Ask HN: Is this all it takes to get flagged as spam?

4 points

11 years ago

Context: I submitted this URL earlier today: Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance, which was briefly on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789547

One user declared it spam, and as I was writing my response (which is submitted as a comment below), I found that not only was the submission pulled (which, fine, lots of things get pulled), but now I can't even comment on it because it's in some special spam deadzone. One user who is apparently well-versed in exercise declares it to be "bullshit fluff piece" with Amazon product links and so that makes it spam? In my response which I couldn't submit, I explain how I came across the piece and why I enjoyed it. But on the merits of the piece itself: There's more than 2-3 thousand words, and according to this Unix script:

    curl -s http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/ | grep -o amazon.com/gp/product/[[:alnum:]]* | sort | uniq | wc -l

35 Amazon product links, 16 of them unique. Is that a lot? I guess? The OP (according to my ublock) loads only the Amazon URLs and a Google banner at the bottom. Do I wish that the author, when linking to "creatine", linked to the many studies and discussions on its efficacy (and also, rebuttals to it)? Sure. But he covers a lot of ground here, and I didn't see the focus as the science, but him describing his exact steps as a blueprint that worked for him and the context of those steps.

My response that I had originally written talks more specifically about the relevance of the OP and why I find his fitness routine interesting is posted as a separate comment below: