Ask HN: Why about a third of the submissions become dead in mere minutes?
6
gg-b-r about 6 hours ago 21 comments
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.
Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I read /newest almost every day and vouch for submissions that I think have been unfairly killed but that's almost never.
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.
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
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.
> The way it is is probably the best approximation of how it is supposed to work
Sure
Since dead posts are only shown to logged in users we can't even use archive.org to check the reliability of the flagging
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.
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
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.
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.
But that’s just my experience.
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).
I recommend setting "showdead" to "yes". You see the damndest things.
It's flagged but not dead submissions that I can't find.
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.
They only allow you to read what they want you to read.