Ask HN: Why about a third of the submissions become dead in mere minutes?
6 points
5 hours ago
| 6 comments
| 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.

wmf
32 minutes 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.

reply
brudgers
4 hours 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.

reply
g-b-r
3 hours 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

reply
brudgers
1 hour 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.

reply
g-b-r
57 minutes 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

reply
kay_o
4 hours ago
[-]
Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.
reply
g-b-r
4 hours 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

reply
kay_o
4 hours 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.

reply
g-b-r
3 hours 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

reply
newsomix9xl
4 hours ago
[-]
Would it be useful if it said "flagged - spam" or "flagged self promotion" or "flagged - slop"?
reply
g-b-r
4 hours 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.

reply
autoexec
3 hours 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.
reply
g-b-r
2 hours 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

reply
g-b-r
4 hours 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.

reply
g-b-r
4 hours ago
[-]
And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???
reply
brudgers
4 hours ago
[-]
In my experience “[flagged]” does not appear until a submission is dead.

But that’s just my experience.

reply
g-b-r
3 hours 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).

reply
bediger4000
4 hours 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.

reply
g-b-r
4 hours 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.

reply
newsomix9xl
4 hours 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.

reply
testing22321
56 minutes ago
[-]
HN is not a place that encourages transparency.

They only allow you to read what they want you to read.

reply