If you have to game the "system", sorry, I mean, provide "social media guidelines" to this extent, maaaaybe your [whatever you're trying to push/advertise/spread] isn't all that worthwhile...? Especially in the "nerd" world, it seems word of mouth will get out without having to rely on such inane strategizing.
I understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and other companies/orgs likely have similar strategy pages, but it all seems a bit, i dunno, anti-HN to me.
Imagine yourself as an excited, enthusiastic young engineer working at a relatively big company. A blog post relevant to the product you work on comes up - what do you do? Should you post to HN? If it comes up there, should you engage enthusiastically? What's appropriate?
Having guidelines can help with this kind of thing. Of course, guidelines that advised a lot of astroturfing or disingenuous engagement would be pretty icky indeed…
It is so easy for an entire company to come off as "tone deaf" in a public forum due to avoidable errors.
Smart people deserve to be allowed to speak in places like HN. GitLab has gotten it pretty darn right in creating a some guidance for such people, AND by making the guidance public.
This document looks less like guidance for gaming a system and more like instructions for being respectful to an influential community, but that's just my read.
It may seem icky but I think once a company hits a certain size it is important to define some basic rules for external communication of any type, otherwise it becomes a garbled mess.
Overall the policies seem pretty common sense and hands off which is good! Hopefully this community is robust against astroturfing (something I'm worrying about with Reddit)
Absolutely. True story: I was at a small startup and our company organically made it to Hacker New's front page. I was so excited. At that point, I was only a reader. I made an account, upvoted it, told our social media manager. Next thing I knew, it fell off the front page and we suspected I or the manager accidentally set off the fake vote detector. We had no idea such a thing even existed. The CEO was so disappointed in us. We learned the hard way.
Edit: to be clear, I wasn't trying to game the system. I was just so excited that the product I'd been working on appeared on a site I often read. Only in retrospect did it occur to me why one would have anti-vote ring detectors. Yes, I was naive.
Par for the course for Gitlab, like how they claim they don't adjust compensation based on cost of living[1] before describing in detail why they adjust compensation based on cost of living[2]
On the contrary, I think it's refreshing to see a company have policies that are appropriate and understanding of the community they want to be a part of.
1. Other companies probably have similar strategies but it's behind closed doors to act however nefarious they would like, not open docs that can be criticized here publicly like Gitlab has.
2. The MO (modus operandi) here seems entirely about reading customer feedback and engaging with it. That's like YC startup advice numero uno. They explicitly mention not to submit content or get people to upvote.
I'd summarize most of their guidelines here as: "Don't try to game the system, it doesn't work on HN. Honest engagement and thoughtful replies win out."
If you have to game the "system", sorry, I mean, provide "social media guidelines" to this extent, maaaaybe your [whatever you're trying to push/advertise/spread] isn't all that worthwhile...? Especially in the "nerd" world, it seems word of mouth will get out without having to rely on such inane strategizing.
I understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and other companies/orgs likely have similar strategy pages, but it all seems a bit, i dunno, anti-HN to me.