Yes and I browse with showdead on to vouch for reasonable items.
Currently on new for dead/flagged: new account self spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / show hn ai slop with all default llm design / spam / spam / spam / account that has never posted anything but its own blog / spam (all of dev.to is dead afaik, because it is nothing but a spam source; there are no useful posts on it)
There is nothing that I consider even slightly interesting or reasonable or innovative to hackers. I am also not anti-gen AI but there is a line between "person has used claude to create something" and "literal zero-effort unreviewed trash that is a waste of the environment". >99% of ones I'm see in /new is the latter.
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.
> To the extent it is important to someone they will do it. To the extent it is not, they won’t
Who here knows that it's something you're supposed to do, if you are?
I imagine that each new submission is seen at most by a handful of people, by the way, on average probably too few to resuscitate a dead one.
And I hope we can get an actual answer to how does it work.
> Most pages on the internet are not a good fit for HN
Most pages on the internet are not submitted to HN
Most are actually spam, slop, or obvious self promotion.
Did you actually check the current ones?
Since dead posts are only shown to logged in users we can't even use archive.org to check the reliability of the flagging
Yes and I browse with showdead on to vouch for reasonable items.
Currently on new for dead/flagged: new account self spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / new account zero effort ai slop spam / show hn ai slop with all default llm design / spam / spam / spam / account that has never posted anything but its own blog / spam (all of dev.to is dead afaik, because it is nothing but a spam source; there are no useful posts on it)
There is nothing that I consider even slightly interesting or reasonable or innovative to hackers. I am also not anti-gen AI but there is a line between "person has used claude to create something" and "literal zero-effort unreviewed trash that is a waste of the environment". >99% of ones I'm see in /new is the latter.
Would it be useful if it said "flagged - spam" or "flagged self promotion" or "flagged - slop"?
You should be required to provide a reason when flagging something, possibly choosing from a set of common and legitimate reasons.
And if it's some Hacker News own bot doing some of the killing, that should be declared.
And a ton of other things, I like Hacker News's interface and in part its user base, but I'd change much of the rest.
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.
And, what the fuck, I went up to the 800 newest submission without finding a single flagged but not yet dead submission???
In my experience “[flagged]” does not appear until a submission is dead.
But that’s just my experience.
No, if they do get flagged [flagged] alone is shown, initially.
And you can't vouch for them until they're dead, by the way, another nice detail (in the meanwhile they are removed from the front pages).
Click on your user ID on this comment. Is the "showdead" pulldown set to "yes"? If it's not set to "yes" HN doesn't show you any "[dead]" submissions.
I recommend setting "showdead" to "yes". You see the damndest things.
It is, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to write about dead submissions.
It's flagged but not dead submissions that I can't find.
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.