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10 Comments

We need better rules for Link Posts

This was my view when I just opened IH - https://imgur.com/a/4nAUcnm

As you can see, my screen showed my 8 posts, 5 out of which were direct links to other sites.
I'd like to know if I'm in the minority here, but when I open IH, I'd like to have a discussion and not be subjected to this platform being used as yet another marketing platform. I don't remember the situation being this bad not too long ago.

I'd like a rule where link posts need some description too, and preferably a way to enforce the poster to interact with the community. I don't want to open IH just to be taken to some other site and back and forth.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and whether there's any feasible solution to this.

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    Most of the time the link post are form of promotion rather than contribution.

    I would say link post must be completely removed. Let people link in their content at a relevant position.

    A link with a proper context don't hurt.

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    Totally agree. I've been mainly lurking here for about a year now and it seems like I'm taking more time to filter the promotional/spammy links as opposed to gaining new insights about the indie process. It has gotten pretty bad in my experience, that I mainly just listen to the podcasts.

    On another note, I feel that there isn't much community involvement anymore and a lot of the "help me" type of posts goes unnoticed or gets very few responses.

  3. 1

    I don't remember the situation being this bad not too long ago.

    +1 on this sentiment, definitely. This is the main reason I'm really glad to see @channingallen's move to make IH invite-only -- at a stroke he's reduced the value of IH as a marketing platform and strengthened its community aspects.

    That said, at this point I'd love an even more limited community of vetted solo founders. At the very beginning that's what IH felt like: a place where you could have honest discussions with people solving the same sorts of problems and experiencing the same pain, and get advice from founders who were further along. Don't get me wrong: that's all still here and I love it, but it's increasingly hard to find under the "Where do I get my idea!?"-esque discussions and endless signal-boosting links to marketing copy on Medium.

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    I so agree with you, I think this is really annoying.

    Let's just ban links.

  5. 1

    Thats true. Many people have switched to using IH has a means to advertise themselves or their blogs on other platforms which is kind of ridiculous since this was supposed to be a discussion based community. Maybe they should impose some kind of a minimum amount of words to allow link pasting.

    Or just ban links as a whole.

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      This comment was deleted a year ago.

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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      If links are necessary, but often too low quality, @csallen should really consider implementing reputation points and privileges as suggested here

      This would allow users to post links only when they contributed positively enough to the community, and this might reduce the number of low quality links posted.

    2. 1

      What I'm worried about with a setting like this is that people will continue posting link posts and I'll be missing out on them
      Doesn't seem like a solid solution to the community problem as a whole
      So far the only feasible solutions seem to be that people with a certain amount of points can post links, or somehow enforce a rule that people posting links or any other content must interact with the community in the comments or otherwise

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      Yeah this isn't too encouraging
      I understand that with the nature of this site, it's going to have a lot of external links, exactly like Hackernews and stuff, but it annoys me that the posters just add their links here and disappear without interacting in the comments. If we had a way to ensure that discussion happens, I wouldn't have minded all the external links at all.

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      This comment was deleted a year ago.

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