Tell HN: new and non-neg low karma users, your posts appear to be auto-killed

3 points by bookaway 1 year ago | 16 comments

Just an FYI -- I don't know if this has been the case for a while and I'm just noticing it, or a new moderation change but a lot of noob submissions and low karma user submissions (sub 100 points?) seem to be getting auto-killed despite some being non-political legit tech submissions.

There seems to be a "guilty until proven innocent" auto-moderation in place and I'm guessing other users are expected to vouch for those submissions one-by-one?

To check, toggle your "showdead" attribute. (I have no idea if that allows you to see your own dead submissions but you can at least confirm my observation)

dang 1 year ago |

Posts by new and low-karma users are not automatically killed. Anyone can see that by looking at the /newest page.

If you have questions like this, you should be sending them to hn@ycombinator.com so we can actually see and answer them, not posting metathreads about it. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) The only reason I found out about this thread is that a different user did email us.

It's all too easy to look at a limited set of datapoints and misinterpret what you're seeing. For example, some spam rings post legitimate (or legitimate-looking) submissions in order to cover for their spam. If you see a submission like that being auto-killed, you might well think "how can the moderators possibly be so heavy-handed" when in fact we're working hard to prevent spammers from taking over the site.

It's a constant struggle, like a cat-and-mouse game crossed with an arms race, and it's impossible to get the anti-abuse code perfect, so there will always be false positives. When you see those, you can help by vouching for them and/or by letting us know about them at hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix it. Many users do those things every day.

bookaway 1 year ago | |

Thanks for the explanation dang.

>Posts by new and low-karma users are not automatically killed. Anyone can see that by looking at the /newest page.

>[let us] know about them at hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix it

You’re right to chastise me about the title. I had to remove all the qualifiers to meet the title character limit (also negative-> neg for that reason), so the title was more chicken little than I would have liked, but I did leave the qualifiers in the explanation, where I wasn’t claiming that all noobie posts were getting killed. My primary intention was to warn some of the good faith noobies who looked like they were getting caught up in the spam filter, and a post that noobies could see seemed to be a more appropriate venue for that. I didn't think my post would provide any extra utility to spammers. I apologize if the person that emailed you wasn’t a good-faith noobie poster concerned about their own posts.

But overall, because of the information asymmetry, I do think you underestimate the positive impact on the community of you coming out of the woodwork to provide explanations about specific instances once in awhile, as much as you loath to do so it seems.

e.g. TIL approx +50% of noobie posts are potential spam at a given time.

gus_massa 1 year ago |

I think some get auto-dead but not all of them. Probably there is another filter like bad domains or keywords. As a sibling comment says, some users have send a lot of spam an are banned.

But there are false positives. If they are interesting, you can vouch them. If they are very interesting and vouching does not work you can send an email to dang hn@ycombinator.com . It's a manual process so use it only for special cases. (Remember to include a link to the post.)

genezeta 1 year ago |

Stuff marked [dead] on the first page of /newest right now:

- A Chrome extension for tracking dramas. It appears to have been re-submitted, as the link was previously shared just yesterday (and it was dead, too), but this particular author has a lot of dead links which seems peculiar.

- Questionnaire for a school project. I don't know what this is because it's a Google docs link and I'm not going to open it. But also because the submitter doesn't even bother mentioning what the "chosen subject" is. I don't really care much that this is dead.

- "Trillion Ton Iceberg, Worlds Largest, Crashes into South Georgia" a youtube video which is hardly a video since it's just a bunch of AI generated illustrations and appears to be fairly grandiose but low on actual sources and info. meh

- A link to a tweet from an account that "applies AI" to put your face on a ballerina animation. Yawn.

- Spam for a "IT solutions for healthcare" company.

- A link submitted by someone who has all dead submissions on their profile. Uhmm...

- Spam to a blog about AI, I guess.

All in all, I'm setting showdead back to no again.

P.S. Meanwhile, I counted about 5 or 6 links sent from newly created users which are there happily unflagged.

not_your_vase 1 year ago |

Well, to be fair, what are the chances that a user who has registered a few minutes ago without email with username "createvideoai" or "username998" (just took random spammers from the new page) will submit a non-spam link? It's arguably naive and simple heuristics, but I guess it's a reasonable baseline...

bookaway 1 year ago | |

If you go to the "lists" page there is literally a "noobstories" page, because someone deemed that that would be an interesting filter for some people to explore. What's the point of posting if you're a noob if you know your legit post is going to be auto-killed and no-one is going to see it?

Good-faith posters should know that this is what is happening (assuming the auto-killing is intentional and not a bug) so they can go and try to build enough karma from their comments before posting a story.

dang 1 year ago | | |

Stories by new accounts are not all killed automatically. Your own posts make it clear that you know this.

Some such submissions get killed, mostly for reasons related to spam filters. But there's a huge difference between "some" and "all". I'd appreciate it if you'd stop making dramatic "all" claims about what is very much a "some" situation.

Obviously we have no intention of impeding legit users and legit submissions. Legit new users are what keep HN alive. Why would we cut off our own oxygen? The issue is that it's hard to write spam filters that don't produce any false positives. Perhaps you know how to do that; I don't.

If you want to help, vouching for the false positives (i.e. legit submissions that get killed by mistake) is helpful, as is emailing links to hn@ycombinator.com.