[knur]

I agree but I hate it when at the end of an article I realize it was just an ad.

The conflict of interest should be disclaimed in the very first sentence of the post.

[sward-zk]

Do you honestly think that every article posted on a product's blog should include a disclaimer that the post may contain information highlighting the usefulness of their product?

[marcinzm]

This doesn't do that. It shits on the competition and then says their approach is better but doesn't detail that (wait for the next blog post...).

[eatonphil]

> I agree but I hate it when at the end of an article I realize it was just an ad.

If you wanted to be reductive: if the domain ends in .com, you can assume the submission is an ad. Some ads are better quality and worth discussing and some aren't.

[drewda]

More and more blog posts that make it to the HN front page are content marketing.

Nothing nefarious about it -- it's just a deliberate strategy on the part of companies like Retool or Supabase or Fly or whatever to market their services to this target market.

I have no idea how many actual sales conversations it leads to, but it sure is effective at convincing many HN readers that those are cool companies selling cool things...

[cryptonector]

In this case TFA was lame and a waste of time. Advertising by posting blogs on HN is fine, but the blogs had better be interesting.