Ask HN: What does it mean when a new blog post isn't shown in new? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does it mean when a new blog post isn't shown in new?

2 pointsthepra12 comments

Kind of weird given that I followed also the guidelines and didn't boost the submission in any way.

I replied to your email but perhaps other users may like to read the explanation, so here it is:

Your account's not banned, but HN's software is killing your posts because it thinks you're running afoul of the rule against using the site primarily for promotion—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to submit your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." Our software detects that sort of submission history and starts filtering the posts once the percentage of own-posts is too high.

On HN, the idea is for people to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they have something to promote. It's fine to post your own work, as long as it's interspersed with interesting posts from unrelated sources. But when an account only submits promotionally, it feels like they're not participating as a community member, and HN users notice this and flag the posts.

I don't want to discourage you from submitting your own work! But it's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. The software considers submission histories adaptively, so if you do that, your own-posts will eventually stop getting filtered.

If you dig up interesting things from a variety of places, things people haven't run into before, then you'll be perceived as a community contributor rather than someone trying to market something. Particularly good are stories on out-of-the-way topics that rarely or never get attention. The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any existing sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

Appreciate the explanation. Good to know what happens under the hood.

Your submission was discussed 16 days ago with several comments. You then submitted it again at least twice. These are marked as dead. They require a user or few to vouch for them.

Edits to remove unhelpful comment:

It's probably the system seeing it as duplicate. Or users flagging it because they see it as duplicate or spamming.

That resubmission was my mistake, and I regret it

The submission has been flagged. Choose "show dead" in your profile to see flagged submissions. Sometimes valid content is being flagged but sometimes it is not.

Thanks, I didn't use it before yet, it's eye opening :)

It usually means you're a spammer.

If you're asking why that means you're a spammer with a sense of entitlement.

Don't ask what we can do for your blog, ask what your blog can do for us.

Please don't be an asshole on HN, regardless of how wrong or ignorant someone else is (or you feel they are).

HN is a pretty cryptic site. A lot of the time, people have no idea what the rules or conventions are. When community insiders treat non-insiders in a nasty, condescending way, that's poisonous. We don't want that kind of culture here.

In fact we don't want the online callout/shaming culture in general (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...). The damage it causes greatly outweighs any benefits.

Please give people clear indication of this when their submissions are being rejected this way.

We get this question at least once a day and it's a burden on the few and proud HNers who read "new".

Can't get behind such meaningless hostile logic, I'm not a spammer and I was only sharing something that I wrote myself that I find interesting and worth sharing.

I don't really care what others can do for my blog, it's not a place for me to get popular in primis.

How many times did you submit it?

Once but coming from previous dead links mostly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com