Comment by lelanthran
9 months ago
> It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.
> To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
To rub salt into the wound, any forum will happily let anyone and everyone post in support of any big brand, but instantly spam-block some lone developer trying to showcase their product (HN is different in this regard).
Microsoft/Jetbrains/Apple releases a new paid product, available as a paid subscription only - dozens of people will get upvoted telling the forum about it.
Some lone indie dev releases a free-tier search tool with optional paid tier, and they're banned for spamming.
Now I understand why you'd want to block people who self-advertise, but there's gotta be a middle ground.
Why is advertising on behalf of a company that has a larger ad budget than all the current readers salaries combined okay, but advertising for your own product is a bannable offence?
There really should be a middle ground where (like on HN) the audience understands that someone who posts something that took them 6 months to create is not the same as someone selling love potions or stock tips.
It's become bad to the point an indie dev can't even post to get feedback even when the thing he's poured his blood into completely matches the forum's topic. Extra minus points if he offers it for free (so suspicious!)
You are now expected to develop in the dark, without ever mentioning anywhere the thing you are working on and fully knowing that your "blog" gets completely ignored by Google
I personally refuse to host my blog on a "trusted" domain. I likewise refuse to use Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, and whatever else works nowadays because search engines can't be arsed to tell the difference between legitimate content and spam AND because people's attention span have become smaller than a tadpole's
This is a sore point for me personally. That's why I went through the effort of creating my own personal search engine that filters out all this SEO spam and made it public for others to use https://www.aisearch.vip