Ask HN: Why so many dead comments lately?

7 points by mattm 10 hours ago | 6 comments

I've noticed a lot more dead comments lately in cases where the person is writing reasonable comments. You'll need showdead turned on in your settings to see the examples.

Take this thread as an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818698

The OP has a new account but all his replies are within the guidelines.

Here's another account with a dead comment in that thread. Most of their comments, while brief, seem perfectly reasonable. The account is 2 years old but most comments are dead https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josefritzishere

In this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574167) all of this user's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=backlava12) comments were marked as dead. The user has an established account and all comments seemed within guidelines.

Has anyone else noticed this more recently? Is it perhaps a result of trying to identify AI-bot accounts?

PaulHoule 10 hours ago |

I dunno. One of my pet peeves of the last few months is that somebody posts an AI generated blog post and it's not good enough that we can click on it to read it so they also post an AI summary as a comment. Like... we can click on the link and read your post. Haven't you ever used HN before... Oh, I see, you created this account six hours ago.

I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.

dormento 9 hours ago |

I take it is due to automation, mostly. Every single website that has some sort of user-contributed content, forums, source code repository, social media, anything that has comment or upload capability of any kind whatsoever is being bombarded by a massive torrent of crap, and hn is no exception. The internet has no good defense against it, therefore people have to resort to captchas, geoblocking, shadow banning, proof-of-work portal solutions, cloudflare (eek!) and adjusting detection thresholds "just right" so things feel usable.

Hat's off to the mod staff, things feel "alright" even with the current situation.

bjourne 7 hours ago |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321198

ezulabs 9 hours ago |

Self promotion posts are one thing, not sure if it applies to the examples you gave, good luck if your hn user name and your github user name is same when you have low karma.

smt88 10 hours ago |

HN’s mods have said they have huge amounts of code fighting spam alongside human workers, and they deliberately don’t discuss their tactics in order to avoid an arms race between themselves and the spammers

oulipo 9 hours ago |

Everytime you make a comment about how Grok is led by a pro-fascist team, you get downvoted and your comment gets locked