I almost got banned from Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

I almost got banned from Hacker News

jeffgeerling.com

251 pointsgeerlingguy82 comments

> Enough people read /newest that you should take no upvotes as a sign the content just wasn't as interesting as you thought

Umm, no. Sometimes, it's just luck and timing. Many posts that are interesting hit/stay on the front page the second time someone posts it.

I don't think enough people browse the /newest queue. More people (myself included!) should browse /newest more often.

I'm sure anyone that's submitted even semi-regularly has experienced getting no upvotes then seeing the same thing submitted by someone else hit the front page a few days later.

Randomness plays a large role. That's why the FAQ says a small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. We want good stories to get multiple cracks at the bat.

For best results, it's important not to just post and repost your own stuff though. If you do that, our software will start interpreting your account history as promotional and will start enforcing this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. 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...).

I’ve never had any of my submissions approved, so I don’t bother attempting to submit anything any more.

What do you mean by approved? I'm not following your point here.

If you mean making the front page, two submissions, which is the number you've made with the current account, isn't anywhere near enough to overcome randomness. Far fewer than 50% of submissions make the front page.

I often find myself on /newest when I’m spending the day trying to “complete the internet”. It tends to fall after reading the full front page, all of twitter and various news websites, but before I resort to Reddit…

Hah, and i thought i was the only one who tries to "play through the internet" - somehow, every time i think i'm through, it grows back it seems...

Same here, except that I skim through reddit before /newest.

True, I have posted info about my key remapper here a few times, https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto, but when I posted it it never really took off. Then some guy, nick something, posted it and the thing really took off. Timing & luck is what it really seems to come down to.

That surge of viewers also resulted in a distinct up take of stars for days, almost a full week following the event lol. Word of mouth definitely kept it getting attention, but typically I see a few new stars a day. I don't really watch it that closely now though.

I am happy to have created an app that really resonates with a lot of tech users and programmers though.

My experience at posting content at HN is somewhat hit-and-miss: sometimes stuff I post get no votes, only for the same content (posted by another person) to be upvoted and hit the front page. Ah well. :-)

Maybe it's related to the timezone I'm in (Singapore: UTC+8). When I post, most of the western hemisphere HN population is still asleep.

Side none: one time, I did get an email politely requesting that the upvotes for an item I posted be re-assigned to somebody (who posted the same content) with much lower karma. I was okay with that.

The one and I think only time I hit the front page (after a couple years of submissions) was a title that was extremely dry -- just the name of my project, without trying to say what it was (other than what is conveyed by the name). And had a 10 second elevator pitch as the intro paragraph on the page.

My conclusion is that if you can think of a click bait title, think of the complete polar opposite of click bait, and that is more likely to be looked at.

I'm one that doesn't use newest, honestly... I think I just like having my feeds a little curated

Scrolling newest submissions feels like digging for gold when I can just walk to the bank

Not that I disagree, just some context to offer. The internet is too big of a hose

/newest isn't about passive reading of the posts though. It's about upvoting the ones that are worthy in the aim to get them to a wider audience.

I can get that, I didn't look at it from this angle

Sounds a bit like work, appreciate y'all

Back in 2015 I decided to bot my HN account for fun and karma. I wrote a python script called karmabum that scanned a few dozen RSS feeds every 30 seconds to catch fresh articles. When it saw a new article, it launched the Submit page with the form parameters pre-populated. At that point a TamperMonkey userscript took over and submitted the form for me.

Karmabum ran for something like 24 hours, and got me some good karma, before users started complaining and I was quickly thereafter banned. Luckily, dang is very gracious and un-banned my account after I reached out, and to this day I have never botted my HN account again.

These days I use those skills for good, writing E2E tests :)

Haha, i have a more manual process.

A webapp like HN, but crawls RSS. There's a "Post to HN" button, when i think there's something interesting. So it's still a "manual process".

I think jacquesm will appreciate this one: https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5

I think you were hitting some kind of limit regarding submits per day. I think if you were to throttle such a bot to maybe a few submissions from serious sources per week, then it would likely work. I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated.

"I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated"

Either this, or the humans run mentally on bot mode.

It seems that a malicious person A who has a strong dislike or enmity for person B's projects could do some real harm by buying upvotes/clicks/likes for person B's projects, getting them banned from various services.

Make it look like person B naively went out and paid a third party upvote/promotion service, and make it obvious enough to be noticeable.

to use some old internet terminology, make it look like a joe-job astroturf?

Twitch famously does not ban people for botting unless they have evidence that the streamer themselves ordered the bots.

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-handle-view-follow-b...

And Twitch are well known for applying their rules fairly and consistently, to streamers big and small. /s

At this point the divergence between the rules-as-written and rules-as-applied(-in-each-case) has become so apparent that I'd treat Twitch's help pages like comments on a decades old poorly maintained code base - any match between them and reality is almost accidental and cannot be relied upon.

From what I have seen this is indeed Twitches prescribed approach, even for small streamers. I had a friend that was getting viewbotted when his channel was just starting to grow and remember being surprised he was worried it'd actually make him look bad to viewers (like he himself was trying to inflate his channel since his chat was dead vs the view count) but never worried Twitch was going to do anything to his account for it.

Have you seen different for this topic or is that a generic reaction for any time Twitch help pages are linked?

Agreed in general but for bots it anecdotally seems to be the case. For example Massan was blatantly viewbotting for a long time but he wasn't banned for several months at least (I don't remember the time).

I'm a bit doubtful, as even gaining real followers rapidly has apparently been a problem. That happened around 2 months ago with new members of the Hololive streaming group, as all their fans followed the new accounts.

That is for YouTube, not Twitch. Hololive is mostly on YouTube except for a few exceptions, mostly for watchalongs with Amazon Prime.

I just misread Twitter instead of Twitch.

Apparently this was the move for a while on amazon: buy upvotes for the people who are listed higher than you so they get removed.

Reply All episode 182 mentions this occuring on twitter

> X was heavily upvoted by a criminal spam service that steals accounts from HN users and then sells upvotes and comments using the stolen accounts. That's basically the equivalent of a capital offense on HN and we ban accounts and sites that do it.

That to me means HN front page has a lot economic value. It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.

"It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me."

It is about the audience, who comes here, to enjoy the crowd prefiltered content and comments, that is usually way higher than the average. There are quite some interesting (and rich or otherwise influential) people reading here.

So if you manage to bot upvote a submission to the frontpage - it looks like the hacker spirit supports it. Powerful guerilla marketing. So I think it is not surprising, that it is tried at times, but according to dang(moderator), it happens way less, than people do expect.

>It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.

True, you can find top dogs from tech field roaming around on HN. The front page or newest submissions are read by a pretty large number of individuals, by RSS Feeds or manually visiting the site.

If your submission like 'Show HN' hits the front page, it is similar to hitting the jackpot due to the overall impact it has for your project.

I suspect a well-timed front-page HN post with a lot of engagement could move a new fundraising valuation by tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.

What made the spam service criminal?

I’d presume the “steals accounts” part.

I think criminal in the eyes of 'Internet etiquette'. As well as the T&C for having an account on most sites. But probably not enforceable in a court of law.

I blog about electronics, roughly every other month. Sometimes it’s about simple equipment repairs, but more often it’s esoteric stuff like JTAG debug interfaces. A few of my blog posts have hit the HN front page.

I never submit my new blog posts to HN, because I don’t need to: literally within minutes after announcing a new blog post on Twitter, somebody does that for me. Not always the same person either, and I have no idea who they are.

It’s very convenient, and nobody can accuse me of self promotion. :-)

This post is meant to distract from the fact he operates these other Twitter and hackernews accounts.

;-)

I'm going to risk the downvote wrath but geerlingguy's rate of self-posting has annoyed me in the past. I did notice that the rate had dropped recently and am glad dang took proactive steps to communicate with geerlingguy to that end. That being said I am sorry you had to go through this recent experience and certainly never thought you should be banned.

Is there not a double standard going on here? Why is that an individual is almost banned for "spammy" behavior yet it seems that it is OK for a company to aggressively post to HN? I will give you an example - Cloudflare. Their CTO has posted to HN 7 times in the last two weeks. And his submissions are always promotional[1]. This individual posts something about Cloudflare every few days and sometimes even submits more than one Cloudflare post in a single day. This has been going on for years. As far as I can see Jeff Geerling isn't even selling anything. Are there different rules for companies vs individuals?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jgrahamc

Key take-away for me:

> dang is superhuman; I honestly have no idea how he and the rest of the tiny group (is it still just him and sctb?) that moderates HN keeps it a mostly civil place.

It’s the excellent moderation that makes Hacker News the only Internet forum that I regularly read – or occasionally contribute to.

I’ve always found your work to be done with high integrity and I don’t consider your posts to be spammy at all.

Please continue posting and I hope that HN would consider some type of moderation that allows your content.

HN does allow that content: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Oh, "geerling" I know you, I used your stuff in the Ansible galaxy.

> is it still just [dang] and sctb?

As far as I can tell, Scott left in 2019, so it's just dang.

There are other mods, but he's the only public one. (He's said as much.)

I stand corrected. And according to this HN poll, 8% of HN users believe he's a lizard: https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=29755614

This poll does not account for the users that believe dang is a lizard but did not know that HN allows you make polls.

Absolutely wrong. He's the first sentient AI but he prefers that that personal side of his life remains private. Oh woops.

I would still very much appreciate an AMA with Dang

There is a New Yorker article written about them: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Good read!

That's twice as much as the "regular" lizard constant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Wait so should I upvote this or not?

Thanks for all of the work you do.

I don't understand how Dang can possibly moderate all the content on this site, all the time.

Somehow he does though. 8th wonder of the world.

isn't it possible Dang is just shared account by multiple mods?

I am glad things got straightened out. OP is one of the good guys. Very intriguing posts on Raspberry Pi over the years.

Without a comment from the people who COULD ban, the word ban has somewhat loaded context here. Banning has a permanency ring to it.

Your context goes to "I almost got temporarily shut out of" as much as banning surely? Or is there something I missed about the longer-term?

> That's basically the equivalent of a capital offense on HN and we ban accounts and sites that do it.

I interpreted that as having some sort of permanence attached.

The typical message that dang leaves when banning an account is something like:

"Since we've asked you many times to use HN as intended and you've continued not to, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html."

I assume this applies to all but the most egregious cases (e.g. posting overtly racist nonsense, only posting flamebait/spam, and stuff like that), even when not explicitly stated.

That's quite generous then, I'm mostly basing assumptions on other communities where moderators assume the worst automatically, and you might as well talk to a brick wall... but thinking on it that's not the case on this site. Most of the time ;)

As someone who got on the wrong side of dang, he's a model of light handed moderation.

And because he's so reasonable, I feel like I owe it to him personally to stay away from the fanning flamewars behaviour he flagged.

I've had the same experience, and his advice has improved my writing.

The main thing he advised me: You don't have to "bash" the opposing viewpoint in order to write your own. Just write your own.

There are a few things I disagree with him about, but as he's the mod, and I'm not, I accept it and try to avoid those topics.

"he's the mod and I'm not" certainly brings a lot of civility to a space. Most speculation of "why are people assholes on the internet" tends to center around anonymity, or not seeing each other face to face, but I think the toxicity can also be explained as "who's going to stop me", like 8 year olds seeing what they can get away with. Anywhere comments are simply reported to a faceless beauracracy is rife for abuse.

Depending on how good the support is in the part of the service, a temporary ban can quickly turn into a permanent one.

> Munin couldn't even catch up

He's still using Munin in 2022? That's clearly the real story here.

Commence nerdfight...

If it works, it works. I've been running a couple Munin servers for like 10 or 15 years, and they're still happy on a 512 MB VPS!

Thanks for that peek behind the scenes. It's good to have a sense of how things work.

Discussion here is such that I sometimes read the submitted link as an afterthought. Apart from the occasional distraction of a comment by dang, I had operated under the polite fiction that this was the result of self moderation.

Jeff's account leaves me conflicted. I resent heavy-handed, unaccountable moderation, and boy would I be pissed if I was accused of stealing accounts to upvote a HN story of all things. On the other hand, if the alternative is regressing to, say, USENET, what can I say?

I've found so much value from your posts over the years (and books). Interesting situation, glad you didn't get banned!

"Unlike many other communities, HN is still relevant and moderated enough that spammy behavior is almost always caught and punished."

I sometimes read newest, but the signal to noise ratio is pretty low there unfortunately.

Not sure if I should upvote this, could make his case worst :p

Reply on news.ycombinator.com