I guess you're not being critical, but I'm going to defend kirse anyway.
I think it's disingenuous to use affiliate links if someone said, "Hey, where can I buy a Kindle?" or "what's the best ebook reader I can buy online?". But in this case, if you saw this link and said "Oh crap! This is news to me and I've been waiting for a price drop" . . . then by all means kirse deserves an affiliate payout.
Hmm. Getting sidetracked, but how is it disingenuous to use your affiliate link when someone asks you where to buy a Kindle? They're only available on Amazon, and it doesn't raise the price at all if they buy through an affiliate link.
In my opinion, lines are crossed when you suggest a less than optimal solution/link because it'll earn you more money. For example - on my NIN site, when an album becomes available for pre-sale, I list each vendor that we find along with their price, even if they're selling it cheaper than Amazon. If I were to ONLY suggest Amazon for pre-orders when I knew better deals were to be had, that's where I feel one starts losing ethics points.
I think the bottom line, for a site like HN, or a message board, or anything like that -- it's up to the owner/administrator of the site. I don't know how much work goes into the administration of HN, but the content is almost entirely crowdsourced. Were it my site, I'd probably strip (but not replace) all affiliate code from links, but I don't really think it's unethical to have posted that to HN with a link. Were it me, I'd have commented in the interest of full disclosure.
And that's pretty much all I was doing with my first post - disclosing something that may be of interest to readers here :)
yeah, Kindle's not a good example -- I was lazy to use that.
I just wanted to comment mainly because I always see people going way out of their way to disclose affiliate links (and conversely -- people pouncing on undisclosed ones like they've found a witch) and I always think "do people really get so offended by them?". But yeah, I totally agree that it's wrong to recommend a sub-optimal product b/c you're an affiliate.
I see no excuse for dropping an affiliate link on a submission to HackerNews. It applies not just to the kindle, but anything one would buy after follwoing the link to Amazon, and even at a later time when purchase is not even related to this article. I visit comments first, before link, but I'm sure many others would be impacted. Affiliate links should be discouraged altogether on a site like this, and worthy of banning/suspension.
I think it's disingenuous to use affiliate links if someone said, "Hey, where can I buy a Kindle?" or "what's the best ebook reader I can buy online?". But in this case, if you saw this link and said "Oh crap! This is news to me and I've been waiting for a price drop" . . . then by all means kirse deserves an affiliate payout.