A lot of things posted here to HN are formulated as "everyone should do x" but would be more accurately formulated as "I personally prefer when people do x"
That's not so surprising. Blogger makes it easy to point a domain to a blog. But what else would you ever do with this particular domain other than have it contain this one post?
(Once upon a time back in the pre-cambrian era of the internet I once got myself into a situation where I had to register a new domain with Network Solutions in order to re-activate an account (or something like that, I don't really recall the details). So I registered networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. Got myself into a wee bit of trouble with that one.)
More seriously, I never know how to respond to that question because it depends on what the question is. It feels like a trap so that I can't get out of providing an answer to a question I won't want to answer.
This really only applies to stream-based immediate communication (i.e. verbal communication). "Can I ask you a question?" is a short question that basically says "Can I take up more of your time?", as the mere act of asking someone a question is taking up time. If you just launch into your long question, the recipient has to wait for you to say your entire question before they can indicate whether they're even in a state to take questions right now.
This isn't appropriate at all for packet-based asynchronous communication. It's packet-based, meaning that receiving a short question is no faster than receiving a long question (you don't have to actually read the long question in order to receive it). It's asynchronous, meaning, if you can't answer right this moment but can in a minute, then the asker can still go ahead and ask their question.
What's more, it's outright rude in an asynchronous communication, because what you're actually doing is saying "hey can you please suspend what you're doing and have a synchronous communication with me?" when you almost certainly don't need a synchronous communication. About the only justification for this is "I don't want to type my question if nobody's around to answer it immediately, because I won't be staying long", but all I can say to that is: tough cookies.
It's even worse if you do this in group chat (like IRC), because you're now asking anyone who's around to stop what they're doing and wait for your question. So it takes the above rudeness and magnifies it by the number of people currently reading the channel.
It's a common courtesy that, in a text-chat context, ends up being less courteous than just asking. If you "ask to ask", you are wasting my time with an extra interruption that I don't need. Now I either need to sit there and stare at "readhn is typing..." until you've finished your actual question (wasting my time), or I need to go back to what I was doing, only to be interrupted again in a minute or two when you finish typing out your question.
I understand that asking to ask is a courteous thing to do in general and follows the general rules of social graces, but when you do that, you're actually wasting my time and are being less courteous.
If you really must do this, just put the ask-to-ask in the same (initial) message as the actual question. Given that the ask-to-ask query is functionally useless anyway (what asshole would say "no" to that?), you get to appear courteous while also not wasting your colleague's time.
agreed, but the phasing can be improved. instead of "can I ask a question?" (which risks the classic sarcastic retort), ask "do you have a moment to talk about $topic". if you don't give a hint about how involved the question is, the person can't know whether they have time to answer it.
That's fine, but then you must follow through on that courtesy by having the actual question ready to paste and send when the person says "yes". By taking more of their time, you're being rude, not courteous.
In my darker moments I think people don't want to take the time to type a good question and only commit to it when they believe I'll be faster than grep/google. Not sure if they realize that now I have to sit through that typing time in addition to providing help.
This is exactly what I do, and it generally has good results. I don't have to worry about being rude, because the greeting - usually a simple "Hey!" - is there for those who care about it, and my question is also right there. Makes Slack turnarounds MUCH faster.
I'm on the other side where I'm answering questions, I start with
"Hi, what is the problem you're having?", the only answer to that is exactly what I want to hear. Not "Hey what can I do for you today" or anything like that to which the answer could start with a review, or an anecdote, or whatever.
So the other side of this is greet people with direction.
If the matter is time-sensitive then I need to ask whether the user is available or not to provide an answer.
u1: Hi, can you switch to the alternate server, the main one is crashing
[... 12 hours later, when the problem has already been resolved]
u2: Sure thing, let me do it.
u1: STOOOOOOOOOP!
Or simply use your best judgment about how to interact with individuals and to build relationships. We shouldn't rely on blanket rules because people are different. You should know if you're going to sound curt or polite or irritating or friendly, based on your own personality and that of the person you're engaging.
I feel like I'm making it sound complicated, when for most people it's the most natural thing in the world.
The problem with this is that in anything other than a small organisation, you probably don't know the individual you are starting an interaction with.
Providing helpful advice for people for free on Freenode, I think "don't ask to ask, just ask" should be made a services-level command. Y'know, just type /justask and a service bot will post the almighty phrase of concision into the selected channel. Save everybody having to make it part of their clients or keyboard macros.
I get so many random messages on Slack that I usually just ignore the DM if it says 'hello' typically because the actual request/question will appear sooner or later (as they grow impatient)
I wonder if if the integration hooks in slack have enough options to allow a good bot to help with this. I know they can identify and respond, but if they can't alter the message or noise it makes, maybe they can at least set a specific noise for the automated reply? Then if you recognize the telltale combination of the two, you can assume that initial interaction has been handled and wait until you hear the singular message received noise.
Last I had checked most platforms don't have much in the way of modifying messages or accessing PM/DMs.
What I wanted it for was a timezone converter, so everyone saw the time in their own timezone. Our group is from across NA, so somebody saying "I'll be on at 6!" can be hard to figure out when dealing with a dozen people from 4 timezones
Tickets are good. They give you tangible credit for your time spent helping someone. If they are interrupting your manager the same way they interrupted you, instead of sending a request in an efficient manner, they saved you the trouble of you going to your manager to ask for help dealing with the person being a nuisance.
Someone needs to write a Slack extension (or whatever the plugins are called) that simply replies to "hi" or "hello" with "Hello! How can I help you?" and hides those opening salvos from you.
To prevent spam (very successfully, so far), I have users fill in their email address instead of displaying mine on my website. They get an email like this:
From: lucb1e-$randomcode@example.com
Subject: Email address for lucb1e
Content: To contact me, just reply to this email!
People use this, but not a single person changed the subject from "Email address for $me" to the actual subject of the message. Not one.
You could programmatically vary the subject. Either by time/sender, or by lifting the first (or first statistically improbable) phrase from the message.
I think we may want to consider if our hatred of meetings, and now just saying "hello", has more to do with dealing with unrealistic deadlines and pressure for what should be a white collar job.
In the example given, there is 1 minute between the "Hi" and the question. If 1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a factory room floor.
I think it's more about context switching than time. I might be on a roll writing something and then have to change context for a few minutes to wait for someone to ask a question, and by then I lost my train of thought.
Why are you even getting notified of someone messaging you? I’ve had my notifications for computer and phone muted for the last 1.5 years. It has changed the way I work. If someone needs an answer right now, they know how to call me. If not, I’ll see it when I check slack again.
Why are you asking your coworkers to place a phone call just to get ahold of you? That seems like an incredibly high barrier to having a conversation with you.
It’s not about the raw time wasted, but more about the interruption. When people are concentrating on some creative task, having this one-minute gap between “hello” and actual-question can really break one’s “flow”.
Much better for the question to be directly asked, so that the person can respond asynchronously when at a convenient stopping point.
Also note that asking directly doesn’t preclude being polite with “hello - mind if I ask you a question? <insert question>. Thanks in advance!”
It's not so much that it breaks productivity, it's annoying on a simpler level.
You are doing productive thing x. Person A sends you a hello message and your chat app pings you. You go to look at chat and now you are staring at an empty chat window for the minute or more it takes for person A to actually ask what they could have sent already.
I honestly think you can treat "conversations" in a chat program as more like email. Sure, some of the time you can get a conversation going, but if you don't already have a continuous conversation going then create a fully self contained message
No matter how the person asks their question your flow is going to be interrupted the moment you open your chat apps. If the person says hello then asks a question a minute later your flow is broken. If the person asks the question right away now you're answering the question and your flow is, just as likely, broken.
As far as flow interruptions are concerned, it's not the fault of the person asking a question but rather the invasive design or reliance on chat, or your own patterns of chat consumption.
The real solution to this problem isn't to impose some kind of rule that people should stop spending an extra minute to be polite, but rather that we should all adopt conscious consumption patterns around chat, i.e. setting aside time each day when you focus strictly on work and ignore chats for x hours (your role permitting). Rather than letting the chat notifications dictate when you attend to them, you should dictate when you attend to chat notifications, and if it means breaking some important flow you have going the chat can probably wait.
Edit: I suppose the only exception to this is when the question is something that requires a one word answer and can be answered instantaneously, but if that's the case that's probably a sign you have larger communication problems in that things that are easily answerable are in the heads of workers and not stored in some uniformly accessible place.
Because one interruption takes x amount of time to deal with and the other interruption takes x + 60 seconds of staring at a chat window that FEELS like 3 times as long
That’s a fair point, but the original complaint was about the break in thought flow or activity immersion. That’s going to occur whether you sleep 60 or sleep 10. That happens the moment you decide to interrupt your focus by looking at the chat.
Of course there are some roles that require immediate attention to chat messages when they come in, for example if you’re on call or something, but for the majority of jobs you don’t have to answer right away. Instead of focusing on our own consumption patterns and lack of discipline/restraint we like to blame others because it’s easier—if you’re in the middle of something wait to get to the chat until you’ve reached a good break point.
This is why it’s also good to adopt rules of use for different communications tech, e.g. x chat channel is to be avoided except for emergencies, or DMs are assumed to be casual and important stuff must be relegated to certain channels etc etc.
I honestly do not understand why anyone would just stare at a blank chat window for a minute (or more) instead of switching back to what they were doing (or, in most(?) cases, just looking at a different screen).
It's similar one of your sibling comments which compares a chat message to a person walking up and saying "hello"... They are absolutely not equivalent; it's perfectly alright to not immediately respond to every message you get (or even only giving it a bit of your attention), even if they are not emails.
Well, because the second you look back to the other window and remember what you were doing, it's just going to ding again with whatever their actual question was.
I must just be better at multitasking than most... It doesn't really take a lot of my focus to respond to an arbitrary greeting with an equally arbitrary greeting... Certainly not to the point where it's going to take minutes for me to get back to what I was doing.
Yeah agreed - it's more irritating than anything else. It anecdotally also seems like the people that do this also tend to be more annoying and slower at typing in general, but maybe I've just conflated the two.
Nah, waiting for one minute is sufficient to kick most people out of their “zone”. And the problem in this scenario is that you have no way of telling in advance whether the incoming question is within your area of expertise, or something you want to spend time responding to.
You're missing something very important. Imagine we are co-workers, and I come up to you and say "hello" and then stand there saying nothing further for an entire 60 seconds. While you stand there and wonder why I'm there and what I'd like to talk about. It would be weird and rude of me.
It is rightfully expected that one gets on with it and says what one has further to say, and in less than sixty seconds from the initial "hello".
For me personally it's a context switching issue, not a time issue -- It's more of a mental inconvenience to have nothing to switch to.
When someone grabs my attention to ask a question but leaves me idle for a moment, I'm left to wait. I don't get back to what I'm doing because I'll be pulled away from it shortly. The back and forth is very mentally taxing.
I'd love for it to be different but in my experience it's a physical limitation, just the way I am.
Speech is bidirectional, synchronous streams, so you can process it while it's being emitted. Text chat on the other hand commonly is asynchronous and packet-based, i.e. you only get completely formed sentences.
That means with text there's an idle period between the "hello" packet and the followup. Just seeing the greeting and having to decide whether to wait, respond or ignore it is an annoyance that does not exist in spoken conversation.
It's not about the time itself, it's about the uncertain, possibly unbounded latency and the context-switching.
In fact text is not just higher-latency, it also has a lower bandwidth. It's really important to use it efficiently.
For a bit reduced latency and higher throughput they could implement liveposting as some imageboards do[0].
Imagine the same interaction happening in real life. If I came up to your desk, said Hi, then didn't say anything for 60 seconds, and then asked you a question. Anyone would reasonably be annoyed by that. It has nothing to do with deadlines and being overworked. It's just annoying.
> If 1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a factory room floor. Food for thought.
Um, if you think there's a connection between a job being "white collar" and not caring whether or how long one's focus is broken, you may want to look into getting a better job.
I'm fortunate enough to have made and saved a lot more money than I need, so a big part of what motivates my career drive and keeps ending my sabbaticals is that getting sufficiently difficult intellectual challenges in front of me is a lot easier in a corporate environment. It turns out that most of these require sustained concentration: interrupt-based communication destroys the ability to do this work, and drawing out the length of the interrupt exacerbates it.
In fact, you have your example precisely backwards: if I worked on a factory floor and someone interrupted me, the cost of the interruption is going to be a lot closer equal to the length of the interrupt (with no second-order effects), since one's time is a lot more fungible.
That's a bit what I'm thinking about lately. I'm wondering what could I do instead. I like programming as a hobby, but not necessarily as a job.
How could I go into a think tank for example? Or whatever that needs problem solving, but does not equate with sitting on my ass in front of a screen for hours.
For now I'm saving money to try building multitenent CLT housing.
Funny how this resonates with so many of us that it is #1 post on HN within minutes. We have been telling our team members to not just say "hi" or "hello" and instead ask the question straight away. Imagine the amount of hi and hello texts that are stored on tools like skype/slack :)
maybe that's a business model. go find high ranked content on HN from a couple years ago, make a site about it, put some ads, and pretend it's something new.
There’s about a million marginally skilled SEO guys working from home you’ll be competing with. I know you’re joking but it’s an interesting thing to think about. The countless people scrapping the bottom of the pool of where internet money is made with endless grey hat trickery.
Fooling Google is a different game than catering to arrow clickers.
This is really more of a data problem.
I think the strategy is to take the most popular things around this time of day, day of week, and month of year from say a pool of 5-10 year old data.
Then you filter it looking for evergreen content. This would be an incremental heuristic model.
You take the candidate content, use some trivial grammar model to rewrite it so it's not completely identical and then automatically put it on different styled templated sites.
Register a few domains that suggest they are tech information sites
Make sure your Twitter cards and url naming system is reasonable, then have a bot to post it from a handful of puppet accounts
Have a much larger pool of about 250 or so puppet accounts and use a different 5% subset to seed them with upvotes over Tor in order to confuse any clustering algorithm and then keep the profits.
Affiliated ad revenue is total complete shit though. Even if this all worked beautifully you're looking at what? $20/day? I mean who cares...
The truly dishonest and devious thing you could do is freemium it and have a generous paywall like NYT.
That's an incredibly dishonest way to make money though. It'd probably work great.
1) You'd need 100k+ visitors to make any money off Google (1+ thousand a month).
2) Just having visitors is not enough, they have to be "niche" to an ad category and ideally looking for something to buy (not just information). The only thing that pays out is high-quality PPC traffiic or even better lead-gen for high-value products (health, debt, education, etc) with conversion-based pricing.
3) Google ads on content sites with CPM (impressions) pays pennies out.
4) Targeted blogspam sounds like it involves lots of humans beyond just mechanical turk, with some text parsing and rewriting which is a big overhead
5) This is basically the business model of Buzzfeed and other cancerous sites plus countless "niche" sites you've never heard of with high quality domains + foreign content mills + partner networks+cross domain advertising systems to convert in bulk.
If you want my personal opinion there's almost no low hanging fruit left in the content + high volume + conversion game unless you get lucky with a few niches (but the advertisers find those niches for you).
There are communities like http://www.leadscon.com and similar who do this stuff. It's really unstable business with constantly changing market + technology trends, unless you have a unique product and are developing marketing channels. Otherwise you're constantly fishing for got lead buyers and new traffic sources. Which is a constant grind and probably not a great business to get into, unless you have the heart for that stuff - then you could easily become middle class off of it. At least temporarily.
I don't really make dishonest dollars so this is unfamiliar to me but I was under the impression content mills made easily detectable formulaic clickbait "What happened next will surprise you" "a local housemom discovered something" "7 worst celebrity hairstyles" etc...
This is decidedly different. Here's some examples:
These are all at least 6 years old ... the key here is to make it look like it's legit and above board all the while you're just content farming from archives.
I've had people repackage articles I've written on their own site and presented them as conference papers as just one-offs (I don't really care, whatever). This is a proposal for an automated plagerization engine, shamelessly lifting old content and repackaging it in a way suggesting it's exclusive.
I've had top articles and projects on reddit, slashdot, and hn ... I tried amassing a portfolio recently and it's really hard to find the old references, blogs, and articles talking about it. The web is more of a moving river than a library. That's why I think this would work.
It's incredibly dishonest but I don't think I've seen it done.
As others here have said, ignoring the 'hello' is the best bet.
For those on the asking end, my advice is to ask your question and if it goes beyond a simple answer, follow up with 'do you have time to talk about this now?' Most people assume I have time or desire to answer a flood of questions because I responded to the first simple one, which isn't usually the case.
And, if you're sick of your coworkers saying, "Hi"--tell them directly. Don't create a domain name and get it front-paged on a site you know they frequent. ;)
There is an anecdote, but I just cannot remember which major US bank it was. The anecdote is that they have eliminated the "Hi <name>" on the email. No greetings are accepted. People were asked to proceed to the task/question and wrap it up fast. Also no "kind regards" etc. in the end of the message.
I will continue googling and I may update if/when I find more info on this.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadEdited to remove irony
(Once upon a time back in the pre-cambrian era of the internet I once got myself into a situation where I had to register a new domain with Network Solutions in order to re-activate an account (or something like that, I don't really recall the details). So I registered networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com. Got myself into a wee bit of trouble with that one.)
More seriously, I never know how to respond to that question because it depends on what the question is. It feels like a trap so that I can't get out of providing an answer to a question I won't want to answer.
Just dropping it all at once gives them a chance to absorb the question and give a more thoughtful reply.
Obviously if the question is of a sensitive nature or needs special care then none of this applies.
I find it a polite way of determining if the other party is able to give me their attention.
This isn't appropriate at all for packet-based asynchronous communication. It's packet-based, meaning that receiving a short question is no faster than receiving a long question (you don't have to actually read the long question in order to receive it). It's asynchronous, meaning, if you can't answer right this moment but can in a minute, then the asker can still go ahead and ask their question.
What's more, it's outright rude in an asynchronous communication, because what you're actually doing is saying "hey can you please suspend what you're doing and have a synchronous communication with me?" when you almost certainly don't need a synchronous communication. About the only justification for this is "I don't want to type my question if nobody's around to answer it immediately, because I won't be staying long", but all I can say to that is: tough cookies.
It's even worse if you do this in group chat (like IRC), because you're now asking anyone who's around to stop what they're doing and wait for your question. So it takes the above rudeness and magnifies it by the number of people currently reading the channel.
I understand that asking to ask is a courteous thing to do in general and follows the general rules of social graces, but when you do that, you're actually wasting my time and are being less courteous.
If you really must do this, just put the ask-to-ask in the same (initial) message as the actual question. Given that the ask-to-ask query is functionally useless anyway (what asshole would say "no" to that?), you get to appear courteous while also not wasting your colleague's time.
"Hi, what is the problem you're having?", the only answer to that is exactly what I want to hear. Not "Hey what can I do for you today" or anything like that to which the answer could start with a review, or an anecdote, or whatever.
So the other side of this is greet people with direction.
For some reason that reminded me of this gem: http://www.bash.org/?23396
Not sure if I should be pleased or horrified with myself that it took me less than 15 seconds to find that link. :/
I feel like I'm making it sound complicated, when for most people it's the most natural thing in the world.
https://dontasktoask.com/
Hasn't burned me yet but YMMV
What I wanted it for was a timezone converter, so everyone saw the time in their own timezone. Our group is from across NA, so somebody saying "I'll be on at 6!" can be hard to figure out when dealing with a dozen people from 4 timezones
It shows them that I've seen their message, but I won't be responding with my own message in order to pull a request out of them.
In the example given, there is 1 minute between the "Hi" and the question. If 1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a factory room floor.
Food for thought.
Much better for the question to be directly asked, so that the person can respond asynchronously when at a convenient stopping point.
Also note that asking directly doesn’t preclude being polite with “hello - mind if I ask you a question? <insert question>. Thanks in advance!”
You are doing productive thing x. Person A sends you a hello message and your chat app pings you. You go to look at chat and now you are staring at an empty chat window for the minute or more it takes for person A to actually ask what they could have sent already.
I honestly think you can treat "conversations" in a chat program as more like email. Sure, some of the time you can get a conversation going, but if you don't already have a continuous conversation going then create a fully self contained message
Worse, you're trying to figure out if it's worth refilling your short term memory with the things you just dropped when you checked on the chat.
It's not a minute of boredom, it's a minute of having too much in your brain but you're uncertain if it's worth it to stop the effort or not.
No matter how the person asks their question your flow is going to be interrupted the moment you open your chat apps. If the person says hello then asks a question a minute later your flow is broken. If the person asks the question right away now you're answering the question and your flow is, just as likely, broken.
As far as flow interruptions are concerned, it's not the fault of the person asking a question but rather the invasive design or reliance on chat, or your own patterns of chat consumption.
The real solution to this problem isn't to impose some kind of rule that people should stop spending an extra minute to be polite, but rather that we should all adopt conscious consumption patterns around chat, i.e. setting aside time each day when you focus strictly on work and ignore chats for x hours (your role permitting). Rather than letting the chat notifications dictate when you attend to them, you should dictate when you attend to chat notifications, and if it means breaking some important flow you have going the chat can probably wait.
Edit: I suppose the only exception to this is when the question is something that requires a one word answer and can be answered instantaneously, but if that's the case that's probably a sign you have larger communication problems in that things that are easily answerable are in the heads of workers and not stored in some uniformly accessible place.
`sleep 60`
Because one interruption takes x amount of time to deal with and the other interruption takes x + 60 seconds of staring at a chat window that FEELS like 3 times as long
Of course there are some roles that require immediate attention to chat messages when they come in, for example if you’re on call or something, but for the majority of jobs you don’t have to answer right away. Instead of focusing on our own consumption patterns and lack of discipline/restraint we like to blame others because it’s easier—if you’re in the middle of something wait to get to the chat until you’ve reached a good break point.
This is why it’s also good to adopt rules of use for different communications tech, e.g. x chat channel is to be avoided except for emergencies, or DMs are assumed to be casual and important stuff must be relegated to certain channels etc etc.
It's similar one of your sibling comments which compares a chat message to a person walking up and saying "hello"... They are absolutely not equivalent; it's perfectly alright to not immediately respond to every message you get (or even only giving it a bit of your attention), even if they are not emails.
I wonder if this is a generational thing...
I was essentially conceding that clearly others are not as able to switch contexts easily.
If I get a 'hello', now I don't know what the situation is, and it might go a few different ways. More distracting.
It is rightfully expected that one gets on with it and says what one has further to say, and in less than sixty seconds from the initial "hello".
When someone grabs my attention to ask a question but leaves me idle for a moment, I'm left to wait. I don't get back to what I'm doing because I'll be pulled away from it shortly. The back and forth is very mentally taxing.
I'd love for it to be different but in my experience it's a physical limitation, just the way I am.
That means with text there's an idle period between the "hello" packet and the followup. Just seeing the greeting and having to decide whether to wait, respond or ignore it is an annoyance that does not exist in spoken conversation.
It's not about the time itself, it's about the uncertain, possibly unbounded latency and the context-switching.
In fact text is not just higher-latency, it also has a lower bandwidth. It's really important to use it efficiently.
For a bit reduced latency and higher throughput they could implement liveposting as some imageboards do[0].
[0] https://imgur.com/HQKEwXE
Um, if you think there's a connection between a job being "white collar" and not caring whether or how long one's focus is broken, you may want to look into getting a better job.
I'm fortunate enough to have made and saved a lot more money than I need, so a big part of what motivates my career drive and keeps ending my sabbaticals is that getting sufficiently difficult intellectual challenges in front of me is a lot easier in a corporate environment. It turns out that most of these require sustained concentration: interrupt-based communication destroys the ability to do this work, and drawing out the length of the interrupt exacerbates it.
In fact, you have your example precisely backwards: if I worked on a factory floor and someone interrupted me, the cost of the interruption is going to be a lot closer equal to the length of the interrupt (with no second-order effects), since one's time is a lot more fungible.
How could I go into a think tank for example? Or whatever that needs problem solving, but does not equate with sitting on my ass in front of a screen for hours.
For now I'm saving money to try building multitenent CLT housing.
Grass is greener...?
I’d rather not share this.
Too bad because I agree with it.
Edit: it’s also stolen from a Google wiki https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870907
Just think, by this time next year I could be losing thousands each month. Finally I'll put those Reid Hoffman books to practice.
This is really more of a data problem.
I think the strategy is to take the most popular things around this time of day, day of week, and month of year from say a pool of 5-10 year old data.
Then you filter it looking for evergreen content. This would be an incremental heuristic model.
You take the candidate content, use some trivial grammar model to rewrite it so it's not completely identical and then automatically put it on different styled templated sites.
Register a few domains that suggest they are tech information sites
Make sure your Twitter cards and url naming system is reasonable, then have a bot to post it from a handful of puppet accounts
Have a much larger pool of about 250 or so puppet accounts and use a different 5% subset to seed them with upvotes over Tor in order to confuse any clustering algorithm and then keep the profits.
Affiliated ad revenue is total complete shit though. Even if this all worked beautifully you're looking at what? $20/day? I mean who cares...
The truly dishonest and devious thing you could do is freemium it and have a generous paywall like NYT.
That's an incredibly dishonest way to make money though. It'd probably work great.
2) Just having visitors is not enough, they have to be "niche" to an ad category and ideally looking for something to buy (not just information). The only thing that pays out is high-quality PPC traffiic or even better lead-gen for high-value products (health, debt, education, etc) with conversion-based pricing.
3) Google ads on content sites with CPM (impressions) pays pennies out.
4) Targeted blogspam sounds like it involves lots of humans beyond just mechanical turk, with some text parsing and rewriting which is a big overhead
5) This is basically the business model of Buzzfeed and other cancerous sites plus countless "niche" sites you've never heard of with high quality domains + foreign content mills + partner networks+cross domain advertising systems to convert in bulk.
If you want my personal opinion there's almost no low hanging fruit left in the content + high volume + conversion game unless you get lucky with a few niches (but the advertisers find those niches for you).
There are communities like http://www.leadscon.com and similar who do this stuff. It's really unstable business with constantly changing market + technology trends, unless you have a unique product and are developing marketing channels. Otherwise you're constantly fishing for got lead buyers and new traffic sources. Which is a constant grind and probably not a great business to get into, unless you have the heart for that stuff - then you could easily become middle class off of it. At least temporarily.
This is decidedly different. Here's some examples:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2198700&cid=3629362...
These are all at least 6 years old ... the key here is to make it look like it's legit and above board all the while you're just content farming from archives.
I've had people repackage articles I've written on their own site and presented them as conference papers as just one-offs (I don't really care, whatever). This is a proposal for an automated plagerization engine, shamelessly lifting old content and repackaging it in a way suggesting it's exclusive.
I've had top articles and projects on reddit, slashdot, and hn ... I tried amassing a portfolio recently and it's really hard to find the old references, blogs, and articles talking about it. The web is more of a moving river than a library. That's why I think this would work.
It's incredibly dishonest but I don't think I've seen it done.
I will continue googling and I may update if/when I find more info on this.
Slack doesn't you make you more productive, it makes you spend more time on smalltalks and constant distractions.
I almost never had a constructive discussion on Slack. In contrast, I used to have them way more over email.