I was suspicious the first time this hit the homepage, but twice? Are we sure the author isn't manipulating things somehow? He has been publicly promoting his track record of screwing people over to get ahead an awful lot.
Edit: to add a bit of credence, Thun (above) seems almost exclusively to pimp Alex and his company with these bland comments. I don't doubt they're different people, but he doesn't disclose his relationship with Virool very clearly.
The article is meant to be useful for the community. There's no use of us manipulating anything as my intent was to share some tips that worked for me (and might work for someone else). It got republished on lifehacker.
I am open to constructive conversations and suggestions. If you have ideas about social hacking, then please share them.
The thing is, I don't think this post benefits the community, especially reposting the lifehacker version after the original was front page so recently. I'm not really into social hacking, personally it feels dishonest. I discussed this on the last thread; social hacking only works because you're working against the norm. If everyone adopted it, it wouldn't be effective. So you have to do things that are really outrageous, that most people won't do. The other downside is that social hacking doesn't usually create anything; if everyone was social hacking, nobody would have energy for constructive endeavours.
The broader point of my first post was that I felt there might be some manipulation of the system to put this post on the front page. Unfortunately it's difficult to prove, but we could always say that I'm making baseless allegations for reasons of self-promotion. That certainly feels like social hacking
I appreciate your honest input. And I agree to an extent that social hacking (networking) is not everything, far from it. However, in building a company, it's a very useful skill to have.
As far as appearing on front page, I am not sure how hn works, but I can guarantee you that I have no interest in manipulating upvotes, nor do I have time to do it.
And overall, I am just trying to create useful content for the community.
I seriously wish society placed less importance on the famous. I will concede that at least this article discusses celebrities who have done something worth celebrating rather than the latest reality TV star than many young people are so smitten with. However I still have to question why anyone would want to spend so much energy stalking public figures.
I prefer to live by the philosophy of "doing your own thing and do it so well that people will come to you" and thus leave the stalking to those who have fewer skills in life.
Edit: to add a bit of credence, Thun (above) seems almost exclusively to pimp Alex and his company with these bland comments. I don't doubt they're different people, but he doesn't disclose his relationship with Virool very clearly.