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.