Ask HN: Have you vouched for dead HN submissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you vouched for dead HN submissions?

6 pointsminimaxir7 comments

The feature was implemented a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512

...and I haven't vouched for a single submission, nor seen one I would have vouched for, which is a testament to HN's spam detector. Articles that have been flagkilled usually have valid justification.

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By 'submissions' do you mean stories as opposed to comments? If so, then yes, it's rare for dead stories to get rescued by vouching. We see maybe one or two a day. We see more rescued comments, though not as many as I expected. We've also seen very few cases of users rescuing posts—either stories or comments—that ought not to be rescued, which is a testament to HN's community.

Notes for anyone wondering where the 'vouch' links are: (1) they only show up on [dead] posts, so you have to have 'showdead' on in your profile, and (2) for comments, you have to go to the item page (linked from the timestamp) to see them, just as you do for 'flag'.

Ah, completely forgot you could vouch for comments. Those numbers make sense.

We mostly created vouching for comments. The problem was that banned accounts sometimes post good comments, so autokilling every comment is too coarse-grained. The core idea of modnesty (comment vouching) is that being banned no longer means your comments are all [dead], but merely that they are subject to a jury of your peers. After a month, I think it's safe to say that this has worked; in fact it has exceeded our expectations.

Yes. Both for user-flagged ones and for ones stuck in the spam filter ([dead]). (and a flag by me has been overridden by other users)

I've vouched for a few comments (I try to vouch for as many good comments in a dead users' history as I can), but not submissions.

I've vouched for comments, but not submissions.

I find it much easier to flag than vouch, which is weird because it should probably be the other way round.

I've vouched for one story so far.

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