HACKER Q&A
📣 thepra

What does it mean when a new blog post isn't shown in new?


Kind of weird given that I followed also the guidelines and didn't boost the submission in any way.


  👤 dang Accepted Answer ✓
I replied to your email but perhaps other users may like to read the explanation, so here it is:

Your account's not banned, but HN's software is killing your posts because it thinks you're running afoul of the rule against using the site primarily for promotion—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to submit your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." Our software detects that sort of submission history and starts filtering the posts once the percentage of own-posts is too high.

On HN, the idea is for people to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they have something to promote. It's fine to post your own work, as long as it's interspersed with interesting posts from unrelated sources. But when an account only submits promotionally, it feels like they're not participating as a community member, and HN users notice this and flag the posts.

I don't want to discourage you from submitting your own work! But it's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. The software considers submission histories adaptively, so if you do that, your own-posts will eventually stop getting filtered.

If you dig up interesting things from a variety of places, things people haven't run into before, then you'll be perceived as a community contributor rather than someone trying to market something. Particularly good are stories on out-of-the-way topics that rarely or never get attention. The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any existing sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).


👤 thinkingemote
Your submission was discussed 16 days ago with several comments. You then submitted it again at least twice. These are marked as dead. They require a user or few to vouch for them.

Edits to remove unhelpful comment:

It's probably the system seeing it as duplicate. Or users flagging it because they see it as duplicate or spamming.


👤 gostsamo
The submission has been flagged. Choose "show dead" in your profile to see flagged submissions. Sometimes valid content is being flagged but sometimes it is not.

👤 PaulHoule
It usually means you're a spammer.

If you're asking why that means you're a spammer with a sense of entitlement.

Don't ask what we can do for your blog, ask what your blog can do for us.


👤 smoldesu
How many times did you submit it?