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Ask HN: My post just did 10 points in 30 minutes and was nuked. Why?

22 points by DanLivesHere ↗ HN
I wrote it for reddit's startups subreddit and a lot of people found it helpful, so I re-wrote it for here -- and it was again, useful, based on votes. And now, poof, gone. What happened?

15 comments

[ 836 ms ] story [ 1070 ms ] thread
cgshaw
I had the same thing happen to me last week. And similarly received no response as to why it got nuked.

We're a fickle bunch I guess.

mikecane
I just had it happen to a submission of mine. Which was pointing out an embarrassing flaw from Google. Oddly, I also saw another submission that was just SPAM that garnered ten points too. So something is screwy here. Maybe someone has hacked a way to add ten points to submissions and those are being killed in the crossfire?
jgrahamc
The most likely explanation is that your story was 'flagged' by people. I could understand how this could happen, if you read what you wrote again with the eyes of a stranger you might see that to some people it could come across as spam. You talk about some sites you have built but there is no technical content and it's not clear that it's anything other than an advertisement for your sites.
ch0wn
Is there any resource explaining how flagging works on HN? To me it has always been a black box. Is there a manual reviewing process involved or is it all automatic?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
jgrahamc
The guidelines have this to say:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DanLivesHere
Should I resubmit it?

There's no technical content because it was me sharing a marketing strategy which worked for me (and besides, I'm not a dev). I don't want to come off as a spammer and resub something which already got nuked, but on the other hand, I find it mind boggling that it got nuked in the first place.

DanBC
No! Don't re-submit the same content.

I'm not sure why your post was killed. Personally I'd prefer to read someone sharing the things they actually did in an HN post than read a LIST OF THINGS on an ad-filled blog page.

Perhaps gently consider re-writing the post. Include lots of technical details. Include figures. Maybe charts. I dunno.

hetman
I find it strange this post was downvoted. I'd love some further clarification on what criteria people are applying exactly.
trotsky
If it went from being on the 1st page straight to the 3rd page (say from #15 to #75 or so), I believe that is an admin kill that any YC founder can do. They don't seem to have particular standards for doing them. If it dropped significantly less than that (say from #15 to #35 or such) that would probably be the net effect of a number of normal users flagging the post. This Ask HN post will probably end up being admin killed (or whatever the right term is) as well, they don't seem to particularly enjoy discussion of what's behind the curtain.
mraxilus
Really? I thought everyone here was at the knowledge level where we consider secrecy and security through obscurity to be frown upon.
kls
I think it is more like Google in this case, where the algorithms have to be protected to ensure the quality of the site does not decline. They allow enough information so that people understand, but no enough that the process can be deduced. Gaming HN for front page can be a significant traffic increase hence there is a big reward in figuring out how to do it. While everyone appreciated open and honest, their appreciation does not extend past quality, if the site where continually gamed no one would stick around. Thus quality has to trump an implied open policy.
mikecane
The ten points bothers me.

How, for example, did this garner ten points? http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Shodiix

I find it really strange that in the space of an hour, three posts get ten points and are all killed. The one I point to is particularly troubling because I have never seen something like that ever get ten points here. And the person who posted that left a "?" as a comment on my submission and it was then killed.

mikecane
Look, can one of the HN wizards check to see what's going on? I have DEAD set to ON and I'm now seeing PLENTY of posts that have several points attached to them being killed. And many of these are NOT spam links! Something is going wrong here at HN today.

Edited to add:

Someone else is seeing this as well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740