> Never submit GitLab content to Hacker News. Submission gets more credibility if a non-GitLab Hacker News community member posts it, we should focus on making our posts interesting instead of on submitting it.
I appreciate this policy, it makes it clear that HN is a place to engage with the community, rather than a free advertising channel. Looking at the CEO's profile, the last time he made a submission about Gitlab was in 2018, so I'd say the policy appears to be followed.
In my ideal world, most content sharing and even social media sites should be like this. Good content driving interest instead of gaming the algorithm to get clicks and views would lead to a better ecosystem of information with less noise.
Although I doubt we’ll ever reach that point so I’m wondering if there are other small communities around the web that are just more quality-oriented on the content shared (I just go to niche subreddits and mostly HN)
You should consider moving that slack to discord. Discord has unlimited server history for free with pretty good search. The only features you lose compared to slack are ones that are largely only useful for organisations.
> Discord has unlimited server history for free with pretty good search.
Until they pull a Google and either make it not-free, or drop it altogether. It is difficult to have any faith in the long-term prospects of all these services that depend mostly or only on the goodwill of a company.
this is a nonsense argument. you can moderate and restrict your discord channel to enforce whatever culture you want. if you don't want bad culture infesting your channel then don't let it happen. i would still suggest people use matrix over discord, but it has nothing to do with gamer culture.
Discord has a centralized profile system built around gamer culture and the idea of using a “handle” that is rightly disconnected from your identity. It has so many features designed around gaming.
> Discord has a centralized profile system built around gamer culture and the idea of using a “handle” that is rightly disconnected from your identity.
You make it sound like this is a bad thing?
Letting people use handles has been a thing since way before modern gamer and it is probably the only right way if you want interesting people to share stuff.
Some (most?) of the most civil places that exist on the internet - including HN - has pseudonymity.
The only people who thrive with mandatory Real Names policies are:
- people who operate under a false but real looking name anyway (trolls etc)
- people who are squeaking clean by todays standards (and even not all of them because what about tomorrow or next week or next year?)
- people who have nothing to lose anyway or don't realize the problem of Full Name Policies.
> Letting people use handles has been a thing since way before modern gamer and it is probably the only right way if you want interesting people to share stuff.
The issue is being unable to have, under a single login, completely isolated identities for each server (or group of servers).
> It works really nice for non gaming too.
IMHO the Discord branding (specifically the copy) works great for a gaming audience but is slightly off-putting for a non-geeky audience (think non-tech business types).
I'd like to mention though that one model I really liked was what the one that Google landed on with Google+: a central identity only known to one entity and then as many pseudonyms as you want that you can switch between but that can only be traced back by the provider, and where they promise not to do it except for good reasons.
Of course these days we know that such promises need to be backed by laws to really be effective, but what a nice idea - as long as the identity provider can be trusted!
Also, when I think of it Telegram has something very close to this if someone wants to test what it feels like. And just like Google+ it is not totally obvious: you first have to create a channel, then you can reply to other groups as that channel. Maybe you must activate something in your channel settings too.
Yeah, but the takeaway is that "coordinated responses" are the norm for even a relatively small tech company and we basically can't count on any genuine social media discussions about large companies. Disclaimer: I'm not saying you-know-who does or doesn't do any of this (though other pages on their wiki do describe some of what I talk about. You can read it for yourself.) At best what looks organic isn't remotely close.
"Coordinated response" is PR-speak for a company's PR team at best controlling the "message" and who delivers it, instead of half a dozen employees chiming in with "inconsistent messaging". Somewhere in-between: immediately calling/DMing certain employees known to toe the company line / have a good reputation publicly, and who are in a relevant department.
It's severely disingenuous, particularly since people interpret the quick appearance as the employee being active in the community, and never will you hear the employee say "well, actually, our PR team rang my phone off the nightstand and said "shmeddit is discussing _______, please immediately get on Slack to provide a response using talking points to some comments that are coming up."
At worst, it's also a company mobilizing, if necessary, a vendor who supplies an army of users (real or fake) on the platform to comment, upvote, downvote, flag, etc. They even have prearranged topics to boost/suppress, canned talking points, etc.
I think the most visible evidence of this is a certain electric car company, which routinely abuses the DMCA takedown process to suppress videos that are unflattering. Google their name and "dmca video" and you can read all about it.
The same technique has been used by a certain rich playboy who sucker-punched a restaurant worker while someone was recording him without him realizing it, and the video made it onto reddit. The video kept getting either removed by moderators or DMCA'd.
A large number of VHNWI's/UHNWIs have standing contracts with reputation management firms for exactly that sort of action.
Yes, almost every company has automated alerts for mentions about them on any platform. It can be a great thing and it can be abused. A great way for a company to handle social media is to clarify confusion and to answer questions but not raid every thread with defensive or astro turf content.
Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't found it or its newly added. When the PR team can drop in and give a quick update its quite useful.
How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate)
I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are drop in the ocean.
> How do notifications for services like HN get triggered?
Easy, the API allows you to see all the latest X comments/submissions. Setup something to just text-match your name and hit whatever notification endpoint when matching. I think there are services for this that includes HN already too.
> Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch?
YouTube often offers captions for videos, otherwise it's not too hard to generate yourself. Apply same strategy as for HN but for YouTube/TikTok/Twitch. If it has sound, you can usually automatically transcribe it.
This also goes for TV shows like news and whatever. There are services that are transcribing every single news show and scrapes the transcriptions for mentions of brands/companies and whatever. You can use those services to see when your brand gets mentioned, and some services even send you a five-minute snippet of when you were mentioned. I'm sure the same exists for basically every single multimedia medium out there.
Neither an API nor a scrapeable feed is required for you to get a scrapeable feed from it in the end :)
This works great in theory and as one off research projects (source: I've done this). The tricky thing is, can you namedrop any such services that actually work and offer a SaaS model?
I've heard dozens of pitches for such products, but they all end up being either
1) unable to grow due to legal reasons (transcripts are derivative works and thus even creating them, let alone publishing them, is restricted under copyright)
2) pivot to become Yet Another Social Listening Tool with a high-touch sales-heavy SaaS business model. They end up negotiating a deal for direct access to the firehouse feeds with the social media companies themselves, with all the strings attached (completely public content only, sometimes restricted to accounts of certain size, etc).
There are services constantly scraping all public social medias and you pay them some small fee and they let you subscribe to keywords. Of course they might miss some video content but it isn't terribly significant.
You're right, the text does mention Zapier, but what triggers Zapier? Zapier is glue that ties various services together. The web scraper and keyword detection is either a different service or in-house.
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).
I appreciate this policy, it makes it clear that HN is a place to engage with the community, rather than a free advertising channel. Looking at the CEO's profile, the last time he made a submission about Gitlab was in 2018, so I'd say the policy appears to be followed.