If anything, this was a very short and quite contextual piece of text-only advertising. If all online advertising were like that, I won't have to run an ad blocker.

No need to do that. The provenance does not matter as long as the content is interesting, which is the case here.

This is the original hacker's ethos: put something out there for others to use, and let the people make their own opinion about the thing itself, not the authoritativeness of its source.

As long as it's not apparently being done by a bot, who cares?

This is effectively an advertising website.

This is not primarily an advertising site. See guidelines:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

> It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time

Yes. I was responding specifically to this claim:

> This is effectively an advertising website.

Which remains untrue even if you're allowed to post your own stuff from time to time.

Most of the time, the top post of a Show HN is someone else talking about their own project or something off-topic from the Show HN.

Self-promotion on HN is constant.

> not apparently being done by a bot

LLMs will make this very hard to detect, very soon if not already.

For me, undisclosed self promotion puts a very bad taste in my mouth, to the point of coming off as bad faith. I dislike pretending you're just mentioning a cool service since you're effectively trying to trick me with false social proof.

If the post had said "I made xyz which could auto generate domains for these ideas using ai to fully close the slop gap" I wouldn't mind and might even appreciate the additional fun.