<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>untog</author><text>There is- or has been- something very strange going on lately. At the height of the GeekList mini-controversy last week the HN thread discussing it[1], which was in third place on the front page, was flagged and killed. The second discussion that was created[2] was also killed. Then I posted a blog entry[3] which also got to the front page, then was also flagged and killed. At that point I just gave up, because what can you do? It seems like the flagging mechanism is far too powerful- just a few reports and the entry gets shunted back seven pages. A few more and it&apos;s gone entirely.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s worrying for two reasons: one, that original Geeklist discussion had some great points being made, and a lot of users were obviously engaging with it before a minority decided to dispose of it. Two, there&apos;s a clear minority on here that would like to see discussions about sexism in tech removed from HN.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/19740556298/why-are-posts-about-the-geeklist-controversy-being&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/19740556298/why-are-posts-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>