I have two questions for the HN community:

1. Should I, individually, be allowed to "self promote" by having everything I ever post be a link to my personal site?

2. If not, then, in light of my unique constraints, where should I post if not HN?

Let me provide some context:

I have probably read Hacker News about a dozen times in my life. I do not watch the news, I do not read the news, and I do not consume social media of any kind (with the exception of Youtube, which goes through NewPipe). Even my email I only check in multiple month intervals.

To really put this in perspective: I did not know who won the US presidential election until Christmas.

I prefer "write only" social media. I am militantly against consuming social media or news media; I might as well live in a cabin in Siberia. The philosophical rationale behind my stance is irrelevant for the sake of this discussion, but suffice to say that just because I am against consuming social media does not mean I am against producing it.

A byproduct of this is that I wrote 20,000 words and posted them exactly nowhere for two years straight.

Context: a few years ago, I wrote a series of technical writeups about the Microcorruption hacking wargame. These covered the six new challenges added by NCC Group, as well as a few novel exploits for original set. They contain about 20,000 words in total, and would be in excess of 300 pages if they were printed on paper. Skeptics are encouraged to navigate to the homepage of my site (see my profile), click the links to each writeup, and hit CTRL+p.

None of that is LLM generated; I typed those twenty thousand words manually. I can prove that at a technical level if anyone is curious, but for now, please take my word for it.

Now, the crux of the matter:

I concluded there were three appropriate places to post those writeups.

1. Twitter

2. Reddit

3. Hacker News

Given my sentiments about social media, I normally would never have created an account on any of these sites. This was an exceptional circumstance. All I had to do was sign up, post a few links, and never touch the platforms again.

Easy, right?

Within half an hour, without my posting even once, Twitter had frozen my account because it was "unverified". If memory serves, this was either an IP or phone verification related issue. I did provide them with a VoIP number for verification, which seemed to work at first. My suspicion is that they must not have liked my particular VPN.

Reddit allowed me to register, but they did not allow me to post anything on r/microcorruption because I had "insufficient karma" (before you ask: yes, I tried giving away all of my worldly possessions in a third world country to correct my karmic imbalance; that did not help, nor did Reddit support).

Hacker News was the only one that allowed me to both signup and post.

Of the 300+ pages of writeups, I only posted 15 on HN. Why? Because of the guideline against "using HN primarily for promotion".

Believe me, I understand why the rule exists. It was applicable fifteen years ago, and it goes double now. The behavior it is intended to curtail is a large part of the reason why I refuse to use social media.

Perhaps Hacker News is the wrong place to post 20,000 words of hacking writeups, but I see no better alternatives. Everywhere else seems to want me to jump through hoops like a dog.

More broadly, though, I have a rather unique problem. I prefer to vanish into Siberia, write for a month, come up for air to post, go back to Siberia, and check the comments a few months later. Because I do not read the news or use social media, I have nothing but my own writing to post. That means my entire posting history would technically be self promotion.

Given all of that context:

1. Do you all think I should be an exception to the rule?

2. If not, where should I go instead?

I fail to see how posting thoughtful writing on hacker news is self promotion. I don’t see a way you are profiting or soliciting money.

It seems these sorts of articles are exactly what people come here for.

Although… “There is little that I have read on the internet that I have found to be worth reading... and what is worth reading is not worth sharing.”

Why would you attempt to share your writing with the sorts of simple idiots who read things on the internet? I recommend that you retreat to your ivory tower in the depths of the wasteland and write your profound musings in a calfskin bound vellum book on a pedestal in your extensive and impressive library.

It's fine, go ahead! Lots of people only post links to their own articles. I don't think this is what the rules and mods mean when they talk of "promotion".

Have a website?

My solution; consider submitting articles instead. There are a lot of good-faith HN users that don't comment or engage with the community at all besides submitting thoughtful writing or interesting websites. You sound like someone that sifts through a lot of stuff, I'm sure you're privy to a few niche resources that we'd all enjoy.

The rule mostly exists to stop people from using HN as a blog. It's no problem to submit your own stuff as long as it's mixed in with other intellectually gratifying submissions.

You can try but if you post a link to your website in every comment you will be downvoted and get comments flagged until you are shadowbanned.