I think you're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Sure this blog is marketing. All blogs serve at least a partial marketing purpose, whether they be from individual software developers, small businesses, big companies, or nonprofits. The difference is that "good blogs" are ones where I can extract value from the post. Signal vs Noise is one of these blogs.
I don't understand your complaint at it's core. Are you upset that multimillionaires are sharing their key decision points, advice, and retrospectives in exchange for promotion? Most people charge for such disclosure, and highly so[0]. We're lucky that the culture and technology of the web has torn down this glass ceiling access to insight.
Just look at the forum we're discussing this in -- new.ycombinator.com -- if you're anti marketing, you may not want to raise issue within a forum owned and run by an extremely active investment fund
But they don't share anything of worth to my mind. I like most HN links that make the front page but I've yet to find a 37 Signals post that's really anything but smoke and mirrors designed to indirectly praise themselves. Someone made that same smoke and mirrors criticism of PG's essays a while back and I think that's false, he puts work into his "blog" and it's interesting. More than that he gets other people to read it and give feedback before he publishes. The quality of the 37 Signals stuff is just incredibly low and it only makes the font page for "hip" reasons.
There is a foolproof solution to this. It doesn't even require any time or effort on your part. It's this: Don't click on the link.
Just don't click it.
I'm not even going to speculate why you are so worked up over the fact that other people find value in something you don't. We get it. You don't like what they write. Just don't read it. Problem solved. Ask yourself if this is really worth any more of your time or emotional investment.
I don't understand your complaint at it's core. Are you upset that multimillionaires are sharing their key decision points, advice, and retrospectives in exchange for promotion? Most people charge for such disclosure, and highly so[0]. We're lucky that the culture and technology of the web has torn down this glass ceiling access to insight.
Just look at the forum we're discussing this in -- new.ycombinator.com -- if you're anti marketing, you may not want to raise issue within a forum owned and run by an extremely active investment fund
[0]http://www.kepplerspeakers.com/search/?feerange=ABOVE%20$50,...