I was thinking about this policy "Never submit GitLab content to Hacker News."
It makes sense on one level; of course a submission has more credibility if someone else feels like the content is compelling enough to share.
But that's a bit like saying "get interviewed by the New York Times (or the Wall St Journal, your daily paper, etc) because that interview is going to have a lot of credibility". Sure, it's nice if you can do it, but most of us won't ever get interviewed (unless you're Corey Quinn[0]).
On another level, the ability to self-promote (a little bit) makes HN better, because it gives everyone a reason to submit and increases the volume and depth of content.
I unapologetically post content from my personal blogs and my employer that I think is valuable (you can see my submission history, of course [1]). I limit it to ~10% of my submissions. I also spend time submitting what I think are high value links and adding comments when I feel I have something to add. I won't say all my submissions have been perfect and I've definitely gotten feedback from the community over the years about some garbage submissions, but I've learned what kind of submissions spark interest and/or commentary.
In other words, I'm acting like a community member, rather than someone who dumps links for traffic and runs.
Of course I'd rather have someone else stumble on my sites/links and post them, but either my content isn't compelling enough (in which case the voting system will weed it out) or it isn't being discovered by people who want to share it (which is the problem allowing self-posting addresses).
It makes sense on one level; of course a submission has more credibility if someone else feels like the content is compelling enough to share.
But that's a bit like saying "get interviewed by the New York Times (or the Wall St Journal, your daily paper, etc) because that interview is going to have a lot of credibility". Sure, it's nice if you can do it, but most of us won't ever get interviewed (unless you're Corey Quinn[0]).
On another level, the ability to self-promote (a little bit) makes HN better, because it gives everyone a reason to submit and increases the volume and depth of content.
I unapologetically post content from my personal blogs and my employer that I think is valuable (you can see my submission history, of course [1]). I limit it to ~10% of my submissions. I also spend time submitting what I think are high value links and adding comments when I feel I have something to add. I won't say all my submissions have been perfect and I've definitely gotten feedback from the community over the years about some garbage submissions, but I've learned what kind of submissions spark interest and/or commentary.
In other words, I'm acting like a community member, rather than someone who dumps links for traffic and runs.
Of course I'd rather have someone else stumble on my sites/links and post them, but either my content isn't compelling enough (in which case the voting system will weed it out) or it isn't being discovered by people who want to share it (which is the problem allowing self-posting addresses).
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/technology/corey-quinn-am...
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mooreds