HN Explorer

Ask/Tell HN: What's with all the spam lately?

10 points by samarudge ↗ HN
I'm a frequent F5'er of /new, today I've noticed a huge increase in spam posts from new users, is this some new spam bot or have I just not noticed till now?

Examples;

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941195

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2940981

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2940973

(and a few others I ether CBA to find or look like they've been deleted, including weight loss, hotels, weird looking drugs and lots of other stuff)

3 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] thread
_delirium
I haven't seen a huge increase in spammy submissions per se recently (though I don't have data, and do think there's definitely one compared to 6 months ago), but it does seem like they stay undead longer. I'm not sure if the flagging threshold went up, or if not enough people are flagging spam. It'd be cool if more people did. The New page is already pretty noisy when it comes to finding interesting new stuff (it seems most people just read the front page, so the first 2-3 votes are very luck-based), and having it be spammy just makes it less likely that people will read it and/or find the interesting stuff on it.
robfitz
I've been hounding /newest pretty regularly for the past couple weeks as well, and it seems fairly steady..

I don't understand why people keep bothering, as there's no way it's showing results. I'd assume HN is wrapped into some brilliant-auto marketing package somewhere.

Last I heard, the magic number was 5 flags within an hour, so I think we just need more people actively flagging.

rawsyntax
I'm not sure, but my submissions are being marked as dead automatically now.. So I guess HN thinks I'm a spammer. What's interested is one submission that got 10 upvotes before getting dead'ed