Actually, it's a reference to Paul Graham's observation that when news articles start to appear about anything almost simultaneously, it might be the result of a deliberate effort on someone's part to sell something along with all the generated talk: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
A native advertisement is an ad, dressed up to look like news.
A submarine ad is news. It's true, it's newsworthy (though that seems to be a low bar), it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be published as news. It just... happened not to be discovered by a journalist. Instead it was discovered by a company who hunted for possible news stories that would make them look good or would mention their product, found one, and presented it to a journalist. All nicely researched and ready to go; an easy story. (If this doesn't make sense, Paul Graham explains it better.)
That's my understanding, at least. I'm sure there are tons of shades of grey and no clear boundaries between these things.
> "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."
I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".
Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.
Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opposite way from what you propose.
During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.
Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.
Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.
Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)
(In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).
But.
The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.
The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).
Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?
(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)
There you go. Thanks for the trust.
One thing I would like to add, that I think we would both agree on, is that regardless of everyone's exact motivations and the actual causal chain of events, the post is still, de facto, part of the miasma of publicity for the series. Anyway, I appreciate your work, and that of archive.org.
I don't mind that discussion but I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry; we simply put into a formal entry that we've had this for a while. A popular awareness of something we do helps a non-profit, so we'll clarify the context of it. I think we're both in agreement the more people know of our work, the better.
Certainly; archive.org has been singularly beyond reproach in that regard.
Many articles are sponsored. Many are ghostwritten.
Protip: Often times the second company/solution in the article about the solutions is the one that paid for it.
Who cares?
You want the FTC to step in with an "AHA! #AD!" banner forced on everything?
In any case, your comment seems very aggressive.
It's important to know the incentives involved in the creation of a piece of information.
It wasn't a defeatist attitude at all. That is the correct quantifier.