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Ask HN: Hacker News invisibly banned my site, anyone know why that would be?

11 points by mvandemar ↗ HN
It appears that HN has put some sort of ban on my site from appearing on the homepage, regardless of the community votes. Someone submitted a piece I wrote today, it did send some traffic to my site, I came here, voted for it myself as I do when I find one my my stories here, and then waited to see if there were any comments. What I noticed is something that I saw the last time someone submitted a story of mine here... regardless of the vote to time ratio the submission never showed anywhere but the "New" category. If you look here, you can see that it is indeed showing up, with 4 votes in 53 minutes:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-new-submissions.png

The one underneath it has less votes over a longer time period, with only 3 points, and it is showing in the "Popular" list, at #46, whereas mine is nowhere to be seen:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-popular-page2.png

The same thing happened a few weeks back when I wrote a piece about Matt Cutts, that involved the HN community itself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163390

You can see on that someone else noticed the behavior too, and asked about it. They never did get an answer though. Personally, I assumed that perhaps there was some moratorium on discussing HN on HN, and that a moderator had prevented that particular story from getting any exposure. That story did hit the front page very briefly, enough for 3 people to visit it, and was then removed (I am getting that from the traffic reports). There have been other stories that people have submitted from my site that have gone popular in the past, usually ones I have written about Mahalo or Jason Calacanis, and since I did get those 3 hits from the homepage 3 weeks ago I am pretty sure it was that exact story that caused this.

Don't get me wrong... I am in no way trying to imply that my site has any "rights" when it comes to HN or even being submittable at all, let alone the right to be voted to the front page. If the HN mods don't want people submitting posts from my site here so be it. I will even remove the icon from Socializer on my site if they want me to. I am very curious as to why it happened though. My tin-foil hat self automatically goes to "Maybe Matt Cutts saw the submission and asked a mod to kill it", but it's also just as likely that they didn't like the implications behind me saying that Matt was using the HN community to accomplish some hidden agenda, or that even the mention of HN in a story triggers some guideline. If that were the case though, I am still unsure why it would have been a permanent thing.

Does anyone have any insight into this? Thanks.

7 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.1 ms ] thread
mvandemar
And, of course, I just realized - if it is a moratorium on discussing HN itself, then there is a chance that this post will never get seen (or answered) either...
Semiapies
It's at #38 as I look at it.

This sort of question and paranoid conspiracy-mongering would probably not come up as much if articles simply had a visible down-vote instead of the hidden down-vote applied when people flag an article (but not early enough to kill it).

mvandemar
When you say #38 you mean this discussion and not the article that someone submitted today, correct? Is that what you think happened then, it was simply voted down? Who would be able to confirm or deny it then? I just went through all 690 submissions visible from the homepage onward and didn't see the one someone submitted today at all. You would think it would show up somewhere in that list, wouldn't you?
BobbyH
You likely ran afoul of "voter ring detection": http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/22551773068

I think it works something like this. Say you and I are buddies and only upvote each other's articles. The voting ring algorithm thus flags us both as being part of a voting ring. Votes on our articles are then penalized by some amount to reverse this gaming. Detecting voter rings is important as failing to do so has really hurt communities like Digg.

On a related note, if most of the votes on your articles comes from readers on your site that only upvote your articles, those users will probably all be flagged as part of a voting ring.

mvandemar
It's pretty rare that my site shows up here, and my actual readership isn't huge, so I don't think that is the case. Any way to find out though?
mvandemar
Ok, I know no one is going to see this, but in looking for this thread I just discovered that the original one I was discussing is now showing up in the "Popular" list, albeit at #147 (5 votes in 10 hours). So obviously if anything was going on earlier, it's been reversed. It's even outranking this thread.