<story><title>Ask HN: Why are a large proportion of legit posts being marked [dead]?</title><url></url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matt1</author><text>I had the same thing happen twice earlier today. I hit a huge milestone on a product I launched on HackerNews about two months ago, spent a few hours writing a blog post about it and lessons learned, and posted it on HackerNews around 11am EST.&lt;p&gt;Within 50 minutes it had 17 points and had climbed up to about #13 on the front page when all of the sudden it disappeared [1]. I signed out of my HN account and checked the comments link and sure enough the page was blank, indicating that it had been killed.&lt;p&gt;I was talking to a friend on GChat at the same time this was going on. He reposted it, thinking that it was killed because of an algorithmic fluke (which was probably true) [2]. The new post gained 9 points in 10 minutes and then was killed as well.&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can think of is that because that friend upvoted the original post (and he&apos;s upvoted some of my previous posts), combined with how quickly it shot up the front page, somehow caused it to be flagged and automatically killed.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d still love to repost it both to share my product&apos;s milestone and to get feedback from the community, but I&apos;m afraid it will be killed again. Any recommendations?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m all for stopping spam and voting rings, but it shouldn&apos;t be at the expense of legitimate posts.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788402&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788402&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788806&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788806&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: I noticed a lot of the new posts around the same time had several points within a few minutes of being posted. Almost none had 1 point, which I thought was odd. I think someone might have written a script to upvote articles from multiple fake accounts, thereby causing HackerNews&apos;s voting-ring algorithm to mistakenly identify the posts as spam.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why are a large proportion of legit posts being marked [dead]?</title><url></url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikecane</author><text>I think we&apos;re not being let in on a silent war happening here.  It seems bogus points are being assigned to submissions and they are then being killed.  It started several hours ago.&lt;p&gt;See first hints here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And someone else noticed: &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>