I'm not so concerned about people gaming HN with the button, but rather a decline in the quality of content which gets submitted.

It seems PG does lots of algorithm work to keep the community active and engaged with data that is actually of interest.

Is there some way we can flag links that are sent via a button link and compare the number of up-votes to those submitted directly via the site. That may give some insight into the value of the share buttons to the community.

I'd prefer to not jump to conclusions re: the effects, lets get some metrics and see what is happening.

Something I’ve considered but never implemented: A "Submit to HN" button that is only visible if the HN frontpage is in the visitor's browser's history. (Yes, this is possible: http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html)

Benefit: Avoids mainstreaming HN.

Drawback: thafman & similarly-minded users would react the same way to the button on blog.fairsoftware.net; that is, it's begging for social media promotion.

Thoughts? (PG?)

Hi, you're talking about my blog. I use a plugin for wordpress, which as far as I know (I'm no expert), has been around for years. This is just one of many plugins that all offer to post your blog post to various sites. The list of sites they support is crazy, maybe reaching a hundred.

It's the job of the blog author to filter to the sites that make sense based on the content they publish. In my case, I cut down the list to 3 sites I like, that's it.

What is the name of the plugin you are using?

Update: Found it, Sexy bookmarks?

There are tons of them, but I suspect they all have HackerNews as an option... though most blog owners wouldn't see much value to showing it.

HN is protected a bit just by serving a niche; most articles don't have much to do with tech startups.

If you use AddThis they have the ability to add an article to HN.

Can you explain more? We currently autokill addthis links because they're always from spammers. I didn't know this was even something legitimate users would consider.

The concept was to make sites like HackerNews, DZone and Digg because those were the most relevant sites that match my blog on NoSQL. However, after having them on the site for probably a month and a half I never registered a single click. So I pulled them from the site.

I think the big submission/share buttons are the Facebook Like/Share, Google Buzz and one of the several Retweet buttons. I'm going to try and put those up on my site but Squarespace doesn't make that a very easy thing to do...

Derek