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Comments on How to deal with links to commerce?

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How to deal with links to commerce?

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An answer in the Linux Codidact is using the price of solid state drives and hard disks to clarify its point, and does so by linking to these products in Amazon.

Leaving my personal judgement of Amazon apart, I would nonetheless remove the links as the prices are what is substantial to the answer, not the exact products in sale.

Do we have a policy on linking to commercial services? If not yet, should the links be removed?

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2 comment threads

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Regardless of the link target site, a point on the specific case (2 comments)
Regardless of the link target site, a point on the specific case
Canina‭ wrote 5 months ago · edited 5 months ago

Here's something about this specific case.

The answer in question is a self-answer, which is by all means fine, but...

The question states "I have"; in other words, the storage device situation already exists, someone already having a SSD and a HDD. But the second half of the answer (with the links to specific products and their respective prices) seems to be written based on the assumption of buying new.

Thus, the answer is making a point by making assumptions which the question excludes.

This is quite an easy trap to fall into when self-answering: not actually answering the question as posed but rather answering one's mental picture of the question. That can of course happen with any question, but I do think it's easier to fall into when self-answering because of how easy it is to not read the question as closely as one might another's.

For that reason alone my initial feeling is that the second half of the answer actually detracts from the answer, regardless of links.

matthewsnyder‭ wrote 5 months ago · edited 5 months ago

I wouldn't read too much into minor word choice, I typed it up in a hurry.

I posted because there was another question, asking effectively the same SSD/HDD split thing, but with a lot of additional specific requirements. I didn't want to answer for the specific case in the other question, but I felt like sharing my thoughts on the simpler, general case (and in doing so realized that technological advances have made this kind of set up obsolete in many cases) hence the self-answer. Maybe the question text can be tweaked, but the point of the question is "What files do I put on SSD, what on HDD?" and the answer is "put /home on the SSD, then the rest of / except for /var, but actually just buy a bigger/second SSD they're really cheap now".

But, this seems like a comment that should be on that question, not here - it has nothing to do with linking to commerce. Unless you're trying to say nobody would ever need to link to commerce in a Codidact answer.