> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore!

Man, I submitted my application to the Secret Cabal a while ago, and I keep getting held in probationary/review period. I really gotta knock off yelling at people to make more money and advocating imperialism as a good foreign policy, I'd like my SCSHNW card.

> More seriously - call me a cynic if you will, but when I see people offering help with the Twitter API or with SEO or tax advice or even help with RoR, well, I don't know, something smells fishy to me.

Alright, seriously on my end - maybe some people have mixed intentions, but that's fine with me if they're doing good deeds. Like, is part of why Bill Gates is doing his anti-malaria work to better his legacy? My answer to that is "Who cares? Not me" - if someone's doing a good thing and also benefiting in reputation, contacts, etc, that's great. Now if someone doesn't deliver the goods and then tries to pitch people who email them, that'd be really lame. But if they're legitimately good deeds, I don't really care about their intentions.

Also - to shed some light on it, I tend to write all over the place, "Drop me a line if I can give you a hand" - pretty much anywhere. My reasoning? Out of 100 people, 90 will be ungrateful after you do something for hem, 9 will say thanks and nothing more will come of it, and 1 out of 100 you'll become great friends with, or become colleagues, or otherwise do amazing stuff together. I try to spend a lot of my entertainment time connecting with strangers, figuring for every 100 times I do it, I'm going to make 1 pretty amazing connection. Also I figure, what else am I going to do with my entertainment time? Watch TV? I like solving problems. Heck, I don't have anything to sell. I just try to do right by people when they ask for someone, cause why not? I always find it cool when I drop someone a line and they get back to me, so I try to do the same.

I'm digging the Offer HN trend and hope it continues - I wouldn't even mind if a quarter of the entries on the front page at any time were Offer HN. I figure I'd read the interesting ones, skip the boring ones, and I could always click "Next Page" to see other entries if I want more general stories.

I think you're addressing a problem before it's arrived, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I agree that this isn't sustainable, and at some point, the offers are going to become less genuine and less valuable. However, after looking at the bloggergirl copy deck suggestions, I want to clearly state that she (and other offers) don't fall into this group. Great work.

I'd encourage users to ask for help. We're already doing it in the form of "review my ..." Good posts with time invested in describing the problem and asking for very specific help will bubble up from newest, and those that are looking to get out of doing work won't hit the front page.

On the contrary "Offer HN" posts are hard not to upvote...for now.

Thanks, malbiniak! I agree that, as interesting as Offer HN could be, the real opportunities to help others will be in continuing to read Ask HN posts and offering your services there, where there's a good match.

As someone mentioned already, you can give your services away to a lot of people, and possibly only 1 will really need it, be grateful, and pay it forward. So why not save your free services for that 1 'special' HNer who asks for help? Just a thought...

My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.

It would be pretty awesome if I was wrong though, and that a new spirit of collaboration across multiple communities was the end-result, but I remain skeptical.

For me, my offer of help in the RoR Offer thread was motivated out of two things. First, just because I like helping where I can. Second, I might get the opportunity to work on something cool, or meet someone new, that I might not otherwise have.

Volunteer on http://railsmentors.org - we'd love to have you.

> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore! Get in line!

If there's any secret cabal activity happening here, it's a conspiracy to maintain top-ten leaderboard positions by means of random sensationalistic debates.