FilterHN

Tell HN: I found the article that is the cause of the YC/HN Swartz blackout

10 points

5 hours ago

| 1 comment

A lot of accounts have been banned in the past 24 hours for mentioning Aaron Swartz and the circumstances leading to his death.

Since this isn’t a traditionally blacked-out topic, I dig around a bit and I believe I found the cause. I archived it here. It’s an opinionated essay for sure: https://archive.ph/UA7aD

I’m not saying I agree or disagree, but I can’t get on board with the suppression of discussion.

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theamk

5 hours ago

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HN is pretty famous for not deleting posts/accounts (unless there are personal information involved). While the "dead" accounts are removed from search results, their postings are still available via direct links, example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45957018

Do you links to the accounts/posts being killed?

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ypsilon

5 hours ago

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One account is “kisama” which was banned for linking to that essay. I wasn’t able to find it even using showdead, and had to see the actual user go in to verify that the post was made. (Edit: it’s now available with showdead on, but it wasn’t at the time.)

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Jtsummers

2 hours ago

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kisama has no submissions listed. They have a comment which is [dead], and probably dead for that link. But there are two possibilities:

1. The link itself caused the comment to be auto-killed. This can happen when you link to particular sources (I've demonstrated it in the past with, IIRC, a UT subdomain that had ended up in the spam list somehow, mods corrected it).

2. The fact that a new account with low karma submitted a link caused it to be killed. This is very common, they get caught up in the spam filter (which doesn't always look at the link content, but at the account behavior). New account, one of their first comments includes a link, often spam.

Email the mods, link is at the bottom of almost every page on HN, if there's nothing wrong with the link (and it looks like there isn't) then they'll restore the comment and account (if it ended up getting shadowbanned).