Just an FYI -- I don't know if this has been the case for a while and I'm just noticing it, or a new moderation change but a lot of noob submissions and low karma user submissions (sub 100 points?) seem to be getting auto-killed despite some being non-political legit tech submissions.<p>There seems to be a "guilty until proven innocent" auto-moderation in place and I'm guessing other users are expected to vouch for those submissions one-by-one?<p>To check, toggle your "showdead" attribute. (I have no idea if that allows you to see your own dead submissions but you can at least confirm my observation)
Posts by new and low-karma users are not automatically killed. Anyone can see that by looking at the /newest page.<p>If you have questions like this, you should be sending them to hn@ycombinator.com so we can actually see and answer them, not posting metathreads about it. (This is in the site guidelines: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>.) The only reason I found out about this thread is that a different user did email us.<p>It's all too easy to look at a limited set of datapoints and misinterpret what you're seeing. For example, some spam rings post legitimate (or legitimate-looking) submissions in order to cover for their spam. If you see a submission like that being auto-killed, you might well think "how can the moderators possibly be so heavy-handed" when in fact we're working hard to prevent spammers from taking over the site.<p>It's a constant struggle, like a cat-and-mouse game crossed with an arms race, and it's impossible to get the anti-abuse code perfect, so there will always be false positives. When you see those, you can help by vouching for them and/or by letting us know about them at hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix it. Many users do those things every day.
I think some get auto-dead but not all of them. Probably there is another filter like bad domains or keywords. As a sibling comment says, some users have send a lot of spam an are banned.<p>But there are false positives. If they are interesting, you can vouch them. If they are very interesting and vouching does not work you can send an email to dang hn@ycombinator.com . It's a manual process so use it only for special cases. (Remember to include a link to the post.)
Stuff marked [dead] on the first page of /newest right now:<p>- A Chrome extension for tracking dramas. It appears to have been re-submitted, as the link was previously shared just yesterday (and it was dead, too), but this particular author has a lot of dead links which seems peculiar.<p>- Questionnaire for a school project. I don't know what this is because it's a Google docs link and I'm not going to open it. But also because the submitter doesn't even bother mentioning what the "chosen subject" is. I don't really care much that this is dead.<p>- "Trillion Ton Iceberg, Worlds Largest, Crashes into South Georgia" a youtube <i>video</i> which is hardly a video since it's just a bunch of AI generated illustrations and appears to be fairly grandiose but low on actual sources and info. <i>meh</i><p>- A link to a tweet from an account that "applies AI" to put your face on a ballerina animation. <i>Yawn</i>.<p>- Spam for a "IT solutions for healthcare" company.<p>- A link submitted by someone who has <i>all</i> dead submissions on their profile. Uhmm...<p>- Spam to a blog about AI, I guess.<p>All in all, I'm setting showdead back to no again.<p>P.S. Meanwhile, I counted about 5 or 6 links sent from newly created users which are there happily unflagged.
Well, to be fair, what are the chances that a user who has registered a few minutes ago without email with username "createvideoai" or "username998" (just took random spammers from the new page) will submit a non-spam link? It's arguably naive and simple heuristics, but I guess it's a reasonable baseline...