It seems the crux of this post is that "while I don’t know the exact donation totals, I bet the site has raised a thousand dollars in a couple days." Or to summarize slightly: something almost positively probably happened, and by god I'll use this event that may or may not have happened as linkbait.
I really think we should refrain from posting our own content unless it is of particularly high quality (a fairly long--and edited--essay, a project we have been working on for several months, a redesign of our company's app). If I had to summarize this concept into one rule it would be "Don't post things that might appear to a reasonable individual to take longer to read than to write."
I am interpreting this question to mean "How is posting this link different then posting a new topic on HN with the same text?" (Please stop me if I have simply misinterpreted a snarky remark about the value of my comment. ;)
I wasn't intending to address that distinction in my comment, but the distinction is important because additional traffic to your website has the potential to benefit you far more than posting "a long block of text" on HN does. This is why most low quality submissions come in the form of links instead of text submissions: because the submitter wants readers to visit their website for nefarious sundries.
The point I was trying to make, which applies equally to submitted links and printed text, is that they should be of higher quality than this submission. To me this submission feels like its raison d'etre is to serve the submitter, and does very little in way of sparking interesting or meaningful discussion for the HC community.
To be more specific, it fits into the mold of the variety of submissions that I find to consistently be of the lowest quality: short (and often unedited) posts submitted by their own authors. When I joined the HN, posts of this kind were virtually unheard of, but recently they have become rather common. A simple test for these kinds of submissions is "If someone else found this entry, would they submit it to Hacker News?"
I have to apologize though, my comments here are really directed at an undesirable trend, of which your submission is only one example, and not an egregious one at that. So, I hope you don't put too much weight into my critique.
1) I don't have advertisements on my site and my previous blog post was months ago. I'm not exactly on my way to be a full time A-list blogger. Sometimes people just want to host content they have written online, not build up an online phenomenon.
2) It's a social news site for the precise reason that people will vote for the content they like. I felt like sharing how it was possible to get a large burst in traffic using a specific method, and peopled liked it enough to up-vote it, despite my questionable writing ability. Every social news system has its holes and flaws, but I don't think my post is exploiting one of these weaknesses. For that reason I don't think it warrants special protest.
Still, I'll assume that you were lashing out from tiredness of other, more egregious, examples of self-posting, and not take it too personal.
Heh - well I saw enough proof of her identity. Besides the personal correspondence, I saw a photo she took combining her student ID, a photo of her and Tracy, and a coin someone had requested. I don't deny that the whole thing could have been elaborately faked, but its past the threshold where it would be worth it. The author of the reason.com article also confirmed her identity.
Nonetheless, you're right that an unscrupulous person could probably gather some non-trivial amount of money by basically copying what I did.
>Even some of his family refuse to believe the police could be so wrong
That is a problem. I have a hard time explaining to people that don't read Radley Balko's work that police kill many innocent people every year in the name of stopping people from getting high. My non-libertarian friends just assume that the dead person did something wrong, otherwise why would the police shoot at them? They never question the authority of the state, and whether or not police should have the power to knock down doors unannounced on the basis of anonymous tips in the first place.
I really think we should refrain from posting our own content unless it is of particularly high quality (a fairly long--and edited--essay, a project we have been working on for several months, a redesign of our company's app). If I had to summarize this concept into one rule it would be "Don't post things that might appear to a reasonable individual to take longer to read than to write."