same?" If everyone was more polite, the world would be a better place. If everyone treated others better, the world would be a better place.

But if everyone posted "Offer HN" posts, even if they all did it just once and with a genuine desire to help, rather than a secret need to build their public profile and/or get some interesting serendipitous contacts, HN would become much less valuable.

To those who believe that this new "Offer HN" craze is something worth encouraging, if that's the case, please create a site that's better tailored to making those offers. Maybe you can even get pg to link to it if it's good. You'll certainly get feedback, and so on.

But please don't post any more "Offer HN". Despite the generous impulse behind them, they are basically just spam that's pushing out other more interesting stuff, at the moment.

Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840143

I'm not sure whether that's the case here.

My worry is, this one is a good idea in the wrong place. This is basically a strong variation on reddit's AMA, which has taken a solid hold there and isn't going anywhere. Since HN doesn't support sub-forums, there is a risk that we could be "stuck with" this for a while, if it has the durability of AMA but no sub-forum/site to hide in.

Another possible danger is that the community will lash back against it because of the noise, even though it's a good idea, and so we'll lose a good idea. I really do think that if someone made a special site for this (which wouldn't take that long to code up), it might be something of lasting value.