[refibrillator]

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else feels there is a halo effect around certain personalities on this site. When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project, it gives me bad vibes, as if they have ulterior motives. Especially if a majority of their blog posts are content lifted from elsewhere with minimal additions. Perhaps this is just hustle culture, and YC alum status confers immunity from these types of criticisms. Perhaps my only wish is that other voices would bubble to the top in some of these threads.

In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.

[bakugo]

> When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project

There is a rule specifically forbidding this, but it's been made quite clear that certain users are above this rule, to the point that the moderators themselves will show up to tell people off if they bring it up.

[ludicrousdispla]

yeah, it feels like tireless self-promotion and their comments have very low utility for me

[underdeserver]

It's a way to discover their content - content you might miss if you only go on HN once or twice a day.

HN is great for diversity of topics, tech news, random discussions with tech-celebs etc., but e.g. Simon's blog is the best content there is on what the latest LLM gizmo is and how well it works.

[rednafi]

Tireless promo works. 3 of the top 5 authors on this list tirelessly promotes themselves everywhere - not just in HN.

[llmslave2]

With some of these commentators, every single comment contains a link or two to their blog.

[anonnon]

The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.

[adityaathalye]

Well, I link to my blog post(s) and/or github source(s) quite often.

"Why does he do that?" has a fairly charitable interpretation, if you choose to answer it that way.

In fact, here you go, I wrote about it and will quote myself...

From my "about" page https://www.evalapply.org/about.html

> Learn generously directs what I teach, speak, organise, code.

and the first blog post I published:

In the beginning, was the domain name https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main

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May I suggest the mantra "Take what is useful, discard the rest."?