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Comment by strmpnk | Hacker News Reader

A fair argument, but I don't see how excluding content without transparency is any better. At the very least you could let people know why or what is happening when something is submitted. Not all communities need to overlap and it's HN's decision for what goes here. Also, you'd be better off if your guidelines included some wording on this.

As for the competitors line, I was possibly confused by past drama certain threads that there was something going on with that. Sorry for any misinformation this may have spread. It might be to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is a proper way to communicate with HN to get someone unbanned (I am not with Nodejitsu but I'm sure they'd be willing to talk). There is good content on that blog.

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I don't see how excluding content without transparency is any better.

You can see everything that gets killed by turning on showdead in your profile.

I think it's more about informing the person submitting. Most people who hear about this are surprised and had no idea. It might be solving the problem of transparency from the wrong end.

When we kill something it's almost always for some form of abuse: usually spamming, or in a handful of cases for particularly egregious sockpuppet upvotes. I don't feel like we owe such people much. Plus the more you tell them, the easier you make it to get around you.

I'll let it rest here as I'm sure you've thought much longer than I have but I do feel it a bit unfair to assume it's always the spammers submitting content when the domain is shared.

https://twitter.com/#!/FrankDenbow/status/128144916655259648

Ok, that statement seems a little misleading. I just turned on showdead. Yes, I can see the text, but the link doesn't seem to be there, so I can't convince myself that the kill was warranted. Am I missing something?

E.g., "[dead] Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, hacker in AT&T iPad case, on Occupy Wall Street (youtube.com)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146776

Edit: another killed link, "Funding for venture capital industry plunges" from the mercury news. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146633 The article seems pretty relevant to the audience here.

YouTube links are auto-deaded. Write a short blog post about the YouTube video, post that, and see if it dies. I'm guessing it won't.

I don't know if the Mercury News is auto-deaded, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was.

Actually neither site is banned.

I make the links inactive to ensure spammers get no traffic, and thus give up spamming us. HN gets so much traffic that otherwise they might get a significant amount just from people clicking on the dead link. Anyone who wants to see the url of a story can see it on the edit page, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=3146776

As for your specific examples, the first was killed because that user is banned from submitting, and the second I killed myself because when I tried the link it was broken; it's since been fixed so I unkilled it.

The poster is completely unaware however. See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3146243 - I posted the link to check whether it's actually banned. It showed up and I could see it. Now it's dead without any notification or feedback for me.

I don't think pg's trying to hide anything. It's presumably just a lot of work to maintain an up to date public index of blocked domains and rationale.

Simply killing submissions and relying on a lesser known profile switch on the users end is pretty indirect if not obscure. The submitter should be able to lobby to get something unblocked and to do that they need to know what happened in the first place. It's a pretty simple change to the process.

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