I disagree. I think hacker news serves as a great platform for the community to benefit from what other members have found works. There are countless postings, whether they relate to CSS, analytics tactics, or tips like Dustin's "follow me on twitter here" that we all benefit from. I recently shared tips from my personal experience running a small e-commerce, and I hope some members get actual value and implement some of my findings. I thank and applaud Dustin for a great article and proudly utilize his findings. Keep sharing.

Stop taking this so seriously! Its a damn twitter account. Who cares what people close articles with. The more people that follow them the happier they are. To each their own.

IMHO it cheapens the whole article and makes it plainly obvious that the main intent writing the article wasn't to be interesting, but to gain followers on twitter.

When someone ends an article with "You should follow me on twitter", they're being arrogant obnoxious and rude. If their only aim is to get weak minded sheep to follow them, then fair enough. But put the "You should follow me on twitter" link at the top so other people can just ignore the article.

Does having the Digg voting widget or other similar social bookmarking tools cheapen the article?

Sure, just like any website that starts by asking you to invite your friends.

All of these devices are just ways to try and get people to spam for you. Ooops spam is so 1.0. I mean "go viral".

In writing, two forces oppose each other: the desire to be authentic, and the desire to gain readership so that authenticity can be valued.

It's really hard to achieve both goals. One can be really authentic, writing what you care about without regard to your readership, but your work may go unappreciated. Good writing alone doesn't gain followers, unfortunately.

So people try to walk the line (or just cross it) of what tactics can be considered appropriate. Those who don't employ tactics to gain followers and readers often go unnoticed. It's unfortunate, and at times frustrating.

HN at least offers an outlet for tech-related posts where it's acceptable to post your own writing. It lets authors express viewpoints, ideas, and feedback in a neutral, yet effective way. You don't have to spam posts to every social news site to get your writing noticed here. The small target audience makes all the difference.

I don't know what exists for other writing niches. Reddit and Digg don't really cater to good writing as well as HN does.

But I digress, this was about twitter. It's nice to have followers, but when all is said and done, twitter messages are short-lived. They will fade into obscurity soon after they're posted. Blog posts and decent essays, when written well, can often last for many years without losing their value. So I'd suggest to authors: Push twitter less, and focus more on your content. If you're going to advocate anything, advocate that people follow your RSS feed.

"I expect to see "follow me on twitter here" at the end of his articles. He earned it."

That's a bit over the top. Lot's of people have used that phrase before that article. What's next, a land grab for variations of "follow me on Twitter" phrases? Trademarks for article endings?

I like people to read my blog to follow me on Twitter, not because I care for a high follower count, but because I care for relevant relationships on Twitter. Someone who reads my blog is much more likely to be relevant than someone who just searched my Twitter stream for random phrases.

Yeah, seeing "follow me on twitter here" has started to get annoying.

Still, I'm pretty dubious of the notion of "finding your own hacks". I mean just look at written english in most articles, they aren't comprised of just a list of sanitized opinions and facts. They're full of prestigious jargon, funny quips to pull the audience to pull the audience to the readers side or at least entertain (the same goal?), etc, etc; as far as I'm concerned, just more "cognitive hacks".

Shrugs

More after the break.

Restated: copy-based hacks have a limited window of effectiveness.

Fortunately for us all.

“The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.”

Picasso/Banksy

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -T.S. Eliot http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Philip_Massing...

There is no real principle you are basing this on. It is your own assumption that "this person will do anything to get followers." All web content that is popular in some part by UX practices that were invented by someone else.

There is no coercion, and many of the most successful websites do this kind of testing constantly.

Furthermore, the author published the blog to share the technique making it even less justified to "find your own hacks."

I don't know. I found Dustin's original article pretty much to be a hack for trying to get twitter followers. He just dressed it up in UI-optimization garb.It was nicely done, no doubt. But the purpose was twitter followers, which I'm sure he got.

As for the point you make "I may be naive, but I would like people to follow me due to my interesting insights, and not because of some cognitive hack."

This is exactly what I commented on at the time of Dustin's article -- show the reader what's in it for them. Why should they become a follower? Concentrate on the value proposition instead of the gimmick.

My comment didn't receive that many upvotes as I remember. Sad fact is, a lot of people would rather focus on techniques than value. After all, you can simply copy a technique. Adding value -- saying something interesting and worthwhile to the reader -- is a lot more work.

Yeah, this is starting to get old, but thats just a sign that he succeeded at doing something interesting enough that it is now a standard.

Btw; you can follow me on...nvm.

The only thing I really dislike about it is having more "here" hyperlinks. Even if conversion rates are slightly better, where would the web be if the majority of anchor texts were "click here"?

Yeah, I agree the web would not be a better place. There's just something to be said for having that clear call to action. It's hard to resist.

Yeah, I know. I would much prefer the call to action be more clear in the link:

    You should <a href="...">follow me on Twitter</a>.

I think the author of the original article was trying to gauge the effectiveness of a call to action over an assumption to action.

No, we don't want to put the "click here" links at the end of everything, but that MAY just be what people need when it comes to Twitter.

"Click here" is familiar, it means there's more to see and do, and something isn't just going to start happening magically.

Saying "follow my twitter" to a general audience sounds absolutely creepy. What the hell does that even mean? I had a lady once ask what "following my twitter" meant, because she wasn't sure what my "twitter" was. Seriously, 10 years ago, had you asked a random woman to follow your Twitter around, you'd get slapped first, and there would be no asking questions later.

NOTE: I ALWAYS say "follow me on twitter" or "follow me on twitter.com" now - geezers like it when you add .com because it reminds them of the only 3 years of their life they actually made money in the stock market.

Long story short, don't get bent over backwards because you think this person is a follower-whore. This is Hacker News, and the author of the original post was hacking his twitter tag-line to see what pulled in the most subscribers through that single medium.

It's all for science my friend.

No reason to get your panties in a twist, it was 'linked-in', then 'xing', now it's twitter. Given the balloon like nature of these fads I give it another year or so and it will be gone again, or at least greatly reduced.

Every product - twitter too - has a lifecycle, there are 'boom' periods and there is an inevitable bust. See the hula-hoop, click-clack, tamagochi and a whole bunch of other items for real world analogies.

I feel much the same way. I don't use that awful program at all and I'm just waiting for the fad to pass. I would feel the same way if the author plugged some supermarket chain at the end of their article, or there was some "This article brought to you by such-and-such company". I am sick to DEATH of advertising and twitter is basically advertising your mundane life.

I hadn't seen the original article, and maybe I just block out all the 'follow me on twitter here' links, because that is barely recognizable to me as being everywhere.

At the same time it is an interesting practice in call to actions. Though i really wish we could see a comparison of a button vs. text. Are people more likely to recognize a button as clickable vs. just text? and how would that compare? Does text on the button have similar effects? etc.etc.

"In fact [...], I quickly close the tab and forget the contents of the article or why I thought it was insightful in the first place"

Do you think the problem is "follow me" or "on twitter"? If the second, in my opinion you have a deeper problem than just hating a certain kind of messaging service. If the problem is "follow me", then why even mention twitter?

You might be surprised to know that most everything we do is caused by some cognitive hack or another. It's better to just accept it. Or you could try overcomingbias and lesswrong.

-Fact. It's just polemics. It needed to be said.

you should follow me on Plurk then (is that better?) hehehe (hey it's a new cognitive hack!)