What makes you believe the author of this article, who from what I can tell is a long-term active HN user, is advertising for Amazon?

Skepticism is good, but you should also be skeptical of the first conclusion it leads you to.

Using an affiliate link without mentioning it is scammy.

Yes, I have a few affiliate links on my site (on products and services I've used for ~20 years). And those are all super in depth articles. Such as a 4,000+ word post on monitors that I still get emails about years later saying it is the best resource they found on the internet for purchasing a monitor, etc..

I spent about 3,000 hours over 5 years writing the content on my site asking nothing in return. The affiliate sales on my site help pay for hosting and I don't think it's scammy to drop them in when it applies. I also think it would be a little weird if I started every article that has an affiliate link with a 5 paragraph disclaimer to justify why I am using that link, but maybe I should write a post about that and then drop a 1 liner link somewhere.

Literally opening a lemonade stand as a grown man would be more profitable than what I make on affiliate sales on my site if you factor in hourly rates.

The operative phrase in the original comment was “without mentioning”.

> The operative phrase in the original comment was “without mentioning”.

As a reader you wouldn't be weirded out if the first section of the article was to justify why an affiliate link was used?

That would annoy me as a reader a lot more than having an affiliate link used without mention. I mean, I'm not sitting there trying to trick people into clicking links. The blog post is just an honest look / opinion on the keyboard. If you decide to click and buy one, that's cool. If you close the article in 5 seconds after skimming around, that's cool too.

> As a reader you wouldn't be weirded out if the first section of the article was to justify why an affiliate link was used?

Nope, and as the flagging of this article shows, it's worse without disclosure.

It's not just an ethical requirement, it's a legal one. (I believe Amazon's affiliate program guidelines requires disclosure)

> I believe Amazon's affiliate program guidelines requires disclosure

Good call, I just found it in their agreement in section 5: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...

Technically I do mention it on my site but maybe it's not clear enough since I only wrote about it once or twice in a comment on a different post.

I'm working on something now to make this more apparent on all pages that have an affiliate link (which is less than 10 out of ~300 pages).

This is just routine disclosure and it might be legally required. There's been a lot of noise about it in recent years as a lot of blogs, reviewers and influencers started getting paid to pitch products without disclosure.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/if-influencers-are...

What weirds me out more is seeing the phrase "Amazon Basics keyboard ".

You've established the article is just about the Amazon Basics keyboard; just refer to it as the keyboard for the rest of the story.

Way too clickbaity/SEO method of writing it.

> You've established the article is just about the Amazon Basics keyboard; just refer to it as the keyboard for the rest of the story. > Way too clickbaity/SEO method of writing it.

I did that because I talk about other keyboards through out the article and when people skim it gets hard to track what "their" or "the" really means (especially if they are clicking links).

If you do a search for "the keyboard" you'll see I use that phrase 9 times and "their keyboard" twice. When combined together that's more often than I use "Amazon Basics keyboard", so I'm not just spamming phrases for SEO. If anything doing that will de-value your page rank for keyword stuffing.

I mentioned the keyboard by name the least amount of times to keep the article skimmable and making it clear that when you click a link, it's leading to that keyboard. In other words, it's a UI feature not a bug!

> I also think it would be a little weird if I started every article that has an affiliate link with a 5 paragraph disclaimer to justify why I am using that link, but maybe I should write a post about that and then drop a 1 liner link somewhere.

I don’t know why all that would be needed. Even if you just stuck in a parenthetical “(affiliate link)” mention after the link, i would have a hard time saying there was anything scammy going on.

>Skepticism is good, but you should also be skeptical of the first conclusion it leads you to.

As someone who is naturally skeptical, I will keep in this mind more. Thanks.

It feels easy to be skeptical of others, yet much harder to be skeptical of one's own thoughts - for me anyways.

I think the article is well written and brings up some good stuff to consider but I have a hard time appreciating any basic desktop keyboard recommendation for the HN crowd that is not an ergonomic keyboard.

If you're a professional who uses the keyboard regularly, unless you have some special needs or wants, why wouldn't you go with an ergonomic keyboard as the base option.

I use this thing as my daily driver. It's not* just advertising. It's a darned good keyboard.

edit: apparently there's an affiliate link. Didn't see it on first read. Still a good keyboard imo though...

How is it advertising?

I'm the author of the post. I've used this keyboard for half a decade before I decided to write about it.

If you read a few paragraphs of the article you'll see I am using this "generic" keyboard because it's great.

Typing is also a pretty important thing for programmers and I've seen plenty of like/dislike posts about various keyboards. It very much applies to developers.

I (now) understand your intention was to simply share your opinion of the keyboard, I happened to see the post in the same format many other commodity-like product posts take: disguising themselves as a genuine review, but really just exist to peddle a product. Intention can be hard to convey on the internet, and if you meant it as a genuine product endorsement, sorry for misinterpreting you.

It's ok, no problem.

Actually posting this taught me a pretty good lesson on how hard it is not to be anonymous on the internet. That and I need to drop a 1 liner in the very few posts I have that contain affiliate links.

If I remember correctly, Amazon requires that you disclose that you're an amazon affiliate. Many sites just put a line of text in the footer of the page.

That said, I'm not sure why anyone is too upset at you for this. From my experience running many sites that use affiliate links, I can't imagine you're making any significant income from the affiliate links anyway, not to mention that's obviously not the purpose of this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising "Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea."

This is a personal message, and not openly sponsored. There is an affiliate link used, which is to say, the blog author likely hopes to make money off his post (even if that's not the primary impetus for his writing.)

As people that use products such as keyboards, I think we're receptive to well-documented personal messages about the products we enjoy using. I don't imagine anyone will get rich off this blog post, and I doubt that was the reason it was written.