Ask YC: Can we have a report spam button?

In general, I don't like this idea, but I just checked the new page and I count no less than 4 submissions that seem strange to me:

1) Free Software Download

2) a dude soliciting help for red5

3 & 4) InkomHolic and 3rrOrists that violate the posting guidelines.

Marking links as spam has 3 advantages that I can see.

1-You can remove the links so they get no more incidental traffic from people viewing the new-queue.

2-If you remove the link entirely, it removes the SEO benefit of an inbound link. I would also recommend setting rel=nofollow on all links in the new queue regardless, to remove the pagerank benefit for SEO.

3-If a spam link is a separate "veto" then a spammer creating dummy users to vote threads up doesn't work, as real users can veto the post.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...

Edit: In thinking about it, approaches 1 and 2 can apply to low-point items without a new spam feature, however, hiding spam sooner reduces the incentive to submit spam. Theoretically, editors work fine, but that seems like a lot of manual labor.

I might email Mike Arrington to see if he wants to contribute some time to flagging the spam.

What the site really needs is a automated moderation challenge, ala Netflix. Export all the submissions, votes, page views, salted hashes of the IP addresses where users created their accounts from, etc. Let us try to generate algorithms that generate the "best" front pages, as measured by the ultimate number of votes and quality comments each article gets.

Would anyone be interested in poking at that problem?

To be honest news.yc doesn't need a report spam button, a few editors in different timezones and the problem would be beaten.

We already got spam here. See this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135256 and this http://3rr0rists.com/.

We need a REPORT-SPAM option.

I like the idea that low voted items naturally become hidden after a while. Maybe rather than a report spam button we could be able to hide links we don't want to see anymore.

Yes we should. We've never seen spam here so far, but when the sites gets more users, spam will be obvious. That's just my opinion.

Maybe just a vote-down button would suffice.