Ask HN: Why about a third of the submissions become dead in mere minutes?
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.
36 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadSince dead posts are only shown to logged in users we can't even use archive.org to check the reliability of the flagging
Currently on new for dead/flagged: new account self spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / show hn ai slop with all default llm design / spam / spam / spam / account that has never posted anything but its own blog / spam (all of dev.to is dead afaik, because it is nothing but a spam source; there are no useful posts on it)
There is nothing that I consider even slightly interesting or reasonable or innovative to hackers. I am also not anti-gen AI but there is a line between "person has used claude to create something" and "literal zero-effort unreviewed trash that is a waste of the environment". >99% of ones I'm see in /new is the latter.
The two submissions from bamei2ai are not working links, so no questions about them.
Most of the others are from new or very low karma accounts, ok, but is it forbidden to submit something before having gained a good karma? Are submissions from such accounts killed automatically?
The only dead post left is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798889 , I'm not sure what's wrong about it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33272357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28457450
No real answer there though, unless there's someone like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413375 flagging like there was no tomorrow for subjective reasons.
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.
They only allow you to read what they want you to read.
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.
And you can't vouch for them until they're dead, by the way, another nice detail (in the meanwhile they are removed from the front pages).
Who here knows that it's something you're supposed to do, if you are?
I imagine that each new submission is seen at most by a handful of people, by the way, on average probably too few to resuscitate a dead one.
And I hope we can get an actual answer to how does it work.
> Most pages on the internet are not a good fit for HN
Most pages on the internet are not submitted to HN
Nothing is preventing anyone who feels it is important from doing it to the degree they feel that importance.
And I hope we can get an actual answer to how does it work.
The way it is is probably the best approximation of how it is supposed to work.
> The way it is is probably the best approximation of how it is supposed to work
Sure
I read /newest almost every day and vouch for submissions that I think have been unfairly killed but that's almost never.
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.
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.
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.
Show HN has been absolutely flooded since generative code AIs became popular, so if the site lets you post a Show HN, then you’re generally welcome to once. If nothing comes of that, best wait a while (like, weeks) while you continue participating.
(I’m not a mod, if dang/tomhow show up and comment then whatever they say takes precedence.)
I agree on the repo link as well; it was indeed selfish on my side. HN is one of the few places where you can read human content, so let's keep it that way. Lesson completely learned on my side.
Communicating with mods about issues could be a good idea too, but I shall keep it to a minimum. Apparently, they are super busy fighting AI :)