However, while I completely agree that spam isn't anywhere close to being a threat to Hacker News, I'm not so sure about subtle, well-executed content marketing/influence campaigns. By design, these are much less overt than mere spam links to a porn website, and there are plenty of places for them to pop up on HN - for instance, in any number of recent threads lamenting the sad state of modern appliances/tools (like vacuum cleaners, e.g. [1] - and it would be extremely difficult to even approximate the scale of the problem.
I'm not advocating hiding from the outside world in the same sense that one might try to intentionally isolate their community to prevent others from joining - just in the sense of avoiding a specific discovery mechanism (Google) that results in extremely strong incentives for content marketing companies to infiltrate and influence. More specifically, I posit that the amount of organic discovery and community growth that we would get would be significantly outweighed by the attention from content marketers - most people that I know discovered HN through blog posts and individual recommendations, and not through search engine results.
Ultimately, of course, it's up to you - but please think about this issue (and particularly the tradeoff of the upsides vs downsides of being highly-ranked in Google results), and look for indicators of content marketing. Hacker News has, by far, the highest quality-size product of any community that I've seen on the internet ever, and I would dearly love for it to stay that way for many decades to come - which I don't think will happen if "Hacker News product recommendations" becomes a currency with supply comparable to GitHub stars[2].
However, while I completely agree that spam isn't anywhere close to being a threat to Hacker News, I'm not so sure about subtle, well-executed content marketing/influence campaigns. By design, these are much less overt than mere spam links to a porn website, and there are plenty of places for them to pop up on HN - for instance, in any number of recent threads lamenting the sad state of modern appliances/tools (like vacuum cleaners, e.g. [1] - and it would be extremely difficult to even approximate the scale of the problem.
I'm not advocating hiding from the outside world in the same sense that one might try to intentionally isolate their community to prevent others from joining - just in the sense of avoiding a specific discovery mechanism (Google) that results in extremely strong incentives for content marketing companies to infiltrate and influence. More specifically, I posit that the amount of organic discovery and community growth that we would get would be significantly outweighed by the attention from content marketers - most people that I know discovered HN through blog posts and individual recommendations, and not through search engine results.
Ultimately, of course, it's up to you - but please think about this issue (and particularly the tradeoff of the upsides vs downsides of being highly-ranked in Google results), and look for indicators of content marketing. Hacker News has, by far, the highest quality-size product of any community that I've seen on the internet ever, and I would dearly love for it to stay that way for many decades to come - which I don't think will happen if "Hacker News product recommendations" becomes a currency with supply comparable to GitHub stars[2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39238010
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140