HN

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

g-b-r · 4 days ago

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.

9 comments

kay_o · 4 days ago
Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.
- newsomix9xl · 4 days ago
  Would it be useful if it said "flagged - spam" or "flagged self promotion" or "flagged - slop"?
  - g-b-r · 4 days ago
    You should be required to provide a reason when flagging something, possibly choosing from a set of common and legitimate reasons.
    And if it's some Hacker News own bot doing some of the killing, that should be declared.
    And a ton of other things, I like Hacker News's interface and in part its user base, but I'd change much of the rest.
    autoexec · 4 days ago
    Would showing exactly why posts were flagged make it easier for spammers to tune their submissions to avoid getting those flags? Would knowing that they were flagged for one thing but not another make it easier for for them to identify what it was that let them slip past undetected? I think moderation here works pretty well, and I'd hesitate to change it too much.
    g-b-r · 4 days ago
    > Would showing exactly why posts were flagged make it easier for spammers to tune their submissions to avoid getting those flags?
    It seems unlikely it would help much, to me.
    But I'm still trying to understand if an automated flagging system is in place to begin with.
    It would help reviewers a lot in salvaging unjustly flagged posts, though.
    > I think moderation here works pretty well
    I don't
    altairprime · 3 days ago
    > Would showing exactly why posts were flagged make it easier for spammers to tune their submissions to avoid getting those flags?
    Yes.
    > Would knowing that they were flagged for one thing but not another make it easier for for them to identify what it was that let them slip past undetected?
    Yes.
    altairprime · 4 days ago
    > You should be required to provide a reason when flagging something, possibly choosing from a set of common and legitimate reasons.
    Dang said on the AI guidelines post that they’re working on this now.
    > And if it's some Hacker News own bot doing some of the killing, that should be declared.
    First rule of antispam is do not publish the details of antispam decisions automatically. This post could have been replaced by an email to the mods asking what’s going on here. I’ve learned of a few possible automated systems that could be engaging in parallel while reviewing /new posts and flagging and reporting folks and sites by email to them.
- g-b-r · 4 days ago
  Did you actually check the current ones?
  Since dead posts are only shown to logged in users we can't even use archive.org to check the reliability of the flagging
  - kay_o · 4 days ago
    Yes and I browse with showdead on to vouch for reasonable items.
    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.
    g-b-r · 4 days ago
    Ok, a link like https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?next=48799132&n=31 (the current second page) is actually stable, so let's do a a review of that.
    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
    altairprime · 4 days ago
    Reported #36 site by email for possible astroturfing. Reported #48 user by email for volume. Reviewed all existing [dead] instances and they seem appropriately so for various reasons. Reported a possible antispam bug that, if I’m right, when fixed would mark two more as [dead].
    There’s nothing particularly unusual about this page of /new. I opened up current /new after finishing this post and on page one found a YouTube link, which made me think “that’s odd”, looked more closely, and ended up writing a twenty minute mod email reporting several more sites for spam; the future [dead] count will increase accordingly.
    > is it forbidden to submit something before having gained a good karma?
    Not precisely, but it’s in really poor taste after the first time, and I believe the mods tightened up the Show HN thresholds a bit recently due oto the codeslop flood. This is a community, not a marketing channel; if they’re not here to submit and/or discuss other people’s work, then it should come as no surprise that we’re not here to discuss theirs either.
    > Are submissions from such accounts killed automatically?
    Not that I’ve seen. Certainly lots of them end up killed b/c spam bots are detectable, but it’s not uniform. But, as I said a couple weeks ago in a variation of this post: Either genuinely invest time and energy into this community or move on.
    > I'm not sure what's wrong about it
    #51: Boring submission. Poor composition skills, no effort invested in even basic capitalization. Open admission of AI-generated writing: “The site is a bit slop”. Deserves as much attention as effort invested. This post could have been replaced by a training harness.
    User has only <100 karma on an account 5,000+ days old, so this is less a site participant, more a fly-by-night forum spammer as their participation stands right now.
    I would flag this if it wasn’t already flagged. Thanks to whatever HN system or user saved me having to do so.
g-b-r · 4 days ago
Ok, it's probably not a recent phenomenon:
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.
newsomix9xl · 4 days ago
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.
- testing22321 · 4 days ago
  HN is not a place that encourages transparency.
  They only allow you to read what they want you to read.
- altairprime · 4 days ago
  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.
g-b-r · 4 days ago
And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???
- bediger4000 · 4 days ago
  Click on your user ID on this comment. Is the "showdead" pulldown set to "yes"? If it's not set to "yes" HN doesn't show you any "[dead]" submissions.
  I recommend setting "showdead" to "yes". You see the damndest things.
  - g-b-r · 4 days ago
    It is, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to write about dead submissions.
    It's flagged but not dead submissions that I can't find.
- brudgers · 4 days ago
  In my experience “[flagged]” does not appear until a submission is dead.
  But that’s just my experience.
  - g-b-r · 4 days ago
    No, if they do get flagged [flagged] alone is shown, initially.
    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).
- altairprime · 3 days ago
  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 · 4 days ago
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.
- g-b-r · 4 days ago
  > To the extent it is important to someone they will do it. To the extent it is not, they won’t
  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
  - brudgers · 4 days ago
    something you're supposed to do, if you are?
    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.
    g-b-r · 4 days ago
    To feel that it's important they'd need to be told that Hacker News expects them to do it (if it does)
    > The way it is is probably the best approximation of how it is supposed to work
    Sure
wmf · 4 days ago
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 · 3 days ago
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.
- krapp · 3 days ago
  Curation and moderation aren't "criminal," and HN doesn't release their fork of Arc Forums because it contains business code for YC that would be a hassle to get rid of, but the original is open source. People come here because they want that high barrier to entry for content. If you just want a firehose of random shit go to Reddit.
khurs · 3 days ago
For those not aware - in your profile you can turn on showdead option that shows you dead submissions & dead comments.
- nnurmanov · 2 days ago
  But don't turn on the noprocrast option;) I did it today and had to wait for 3 hours:)
nnurmanov · 2 days ago
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.
- nnurmanov · 2 days ago
  I guess HN has become an AI/vs human battleground:)
- natpalmer1776 · 2 days ago
  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 · 2 days ago
  > 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.
  - zloy88 · 2 days ago
    Um, I am also new here. This makes me kinda scared how I will ever be able to post something under /show - I really don't know much about HN yet. Would it ever be allowed that I can ask for feedback for my beta project here? That's what I actually hoped for.
    altairprime · 2 days ago
    The person I’m replying to posted three or more links to their project in unrelated threads in 24 hours or less. Presumably you will not be quite so aggressive :)
    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.)
    zloy88 · 2 days ago
    Oh well, didn't know that. Yea, there is already a hard barrier now before you're even allowed to post something. I will try to participate. Been missing out on HN for way too long it seems. Def. don't want to post any AI slob :D Thanks for reply though
    altairprime · 2 days ago
    It’s generally a solid rule for any community, though it tends to be much more common IRL or on forums and message boards but less so on ‘link posting’ websites.
  - nnurmanov · 2 days ago
    Actually, my mornings start with reading HN; I am more of a reader than a writer :) But I see your point: if you find it useful, then repay it with a contribution.
    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 :)
    altairprime · 2 days ago
    Yeah, if you have a long lurker history, that makes it difficult to assess whether your intentions are genuine or not. I lack visibility into ‘voting’ participation levels as a normal user. That’s why I ask the mods to review things (and beg people to email them rather than post mod questions as post comments!) rather than, in nearly all circumstances anyways, asking for a specific mod outcome. They know far better than we do what the full circumstances are.