HACKER Q&A
📣 g-b-r

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


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.

  👤 brudgers Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 g-b-r
Ok, it's probably not a recent phenomenon:

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.

👤 kay_o
Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.
👤 g-b-r
And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???
👤 newsomix9xl
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.

👤 wmf
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.

👤 journal
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.