HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why about a third of the submissions become dead in mere minutes?

13 points by g-b-r ↗ HN
If you check the newest submissions right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest), ten out of 30 are already dead, some only sent five minutes ago.

On the second page, it's 9. On the third, 11.

It seems unlikely that many people are downvoting them so quickly, and for most I can't see why they should be dead.

I know that there's websites known to publish only AI slop which are probably blacklisted here, but it seems unlikely that a third of the submissions are about them.

There's some automatic AI filter now?

How does it work, and are people assumed to check all recent dead posts and vouch for them if they don't deserve to be dead?

I imagine that the wide majority of users assume there's a good reason for something to be dead, and ignore it rather than performing that check.

17 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 57.4 ms ] thread
kay_o
Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.
newsomix9xl
Greater transparency would be great. This is a wonderful attempt to look at the guts of the HNN machine.

The submission queue definitely gets gamified - self promoting articles seem to get a massive surge of upvotes suggesting a kind of bot farm.

Enquiring minds wanna no.

altairprime
Please email the mods when you see voting rings so they can investigate and adapt. Complaining about voting rings in a comment from a sockpuppet account is not a useful form of participation.
newsomix9xl
Sock puppet account ?

And who are these mods of whom you speak? And what is their email address?

I see the effects of what can only be voting rings. I don't see voting rings.

g-b-r
And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???
altairprime
I tend to report by email rather than flag when something is egregious, because a single user’s flag tends to have no effect, and /new is so incredibly prolific right now that the chances of enough users flagging something that it gets marked [flagged] rather than simply never reaching the front page at all is vanishingly small.
brudgers
Most pages on the internet are not a good fit for HN.

check all recent dead posts and vouch for them if they don't deserve to be dead?

To the extent it is important to someone they will do it. To the extent it is not, they won’t.

How does it work

I suspect using tools, heuristics, and intuitions developed through direct experience within exactly the circumstances of running HN.

wmf
This has been the case for years. Many accounts and domains are hellbanned so their submissions are automatically killed. Most of these are spam of various kinds.

I read /newest almost every day and vouch for submissions that I think have been unfairly killed but that's almost never.

journal
Because they are feeding titles into classification function and based on what they don't like which they've established before, they kill the post before anyone can see it. NH is criminal and they'll never release the source code because they will be punished for what they're doing.
khurs
For those not aware - in your profile you can turn on showdead option that shows you dead submissions & dead comments.
nnurmanov
But don't turn on the noprocrast option;) I did it today and had to wait for 3 hours:)
nnurmanov
My submission was killed immediately. It took me weeks to build the product and days to polish the documentation. At one point, I even went 24 hours without sleep working on it—only to have the submission killed instantly.

I emailed @dang at hn@ycombinator.com but never heard back. What should I do now? I’m scared to repost because I don’t want to risk a permanent ban.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
natpalmer1776
My experiences and observations of the moderation on HN is that there doesn’t usually seem to be an unreasonable response to real people trying to engage in a genuine manner.

If you are a real person trying to show something that you made, I wouldn’t worry about getting permanently banned without recourse and just post again, sometimes mistakes happen.

altairprime
> My submission was killed immediately. It took me weeks to build the product and days to polish the documentation.

You have <200 karma on an account created 3300 days ago, and I see months-long plus gaps in your participation this year alone, with almost no appreciation or replies from others. You’ve posted the same repository link twice today so far in comments on other posts. So it doesn’t seem like you’re much invested in being in this community, except to promote your brand slash project slash self, and the algorithms would likely take that into account when considering and killing your links. The mods can make a judgment call exception, and you’ve emailed them already so nothing more to do there. (If you hadn’t already emailed them, I likely would have reported you by email to them as a self-link forum spammer, so that saves me bringing you to their attention, too.)

> What should I do now?

Participate genuinely on HN on topics unrelated to whatever self-links you want to post, without referring to yourself, your projects, your businesses. Not because some algorithm might be counting your comments — and anyways, I assume if such exists, it counts unflagged comment net-upvotes that aren’t in marked flamewar or offtopic threads! — but because if you treat this community as a drive-by bulletin board to staple your flier to and move on, we’ll usually just ignore or tear down your flier (with user flags) and move on.

> I emailed @dang at hn@ycombinator.com but never heard back. What should I do now?

I emailed the mods at hn@ this weekend five or six times about various issues (this is about my typical weekly email volume to them) and, unusually, haven’t yet heard back, except in one case and it was a super easy one with a super brief reply; presumably there’s competing concerns with YC/HN/IRL as is sometimes the case and I imagine they’ll catch up eventually.

> I’m scared to repost

That’s an appropriate reaction. Barring a change in participation, I would definitely not try to circumvent the algorithms until the mods reply to your email or a few months has passed.