I have great respect for Hacker News. I visit the site every day and have tried my best to contribute to the high quality of the site.<p>I posted on HN when I quit my corporate job (id=209576). I've posted about my time at Sun (1999-2007) and about my experience as a manager. I've attend start up school numerous times and have really enjoyed the experience.<p>I tell you all this because I want to make it clear that I am a real person here and not someone who has tried to promote their start up or do any kind of spam. In this question, I will not post any links directly that go outside of HN.<p>HubPages is now a site that has been blacklisted at Hacker News (For the record, I still a big fan of HubPages even though I stopped working there in February). All the links that I submitted from HubPages are now marked [dead] even though they work fine. To be clear, I do not have any problem with this. Hacker News has been maintaining a high quality of content for news stories. I understand that this is part of what happens.<p>I understand why the links have been marked [dead]. HubPages is a user generated web site and as such, many of its users have used whatever means to promote their links. This has resulted in low quality submissions and spammers and that's why HubPages has been uniformly blocked. Wikipedia also has HubPages blocked (An editor at Wikipedia did eventually approve links I posted to blog.hubpages.com because they saw that they were relevant to the article on HubPages).<p>I write this because I want to make clear that all the links I posted here were to blog.hubpages.com and were to links to blog posts that I wrote and which I hoped would be interesting to the audience on HN. These were my views on the trends in the social content space.<p>None of the stories I submitted got any above a 1 rating. This may because it was linked to HubPages. This may be because the content is my stories was judged not to be too interesting. I accept those judgments. It is those judgments which makes Hacker News such a great site! After getting enough of those nonresponses, I stopped submitting any of my blog posts to HN.<p>My question is how does having [dead] links in your submissions affect your status at HN? I ask this because it seems to me to be a mark of shame to have it, as if I've been labeled a spammer. I think if someone has a large number, that should penalize them. I have 7 of them at present.<p>I thought that it might be valuable to ask this question since other people active on this site, especially user-generated web sites will hit issues of web site reputation. If a link that we post becomes [dead], does this have any effect on the user? Will this person automatically be denied if they apply to start up school? Is there any process for getting a change in status to [dead] links?<p>Is there a list anywhere of all the web sites that are currently blocked on HN?<p>Thanks very much<p>-Larry
Hey.<p>I've been on the leader board for quite some time, and I occasionally and inexplicably have some of my posts declared [dead]. I suspect that sometimes I hit against a x_num_posts/hour wall, or that I occasionally hit up against a blocked domain.<p>Needless to say, I'm still on the leader board, I've been to startup school a couple of times, and I haven't seen any deleterious effects.<p>There is no appeal process on HN, mainly because PG is the admin, and he's got more important stuff to do.<p>Also... There's a lot more to startup life than HN. Move out here to Silicon Valley, start attending local events like <a href="http://www.hackersandfounders.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackersandfounders.com</a> or 106 miles and get plugged in. And, more importantly, build up real life karma points in person, rather than on HN.
Larry, first of all don't worry about it. There is stuff that I find
interesting, but no one else around here does. Maybe it speeds past
unnoticed, or maybe it's of no interest to anyone but me. There is no
way to tell either way.<p>I rarely make submissions, and I rarely post, but I read, vote and flag
here constantly. It takes a lot of reading to get a feel for what others
here generally consider interesting and find the overlap with your own
interests.<p>I have one [dead] post and seeing it in my list <i>still</i> makes me laugh.
The reason why it's dead is simply my sense of humor got the better of
me, and oddly enough, it was upvoted a few times before being flagged to
death.<p>If HubPages is a source of spam, move your blog elsewhere.<p>If you're worried about the [dead] submissions in your profile, put a
link to this submission in the text of your profile so people know the
reason for the [dead] submissions. I don't know of a person who would
hold them against you, but the system running HN is a different story.<p>As for your questions on the effects that [dead] posts have on users of
the HN system, sadly you're asking for dangerous information. Hacker
News runs on a lot of secret sauce to prevent abuse, so PG will not
divulge how it works to prevent the rules from being gamed. Even those
with reasonably well researched theories about the secret sauce won't
talk about it if they have any respect for PG or everyone else on HN.<p>For this reason, I won't even speculate about what [dead] posts might or
might not mean to the system. I hope you understand why.
Hmm, for some reason jawartak's comment below is dead, maybe he deleted it or it's been killed for some reason. Anyways:<p><pre><code> jawartak 41 minutes ago | link [dead]
Here's the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044 It's a bit old, though.</code></pre>
I'm having a similar issue, with links from our startup.
Sometimes folks have submitted links from us that probably aren't meant for the HN crowd, but we definitely also write a lot of stuff that might be useful to HN folks.
For example, someone submitted this blogpost of ours a couple of days ago - 5 reasons to quit your corporate job and join a startup:<p><a href="http://feefighters.com/blog/5-reasons-to-leave-the-corporate-world-and-join-a-startup/" rel="nofollow">http://feefighters.com/blog/5-reasons-to-leave-the-corporate...</a><p>Seemingly very relevant to HN, yet it was instantly marked [dead], and we have no idea why. I tried submitting it too, and the same thing happened.<p>Can someone explain? We're active members of the community, as is obvious from our posts/comments. Many of our feefighters posts have been on the front page for an extended period of time... see:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235710" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235710</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310154" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310154</a><p>etc... but now all of our posts are blacklisted.<p>Anyone? Anyone?