Ask HN: Is self promotion allowed here?
I'm here to ask is self promotion allowed here? I mean can I share news from my website? HN is a great site to attempt to gain exposure and new subscribers. I understand why someone would choose to post their content here, despite my other comments railing against self-promoters. If you make it to the front page you will gain a great SEO boost simply due to the new links that pop up on dozens of HN copy-cats that exist elsewhere[0] So, I say go for it if you have content that you want to share! Specifically: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to submit your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. I think the key word is "primarily". From what I've seen over the years here on HN, a certain measure of self-promotion is totally fine and even expected. But it's not considered cool to spam the site with your own self-promotional stuff all the time. Simply saying: Use Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/show Here are the rules for Show HN rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html Good luck. I think so yes, and if you are building something cool, then you can use Show HN so it goes under the 'show' category. If my site is technology based, will I be allowed to share news here? My personal, subjective, non-official interpretation, based on my experience here over the years: If you're submitting (a) link(s) to your own stuff everyday, it's probably going to raise eyebrows. If you submit your own stuff once a week, it's probably going to raise eyebrows. If you're submitting your own stuff once a month, I doubt anybody would much notice or care. If you're submitting your own stuff once every couple of months or so, you're probably fine. Again, totally non-official, but I think that's a useful approximation. I'd like to add to this. > If you submit your own stuff once a week, it's probably going to raise eyebrows. I browse /new frequently and come across self-promoting accounts constantly[0]. It may depend on dang having time to remove these submissions and other users to flag them. [0]: As an example, I came across this user yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aogl there are plenty of others who do this as well That example is in the border, but it's not annoying enough and can fly under the radar. I'd not be surprised if it get's banned eventually. * Once every two days, so people don't remember. * Not exact repost, so people don't remember. * The post are too short, but not completely off-topic. * Not obvious suckpuppets or similar activity. Note that this is not a foolproof recipe. As I said before, it's not annoying enough and can fly under the radar. I'd not be surprised if it get's banned eventually. I agree with each of your bullet points. There is quite a bit of good content that never makes it to the front page. Having less muck to sift through would be nice :) however, this is just a symptom of HN steadily growing more popular... Here's another one I've noticed. Only ever posts links to his own website articles. Sometimes multiple times a day: Personally, it irks me that a lot of these submissions get posted because it adds to the list of posts that I have to weed through in order to find the gems. I've been making it a point to flag submissions—more often—when they do violate the guidelines (resubmissions, political/can be discussed elsewhere, etc.) Those and the endless duplicate submissions of the same story, by people too lazy to spare the couple of seconds needed to check whether it's already been submitted [often several times!]. I browse HN by the '/newest' page, so every time something hits the news I see it repeated over and over again on the first few pages. Even though people assure me that the HN software filters out duplicates, it's simply not true As regards the spammy and/or junk submissions; I use a TamperMonkey script that allows me to add domains to a blacklist and sets those submissions to 'display:none'. So that allows me to pre-filter what shows up on the page.