> It's beyond suspicious that 4 newly created users all have positive experience with PJON and only posted on this submission.
I will freely admit that I am, quite often, overly suspicious when there's a bunch of "green" users commenting (overwhelmingly positive) on a Show HN thread too -- especially when there's any money potentially involved (i.e., a product for sale, seemingly "technical" blog posts which are, in reality, just carefully prepared sales/marketing material, and so on) [0]. To be quite honest, I'm overly suspicious of damn near everything and I particularly despise "spam" of any kind [1].
In this case, though, I don't think there's anything dishonest going on, though [2].
The project has been around for about a decade and there's obviously a community behind it. I only spent about 20 minutes exploring the web site and Git repo and while I don't recall seeing any obvious links to a mailing list, message board, or IRC channel, I'm sure the project has someplace where they "hang out" and collaborate.
To me, at least, it's quite easy to imagine that the founder of the project -- the same person who posted this Show HN, AFAICT -- may have told the PJON community "Hey everyone, I just posted a link PJON to HN; here's the URL if anyone wants to join the discussion ..." or something else similar to that. I don't know whether something like happened here or whether the PJON users who just created their HN accounts to comment in this thread discovered it via some other means. I do think that there are several possible explanations that are more likely than all of them being (paid) shills for a piece of software that's both free as in speech and free as in beer [3].
Personally, my own smell test considers things like "what's being promoted?", "what's the real benefit/goal of posting this here?", and, of course, "who benefits from this and in what ways?".
As I said before, I don't have any doubt that there's an ulterior motive here -- the goal seems to simply be to share and promote an ~10 year old open source implementation of an open network protocol that 1) is exactly the type of thing that's generally of interest to HN'ers, 2) was founded on ideals and principles that many of us here on HN share and believe in (autonomy/self-hosting/decentralization), and 3) has (verifiably) been used, successfully, in the real world.
Besides, HN guidelines implore us all to extend the benefit of the doubt. Blatant, obvious "violations" should obviously be pointed out -- but this isn't one of them.
In fact, this project is EXACTLY the type of project that belongs on HN. It's a damn shame that it's now "[flagged]"!
It's almost as if "somebody" doesn't want projects like this one to succeed. Who would benefit if PJON and others like it didn't exist? Who would benefit if users instead had no other option but to pay a for-profit company for the hardware, software, and (of course!) the recurring monthly subscription fee instead of just doing it themselves? Hmm... (see how easy that is)?
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[0] Hell, I get annoyed when User A posts a "Show HN" for their new project and then User X (and, sometimes, User Y and User Z) takes advantage of the "opportunity" to post a "This is similar to $foo, $URL, which is an [app|company|service] that also does $thing" comment in the thread ("Submit your own Show HN, then!" is what I want to say!). Bonus points to those who somehow manage to work in a reference to their own product/service even when the two have only the most minimal of commonalities or similarities ("Interesting. Our service, $bar, is also a web site" is only a slight exaggeration).
[1]: Spam doesn't just arrive via e-mail. To me, "spam" is rather loosely defined and includes any unsolicited and/or unwanted sales/marketing/promotional material (or similar) and, in some cases, even includes anything "off-topic" (depending on the forum, usually).
[2]: My HN account is only ~8 years old and I only lurked for a few years before I finally decided to devote the time, effort, and energy necessary to create an account. I'm not sure if that's long enough to pass your "shill test" or not; If necessary, I would sign a sworn affidavit attesting that I had never even heard of PJON before today but, then again, that's just the kind of thing a shill would say!
> To me, at least, it's quite easy to imagine that the founder of the project -- the same person who posted this Show HN, AFAICT -- may have told the PJON community "Hey everyone, I just posted a link PJON to HN; here's the URL if anyone wants to join the discussion ..." or something else similar to that.
Coming from the project's Gitter that is exactly what happened. I am pretty sure some of us over there do not have an account at HN. As far as I am concerned, this is just the third time I wrote something here since creating my account in 2017.
>It's almost as if "somebody" doesn't want projects like this one to succeed. Who would benefit if PJON and others like it didn't exist? Who would benefit if users instead had no other option but to pay a for-profit company for the hardware, software, and (of course!) the recurring monthly subscription fee instead of just doing it themselves? Hmm... (see how easy that is)?
jlgaddis, probably there could not have been a better way to describe the situation.
No, conspiracy theories are not a good way to describe the situation, and certainly don't help people believe you if they are doubting the legitimacy of a submission.
Many of you accused some users of our community to be fake and guilty of trying to influence the narrative, they did everything to prove their feedback was sincere, you gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Another user postulated the same could have happened in the opposite direction (trolls trying to discredit this submission), I told him he might have a point, you label me as a conspiracy theorist.
you didn't just do that. you edited your comment since I replied to it, so my comment now looks out of place.
(And there is some difference between "fake" and "just signed up to help promote a thing". And yes, suggesting that is also somewhat of a conspiracy theory, but one where we know that people asking their users to help upvote and promote a HN submissions happens regularly at least)
In my opinion your comment is clearly out of place.
This post was in the first page thanks to dang, who decided to let me make a repost, after this comment generated a lot of interest:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23589798
now 6 months ago
and this post I created immediately after got huge interest although being only visible in the "show" first page because it was "flagged":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591953
and that is just the standard policy of HN.
But you could have just discovered most by yourself just checking my account info, instead it looks you are prone to see conspiracy behind everything.
I responded to your (paraphrased, since you edited the comment I can't quote the exact text) "I'll say that next time", saying that you shouldn't do that because it'll look unconvincing.
I am not saying that you "faked" anything, and don't think you did, but understand why it looked suspicious to other commenters, because it looks pretty much like what happens if someone tries to game the system by asking others for upvotes.
I will freely admit that I am, quite often, overly suspicious when there's a bunch of "green" users commenting (overwhelmingly positive) on a Show HN thread too -- especially when there's any money potentially involved (i.e., a product for sale, seemingly "technical" blog posts which are, in reality, just carefully prepared sales/marketing material, and so on) [0]. To be quite honest, I'm overly suspicious of damn near everything and I particularly despise "spam" of any kind [1].
In this case, though, I don't think there's anything dishonest going on, though [2].
The project has been around for about a decade and there's obviously a community behind it. I only spent about 20 minutes exploring the web site and Git repo and while I don't recall seeing any obvious links to a mailing list, message board, or IRC channel, I'm sure the project has someplace where they "hang out" and collaborate.
To me, at least, it's quite easy to imagine that the founder of the project -- the same person who posted this Show HN, AFAICT -- may have told the PJON community "Hey everyone, I just posted a link PJON to HN; here's the URL if anyone wants to join the discussion ..." or something else similar to that. I don't know whether something like happened here or whether the PJON users who just created their HN accounts to comment in this thread discovered it via some other means. I do think that there are several possible explanations that are more likely than all of them being (paid) shills for a piece of software that's both free as in speech and free as in beer [3].
Personally, my own smell test considers things like "what's being promoted?", "what's the real benefit/goal of posting this here?", and, of course, "who benefits from this and in what ways?".
As I said before, I don't have any doubt that there's an ulterior motive here -- the goal seems to simply be to share and promote an ~10 year old open source implementation of an open network protocol that 1) is exactly the type of thing that's generally of interest to HN'ers, 2) was founded on ideals and principles that many of us here on HN share and believe in (autonomy/self-hosting/decentralization), and 3) has (verifiably) been used, successfully, in the real world.
Besides, HN guidelines implore us all to extend the benefit of the doubt. Blatant, obvious "violations" should obviously be pointed out -- but this isn't one of them.
In fact, this project is EXACTLY the type of project that belongs on HN. It's a damn shame that it's now "[flagged]"!
It's almost as if "somebody" doesn't want projects like this one to succeed. Who would benefit if PJON and others like it didn't exist? Who would benefit if users instead had no other option but to pay a for-profit company for the hardware, software, and (of course!) the recurring monthly subscription fee instead of just doing it themselves? Hmm... (see how easy that is)?
--
[0] Hell, I get annoyed when User A posts a "Show HN" for their new project and then User X (and, sometimes, User Y and User Z) takes advantage of the "opportunity" to post a "This is similar to $foo, $URL, which is an [app|company|service] that also does $thing" comment in the thread ("Submit your own Show HN, then!" is what I want to say!). Bonus points to those who somehow manage to work in a reference to their own product/service even when the two have only the most minimal of commonalities or similarities ("Interesting. Our service, $bar, is also a web site" is only a slight exaggeration).
[1]: Spam doesn't just arrive via e-mail. To me, "spam" is rather loosely defined and includes any unsolicited and/or unwanted sales/marketing/promotional material (or similar) and, in some cases, even includes anything "off-topic" (depending on the forum, usually).
[2]: My HN account is only ~8 years old and I only lurked for a few years before I finally decided to devote the time, effort, and energy necessary to create an account. I'm not sure if that's long enough to pass your "shill test" or not; If necessary, I would sign a sworn affidavit attesting that I had never even heard of PJON before today but, then again, that's just the kind of thing a shill would say!
[3]: It's available under the Apache license.