alt.hn

7/5/2026 at 10:56:16 PM

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

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 3:24:48 AM

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.

by wmf

7/5/2026 at 11:43:10 PM

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.

by brudgers

7/6/2026 at 12:22:12 AM

> 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

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 2:39:47 AM

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.

by brudgers

7/6/2026 at 3:00:07 AM

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

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 10:07:00 AM

For those not aware - in your profile you can turn on showdead option that shows you dead submissions & dead comments.

by khurs

7/5/2026 at 11:03:06 PM

Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.

by kay_o

7/5/2026 at 11:11:25 PM

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

by g-b-r

7/5/2026 at 11:40:13 PM

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.

by kay_o

7/6/2026 at 12:52:45 AM

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

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 7:06:01 AM

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.

by altairprime

7/5/2026 at 11:08:00 PM

Would it be useful if it said "flagged - spam" or "flagged self promotion" or "flagged - slop"?

by newsomix9xl

7/5/2026 at 11:23:26 PM

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.

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 6:54:39 AM

> 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.

by altairprime

7/6/2026 at 12:45:10 AM

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.

by autoexec

7/6/2026 at 8:25:49 AM

> 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.

by altairprime

7/6/2026 at 12:59:43 AM

> 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

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 9:07:27 AM

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.

by journal

7/6/2026 at 10:02:31 AM

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.

by krapp

7/5/2026 at 11:24:26 PM

And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 8:27:41 AM

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.

by altairprime

7/5/2026 at 11:47:31 PM

In my experience “[flagged]” does not appear until a submission is dead.

But that’s just my experience.

by brudgers

7/6/2026 at 12:16:48 AM

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).

by g-b-r

7/5/2026 at 11:26:48 PM

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.

by bediger4000

7/5/2026 at 11:35:07 PM

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.

by g-b-r

7/6/2026 at 1:55:19 AM

[flagged]

by cyk888

7/5/2026 at 11:05:55 PM

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.

by newsomix9xl

7/6/2026 at 6:58:03 AM

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.

by altairprime

7/6/2026 at 3:00:29 AM

HN is not a place that encourages transparency.

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

by testing22321