Thank. God. This was getting unbearable. Understood the generous nature behind all these offers but c'mon. Not the venue.
Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#82I actually think it is fascinating to see this, and I don't think they're spam at all and suggesting they are really not nice at all. HN is many things to many people don't let your particular view of what HN should be dictate the status quo. > 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 ge…
The title of the site is "Hacker News." That is to say, it's a news site, as stated in the title. A random individual offering their services for sale is not, and probably never will be, news. These posts are just topic drift, and they belong somewhere else - maybe reddit.
Disclaimer: I also spend lots of time on reddit
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#83I actually think it is fascinating to see this, and I don't think they're spam at all and suggesting they are really not nice at all. HN is many things to many people don't let your particular view of what HN should be dictate the status quo. > 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 ge…
The title of the site is "Hacker News." That is to say, it's a news site, as stated in the title. A random individual offering their services for sale is not, and probably never will be, news. These posts are just topic drift, and they belong somewhere else - maybe reddit. Disclaimer: I also spend lots of time on reddit
So what's your take on Ask HN: posts and Rate my startup ?
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#84Why do you get to decide what this site does? Who are you to tell people to go post that stuff on another site? If it's pushing out 'more interesting stuff', it's because people have upvoted it because THEY find it worthwhile. I'll admit, I find them mildly annoying, but much less annoying than the total crap that occasionally gets posted, like videos of dancing bears and such. I watch the rss feed and I see -all- of…
On the other hand, as of this writing this complaint post has 131 points. That seems to suggest that more people are against the offer posts than for them. Curiously, the only post on the frontpage now with more posts is "Things Paul Graham is Wrong About", another post with a flamebait title. Not surprisingly, flamebait attracts the upvotes!
What do you mean, it suggests that? I'm against the offer threads, and I flagged this post!
A vote up doesn't mean "I agree." I don't want to see a webpage full of things I agree with.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#85I actually think it is fascinating to see this, and I don't think they're spam at all and suggesting they are really not nice at all. HN is many things to many people don't let your particular view of what HN should be dictate the status quo. > 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 ge…
Such as ? Angelgate ? Blocks of Ice ? Parachutes ? So your solution to the spam problem is "Let's add more spam, since we've already got lots?"
No, I would not qualify the Offer HN threads as spam, rather the opposite, ham of the finest variety.
Some spam may eventually occur, but we already have a pretty good way of dealing with that, I'm sure the 'flag' option works just fine on Offer HN type posts that are not above board.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will be great if you could add them here too: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists On a similar note, I wonder if there are other filters which are not listed there?
For now they'll only last this server invocation, because I merely pasted the code into the repl. Let's see if we still need them in a week.
Fair enough. Thanks Paul :)
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#87I actually think it is fascinating to see this, and I don't think they're spam at all and suggesting they are really not nice at all. HN is many things to many people don't let your particular view of what HN should be dictate the status quo. > 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 ge…
I can't agree with you more. Maybe there is a compromise somewhere. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839394 I suggested that the offering person summarize advice and findings and puts it back in the thread. Effectively, the thread becomes a reverse Ask HN and can be incredibly useful. The information persists, and it is available to future HN users. You're getting tips/advice/reviews specifically applicable or…
A compromise also could be a hn irc channel, people ask for help there and people qualified (or otherwise) can help them out.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#88I think it's nice, but that OP has a valid point about sustainability. There's a lot of this in the arts sector, and while it's awesome in some ways it also exerts a downward effect on prices at the lower end of the market. Arty types like helping each other out for cheap; they genuinely love what they do, helping out advances everyone's skills, and the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. But the fact that many of them are not in it for the money is often misread to mean 'not interested in money.'
A common problem for freelancers in film and graphic design is getting callbacks (or even referrals) where clients propose paying peanuts or even that the creative should do this bit of work for free - the client is sure of success and it will either be great for the portfolio, or there'll be a lot more work coming down the pipe, or they have a great rolodex. They think [whatever job you do] is extremely important, but most of their budget has gone on [something else important]. So they frame it as a sort of partnership situation, only most of the benefits end up flowing towards them. Sometimes this is straight-out greed, more often it's well-meaning incompetence or an inflated sense of entitlement without any deliberate intent to rip anyone off. But it often looks like a good prospect, and the more people that are involved, the more they reinforce each other's belief in the project...Titanic syndrome, if you will.
Unfortunately for every one of these low-budget projects that scores big and gives everyone involved a big career boost, there's about 99 others which don't. Half pay for themselves in other ways - making new contacts, or building new skills, or by a decent product. A third or so suck but are over quickly, and easy to screen out in the future. The remaining sixth are jobs from hell, where it's apparent within 24 or 48 hours of starting that something is terribly wrong but you're going to have to see it through to the bitter end.
I'm not suggesting such people are lurking on HN, but to the extent that a reputation for karma-based mutual aid builds up around the community, it will start to attract people on the lookout for freebies. Have a look at the gigs section on Craigslist, under the creative, writing or crew headings rather than computers. Generosity is great, but sometimes it ends up as the 'tragedy of the commons' - so don't undersell yourself either.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore! Get in line! More seriously - call me a cynic if you will, but when I see people offering help with the Twitter API or with SEO or tax advice or even help with RoR, well, I don't know, something smells fishy to me. That help is freely available on numerous forums to anyone who's looking for it, and it is a pre…
For me, my offer of help in the RoR Offer thread was motivated out of two things. First, just because I like helping where I can. Second, I might get the opportunity to work on something cool, or meet someone new, that I might not otherwise have.
Volunteer on http://railsmentors.org - we'd love to have you.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop offering your services
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, works now.
It will be great if you could add them here too: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists On a similar note, I wonder if there are other filters which are not listed there?
One thing that I've found entertaining in my short time on this site is the surprising number of semi-hidden features. It's almost like the In-N-Out of tech sites. And now I know where to find the secret menu :). Thanks!