Zachary Tong

Honestly, I would prefer *less design*.  I think Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is a great update on the HN theme.  Simple, clean, functional.  No extra chrome that gets in the way.  I want to A) find links that are interesting and B) easily read/respond to comments.  Everything else just gets in the way.  

Lobsters is excellent in other categories too (tagging, filtering, messaging, active development, etc).  I know Inbound won't switch to it...but a guy can always dream =)

Bah, this article was just fluff.  Could have been summarized with:  Create a sitemap, decrease your site's latency, add new content.

@Ted: Because I already have a job?

At age 18 I was a moderator of a forum with over 50,000 members, managed two separate forums that I had built (totaling around 20,000 members) and ran an IRC channel. Frankly, my community management skills were far superior when I was younger. I was enthusiastic, had nearly unlimited amounts of time (compared to now, where I have a few short hours after work) and, frankly, managing communities is something that younger people seem to do better. I don't know anything about Ed, but I know that his age is probably the last thing I would consider in a resume.

I think everyone knows that +1-ing a website helps the site's authority in some small way (e.g. it is another factor that Google uses to determine ranking).

But what about Plus Ones on comments that you make, either in G+ general or G+ communities?  If I comment/share and receive a lot of +1s, does that in turn help the authority of my account?

I guess I'm just curious if +1-ing comments does anything other than saying "I liked your stuff" to other people.

No need to reply at my G+ page...there just wasn't a way to post text questions on "Ask Inbound" without an article.

So, does your startup/company use life cycle email (LCE) or drip marketing?  Paid product, or a DIY solution?  If you don't use LCE...why not? To difficult to setup? Too expensive?  Not flexible enough? Don't really know what LCE is?

I can commiserate.  While running Startup Frontier, I ran into a similar situation.  It wasn't as bad as this sounds, since startup founders aren't really trying to grub up a link...they are just incredibly busy.  Regardless, I definitely had to sift through interviews and prune out the ones where little effort was put into the answers.

The article is a bit light on how the stats were generated, so if you have any questions just let me know.

Really good analysis of the Hero3 launch.  I think that GoPro is in the (somewhat) unique circumstance of being the un-challenged market leader.  If you want excellent footage in a small package, GoPro products are your only real choice.  There are alternatives but very few people use them.

Furthermore, everyone loves to flash "GoPro" in their videos since they like to show off what awesome gear they are using.  There are hundreds of consumer videos that basically act like marketing material for GoPro

For sure.  We try and convince all advertisers to run text advertisements, since they have a better CTR and convert so much better.  Unfortunately, a lot of publishers don't want to change their email templates to include a text ad, so banners are the only option.

I mostly use Duck Duck Go nowadays for personal search, so I'm right with you in the "Avoiding Google" camp. That said, a business really can do anything they want with their product. It's their fault if they sink their own boat. Fortunately for google, they have a good enough product (or strong enough monopoly) that they can do whatever they like right now.

Google is a business. They can do whatever the hell they like. If you don't like their service, use a different search engine. Just because they happen to be the most popular doesn't mean they have to treat you in a special manner. That said, I agree that the lack of response from Google regarding *anything* is infuriating. They have atrocious customer service and are basically a black-box in many aspects.

Three more: -Nested replies more than two deep. -Editing submission titles -Editing comments

Another good example is Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN, bingo card creator guy). He automated the process to build microsites for his product. All the content is unique but the generation of the page is automated. At my dayjob, we routinely outsource and automate routine things like collecting contact information or twitter handles. What we do with that information afterwards is entirely manual...but the initial collection is automatic. Discount automation at your own peril. And obviously be wary of automating content that Google will look at

Another suggestion: I'd like to see the front-page ranking algorithm tweaked. In my opinion, articles "stick" to the front-page for too long. There are several articles that are 3 days old on the front-page but have gained few comments. If there is no discussion occurring, I'd like to see some of these posts fall off to make room for new content.

Succinctly, the author is mad that people are writing ill-behaved robots. This is a problem as old as the internet itself. This argument could just as easily be made about VPS or dedicated servers or Linode or any other platform.

Any reason why your app needs to be able to update my twitter profile, or post tweets using my handle? I'd like to test it out...but that made me wary

This might be a nice experiment. I've always wanted HN to implement something like this. Particularly as a site grows, the number of Incoming increases faster than the front-page can accommodate. Since most people naturally only check the front-page, many of the new submissions on the incoming page are never seen, except by the small minority of people who check the Incoming page. Effectively, this means that the small minority of upvoters become the decision makers of what content is seen. The obvious solution is "More people should visit Incoming"! True, but clearly something that people don't do. Instead, putting some of the Incoming links on the frontpage (top or sidebar) would be an effective way to get more people voting on new submissions instead of simply piling onto the ones that are already on top.

There should be a downvote and flag option for comments. It would help reduce the number of useless "Great post!" comments that show up frequently. HN has a habit of downvoting non-content comments which keeps the main area clear for real discussion.

I enjoyed the honesty of the article...but it seems that Penguin did exactly what it was supposed to do in this case. It remove a spammy website that provided little value to users. Without actually knowing what the website is, here is what we know about it: -Exact-match, four-hyphen URL. Translation: "I want google to like this URL" -Default theme which is butt-ugly. Translation: "I don't care about users" -Heavily optimized link structure. Translation: "Google look at all my pages" -No variety in anchor text. Translation: "Seriously, Google, look how awesome this page is" -Templated content. Translation: "I don't actually have good or real content because I don't care about users" -Adsense site. Hard to say, but it sounds like all this site did was collect pageviews for Adsense. It's no wonder google slapped it down. The site clearly catered only to Google. I think the moral isn't "This is why Google delisted me", but rather "This is why you should have real content."