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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

I submitted stuff that never got upvotes for months and thought I had just become out of sync somehow with the interests of the rest of HN. Then I realized that my submissions had apparently been banned! I can see them when I'm logged in as myself, but when I hit the site without logging in they're nowhere to be found.

Not quite a hell-ban, since people (apparently) still see my comments, but still frustrating.

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There are many blocked IP's when it comes to submissions. PG commented on within the past several months. Having a link immediately go dead isn't related to one's karma - or at least that's my impression.

In any event, such links don't really disappear. If "Show Dead" is selected as a preference they can still be seen.

I'm looking at two dozen submissions, nearly all from different sites (ranging from major news sites to personal blogs), all apparently banned. I know some sites are blocked, but it's hard for me to believe that every single one of those submissions came from a site that's HN-verboten. It seems like a much more straightforward explanation to assume that at some point an admin decided that anything submitted from my username from then on would go straight into File 13.

My personal theory as to what happened is this -- this is the last submission I made that got any upvotes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4331466

It was made tongue in cheek (follow the link and you'll get the joke), but I think an admin saw it, didn't like it, and decided that was sufficient justification for sending me into the Outer Darkness.

Personally I wouldn't care as much if there'd just been an up-front explanation when the decision was made. Passive-aggressive hellban-type sanctions are supposed to be for hardcore trolls, and I would think 4400+ karma (average of 6.02) would indicate that I am not that. But whatevs.

Well, the same thing happened to me :(

I think for some reason an admin flagged me (it happened after my submission of the "September Mourn"[1] article from the Guardian) and now all my submissions are visible to me only..

This is sad and very unrespectable towards the users, because the system does not say that I'm banned or whatnot, it just accepts the submission and shows it to me as if everything is OK. So, in short, HN doesn't respect my time and efforts spent on submissions, I could have never found out that I was flagged.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/oct/17/martin-sheen-wood...

edit: typo

Just a quick scan of your submissions shows a potential variety of reasons for dead submissions.

The Slate article was already submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5079680

Scripting.com has a unique relationship with HN - Dave Weiner often submits directly, and an article I submitted after him doesn't show up in my list of submissions. Discussions in which he joins sometimes take on their own flavor.

The "Windows Phone without Google" Editorial seems likely to foster partisan debate rather than foster discussion.

"Good News for Gmail users" is blogspam.

There may be a golden nugget in your links. But nothing really pops out. What I will say is that given your karma, people may be following you more closely because of the weight which it can give your posts - I have seen some evidence of this. What you submit may be getting quick attention, and at a certain karma threshold flagging a new submission may be sufficient to kill it - I have seen some evidence of this as well.

Find something really good to submit from an obscure corner of the web. Not the usual suspects. Not linkbait. Not blogspam. Then you can test your theory. Cringly or NY Magazine or Harpers aren't candidates.

So when you reach a certain (unspecified) karma level, the quality of your submissions stops being judged by HN readers and starts being judged by HN admins? And in twenty-plus cases they consistently found my submissions wanting, every time? Wanting so much that they needed to be filtered out before other HN users could even see them?

If that sounds reasonable to you, you've found a friendly place here, I guess. To me it sounds bizarre.

Find something really good to submit from an obscure corner of the web. Not the usual suspects. Not linkbait. Not blogspam. Then you can test your theory.

My submissions included stuff I wrote myself, which is by definition "not the usual suspects."

Look at this piece, for instance, which I submitted:

http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/twitter-teaches-a-new-gene...

Is this blogspam? Is this linkbait? I would argue it's an original discussion of an issue that was much debated among HN readers at the time. You may agree or disagree with its premise, but I cannot see how you could classify it as cheap.

And yet it was killed, just like all the others.

21 of 22 articles is not chance, it seems however

the verge.com, slate.com, gigaom.com etc.

are not the purely sketchy sites one would expect

It's still a bummer, though. What part of my account history means I shouldn't be able to submit anymore?

From my limited experience this has less to do with the poster's history than with the site being linked. Some of the sites just seem to turn false positives wrt being spam.

I for one have plenty of dead BuzzFeed submissions to my name.

That's entirely based on the site and not me - fortunately.

Some sites are only allowed from special users. I've had submissions go insta-dead on me, only to see the exact same link show up later, from someone else, and appparently approved.

My next-to-last submission turned up [dead] the moment I submitted it even though the linked site wasn as far as I know neither spammy nor off-topic. Maybe some of the HN spam prevention knobs were/are turned too far towards eleven.

Same thing happened to me when i tried submitting a story from that site (i-programmer.info).

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