What's HN's stance on publishers posting links directly to HN?
To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally appropriate article for HN.
That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated submission source. I guess a downside would be unethical publishers just laundering their submissions through ostensibly unaffiliated accounts, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that we did have some kind of system here to encourage transparency.
As long as HN has effective vote ring detection, I don’t see any issue with directly posting links.
The crowd helps us here and paternalistic rules can only prevent it from functioning correctly. If the post is good, it will move up. If not, it won’t.
HN doesn't have any rules against self-promotion as long as it's not spammy/low quality content.
Additionally, this is an interesting case as the custom link is an official way to bypass the paywall, which is the more frequent HN complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414141
Comments are a different story, e.g. if a startup employee that works for the startup comments on a post about the startup, they should disclose it.
The Information is some of the highest quality and well-researched tech journalism out there. They frequently break stories months in advance of other publications, and are one of the few tech outlets that actually warrant having a paywall, and are not just rehashes of press releases. I personally have no issue with publication staff posting content.
To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally appropriate article for HN.
That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated submission source. I guess a downside would be unethical publishers just laundering their submissions through ostensibly unaffiliated accounts, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that we did have some kind of system here to encourage transparency.