Comment by dang
17 hours ago
He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs, which are one of the major topics at present. That's not spam.
17 hours ago
He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs, which are one of the major topics at present. That's not spam.
> He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs
Is he, really? Most of his blog posts are little more than opportunistic, buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post or article, often with a bit of AI apologia sprinkled in (for example, marginalizing people as paranoid for not taking AI companies at their word that they aren't aggressively scraping websites in violation of robots.txt, or exfiltrating user data in AI-enbaled apps).
EDIT: and why must he link to his blog so often in his comments? How is that not SEO/engagement farming? BTW dang, I wasn't insinuating the mods were in league with him or anything, just that, IMO, he's long past the point at which good faith should no longer be assumed.
Please stop.
I think when a moderator keeps intervening like this it really does mean that there's something wrong here. I think people would be less mad if you just went ahead and said that you have some kind of special arrangement here with this influencer and post publicly that you like them constantly spamming the site and letting their fans flood the place with deflection and appeals for donations to them. Even YouTube had to add a sponsored post disclaimer.
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If you're not assuming good faith what are you assuming here? What's my motivation?
"buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post"
That's how link blogs work. I wrote more about my approach to that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
(And yes, there I go again linking to something I've written from a comment. It's entirely relevant to the point I am making here. That's why I have a blog - so I can put useful information in one place.)
I'll also note that I don't ever share links to my link blog posts on Hacker News myself - I don't think they're the right format for a HN post. I can't help if other people share them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
It is promotional spam.
But given the volume of LLM slop, it was kind of obvious and known that even the moderators now have "favourites" over guidelines.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0]
The blog itself is clearly used as promotion all the time when the original source(s) are buried deep in the post and almost all of the links link back to his own posts.
This is now a first on HN and a new low for moderators and as admitted have regular promotional favourites on the top of HN.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The operative word there is "primarily". Simon comments on a variety of topics and has far more interactions that don't link to his blog than do.
Simon's posts are not engagement farming by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.
Except that the "content" that reaches the top is always about AI / LLMs and nothing else and it is "all the time". Any opportunity to comment, he will link back to his own blog.
He even reposted the same link (which is about AI) with one of his posts when the upvotes fell off and until the second one reached the top, with the intention of promoting his own blog.
Let me simply prove my point to you on how predictable this spam is.
He will do a blog post this month about this paper [0] with an expert analysis by either someone else (or even an LLM) with the primary intention of the blog being used for self promotion with at least one link back to his own blog.
> ...which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community
You don't know that. But what we do know is that even the moderators now have "favourites". Anyone else would be shot down for promotional spam.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24880
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