> They have it in their bio which is the HN norm, not announcing one’s creds at every turn.
No, appending something like "(disclaimer: CF employee)" is absolutely the norm anytime it could even remotely be construed as a conflict of interest. It might be fine here, but this is an edge case.
I disagree that every comment you make in a community has to stand alone and reintroduce yourself lest a newcomer flies off the handle without knowing who they’re responding to.
That is just annoying. Nor do I think it’s a convincing point coming from someone who suggests they aren’t new here.
imo people new to a community could slow their roll esp in a debate.
Alright; I've been on HN for 5 years. Since we're all friends who know each other so well, how about you tell me about myself? I'm reasonably active and I have an extremely recognizable username, so you should of course remember me quite well.
>I disagree that every comment you make in a community has to stand alone and reintroduce yourself lest a newcomer flies off the handle without knowing who they’re responding to.
I think it's circumstantial. For instance, I don't really think it's necessary for the CTO to have said, "disclaimer: CF employee/CTO/whatever" in this thread. But in this thread[1] from yesterday, I think it would've been helpful.
To me, it’s about the easy of connecting a comments relevance to the post, assuming CTO was on the founding team, so makes sense that them posting they had never seen the post adds value to the thread; anyone else posting comment like that would have likely been down voted.
To me, fair to assume everyone does not know everyone else, though they might be familiar with a subset of the information, for example, knowing who Cloudflare is. If a user appending affiliation to a comment adds context, to me it makes sense to add it - and not assume or expect users to click your profile, other users point out who you are, etc.
But even if you didn't know the user was a cloudflare exec, the comment just becomes a boring throwaway comment from some luser on the internet telling you their thoughts, like posting 'Me too!' like some braindead AOLer.
Sorry, but do not understand references or generally what you were expressing; highly suggest reading all my comments in thread to avoid forcing me to unnecessarily repeat myself.
My point is that adding a disclaimer about your employer only matters if the post has a possibility of being seen as astroturfing if the reader doesn't know about the relationship between the poster and the company.
For example, if jgrahamc said "I never knew that. Cloudflare is such an amazing company, everyone should apply for a job there!", then okay, request a disclaimer. But if someone just says "I didn't know that", then the comment goes from mildly interesting (if you know who they are) to boring (if you don't know who they are). The failure mode here for lack of disclaimer is the post just becomes a boring, low-effort comment.
I think jgrahamc adding "I'm the CTO of cloudflare, and I didn't know that!" might have been reasonable context, but no disclaimer is required, because the reader didn't need to be protected from the post. There was no conflict of interest in the post.
No, appending something like "(disclaimer: CF employee)" is absolutely the norm anytime it could even remotely be construed as a conflict of interest. It might be fine here, but this is an edge case.