Ask HN: Is promoting a self-hosted event not ok by HN standards?

1 chbkall 4 7/2/2025, 5:47:38 AM
My wife does children's book readings with adults from a psycho-socio-emotional lens. She uses children's books as a medium to open up and hold spaces for conversations on complex themes specially mental health. I thought about helping her promote her work by sharing the links for these events on HN. One of the posts just got flagged and I was wondering if this kind of promotion is looked down by HN folx.

Comments (4)

mindcrime · 2d ago
IME, a certain amount of self-promotion is totally accepted (even expected) at HN. But dude... you have had an account for 3 months and in that entire time ALL you've posted is self-promotional content. To the tune of about 15 submissions to your own site, in 3 months. That's 100% going to get you the wrong kind of attention.

From the HN guidelines[1]:

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

chbkall · 2d ago
I have been on HN for around 5 years or more now. I had created this account for mostly publishing about this. I had seen accounts of other users do this and thought this was okay. I wasn't aware of the guidelines around this. Thank you for sharing. I will be more mindful about this in the future.
hammyhavoc · 2d ago
What's the relevance to HN? Sure, it's interesting, but what's the tech angle?
chbkall · 2d ago
Oh, I had thought that both tech and non-tech news and articles are shared on the platform.