Ask HN: Why so many dead comments lately? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why so many dead comments lately?

20 pointsmattm11 comments

I've noticed a lot more dead comments lately in cases where the person is writing reasonable comments. You'll need showdead turned on in your settings to see the examples.

Take this thread as an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818698

The OP has a new account but all his replies are within the guidelines.

Here's another account with a dead comment in that thread. Most of their comments, while brief, seem perfectly reasonable. The account is 2 years old but most comments are dead https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josefritzishere

In this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574167) all of this user's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=backlava12) comments were marked as dead. The user has an established account and all comments seemed within guidelines.

Has anyone else noticed this more recently? Is it perhaps a result of trying to identify AI-bot accounts?

View on HN

The first one's comments were killed because our software classified them as genai.

The second was banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630011

The third got caught in a troll filter and, looking at the comment history, I think the software made the right call.

Thanks for replying. These were just some examples I've seen recently and was able to find them easily in my history. There have been more that I've noticed lately. I imagine this will continue to be the case going forward.

I take it is due to automation, mostly. Every single website that has some sort of user-contributed content, forums, source code repository, social media, anything that has comment or upload capability of any kind whatsoever is being bombarded by a massive torrent of crap, and hn is no exception. The internet has no good defense against it, therefore people have to resort to captchas, geoblocking, shadow banning, proof-of-work portal solutions, cloudflare (eek!) and adjusting detection thresholds "just right" so things feel usable.

Hat's off to the mod staff, things feel "alright" even with the current situation.

I dunno. One of my pet peeves of the last few months is that somebody posts an AI generated blog post and it's not good enough that we can click on it to read it so they also post an AI summary as a comment. Like... we can click on the link and read your post. Haven't you ever used HN before... Oh, I see, you created this account six hours ago.

I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.

I'm not sure if commenting on this thread will help since I recently discovered I'm affected by this when a kind stranger replied to one of my recent comments saying they had to "vouch" for me, so you might not see my comment anyways

I think in my account got flagged because of three things

1. Age, it's a pretty recent account, I used to have another one that's like 8yo by now (if not more) but I lost access to that email (and I could've benefited from a username change, so I decided to create a new one)

2. I created this account using a VPN, I have a slight suspicion that it caused me to be soft-banned from the start, but I can't confirm

3. HN probably implemented more strict filtering due to the advance of LLMs

If I were to pinpoint on a exact cause I'd say it's more likely that 2 and 3 are contributing much more than 1

Your account got caught in a spam filter, probably by mistake. Sorry! I've unbanned it now.

Thank you!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321198

HN’s mods have said they have huge amounts of code fighting spam alongside human workers, and they deliberately don’t discuss their tactics in order to avoid an arms race between themselves and the spammers

Self promotion posts are one thing, not sure if it applies to the examples you gave, good luck if your hn user name and your github user name is same when you have low karma.

Everytime you make a comment about how Grok is led by a pro-fascist team, you get downvoted and your comment gets locked

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