HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do HN domain filters work?

1 points by behindai ↗ HN
I’ve had an HN account for years and submit everything manually. I occasionally posted articles from my project’s domain, but at some point those submissions started appearing normally to me while disappearing when viewed logged out.

No bots, no automated posting, no mass submissions.

What frustrates me is that this seems to be happening everywhere. Reddit can restrict accounts as soon as you post a link. HN appears to silently filter domains. The Internet is becoming a place where it’s increasingly hard to simply build something, share it, and reach even a small relevant audience.

Does HN apply automatic domain-level filtering? What usually triggers it, and is there any normal way to recover from it?

8 comments

[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 2.2 ms ] thread
JohnFen
The only people who can answer your questions are the mods, so you should ask them. hn@ycombinator.com
aledevv
Yes exactly HN silently filter domain. It has a strong anti-spam policy. Share and write comments in a genuine way. To check if your post is actually published check it from incognito browsing. To recover from a ghost penalty wait and write genuinely.
behindai
Understood. I’m just not much of a commenter. I usually come here to share something I’ve built or written and see whether it resonates. I’ve posted my own articles and several products on Show HN over the years.
mtmail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning is common across social media platforms. HN has some automatic and some manual flagging. I reported some, both false positives and negatives. The "normal way to recover" is established users clicking the "vouch" button on flagged posts. I think the threshold is 500 karma, can't remember. I'm happy for every 'vouch'worthy item I discover. With 50 submissions per hour there's not enough users on the /new page to review everything and tastes are different.
behindai
Got it. the problem in my case is that the submissions do not appear in the public feed at all,, so nobody can see them in order to vouch, upvote, or otherwise recover them. they are visible to me when logged in, but effectively invisible to everyone else.
anenefan
Those like myself that choose to view dead posts do see these posts. Not everyone will go back to the last time they visited, maybe a couple of pages of submissions. If from my limited background an otherwise dead topic feels it might meet the site's requirements I can then vouch for. Sometimes there are some sites the algorithm or mods have ... put aside ... that vouching does not help, it stays dead.

Given a long term member (akerl_) replied with what I also think is the troublesome domain - that reply has been marked dead - a guess dead just for containing the site's details ... If I were to guess, no amount of vouching would help. I see another you've submitted since, but from my perspective using the ruler of a good member, it does not meet the threshold - it is about converting some video of a lecture the reader has little idea how interesting it might be for them.

HN has some guidelines regarding the nature of topics it would like ... and how to present them. Better results to be had if the lecture topic is something you think HN members would find interesting.

Edit: too much hurry, not read properly ... skimming always gets me into trouble.