Ask HN: Just me, or are there more [dead] submissions on Hacker News lately?

1 point·thesethings··5 comments

I'm newish to HN, but this week it seems I've seen more [dead] submissions (right now there are 5 on the New page), and more [deleted] comments.

Did something change recently on the administrative end, or is the difference on the community side?

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In addition to the big increase in spam and off-topic stuff lately, usually from accounts that just signed up to spam us, dupes have become a lot more common from old-timers. Not sure why that is. The volume of stuff making it to the front page is still low enough for it to be easy to check the past three days or so before submitting something.

I wonder also if new users are also more apt to have an itchy reporting finger though. For example, yesterday a pretty benign Noam Chomsky link, already sitting with active comments, got killed (it was later restored).

Yeah, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over whether that was the sort of thing that we as a community care about. I didn't read that particular article or the discussion (I find Noam Chomsky to be...benign in his absurdity), but it seemed interesting to other folks, so I didn't mind it.

This meta-discussion is actually kinda weird and doesn't really fit the character of the place, either.

Maybe we shouldn't encourage this sort of thing, and just let the votes and editors do their jobs.

I've noticed this too, for what seems like the past 2 months or so. This is just a passive observation, though. Most [dead] links seem to be from users who are either brand new or who have 1 karma point - basically bots, it seems.

the more popular the community gets, the more spam and non-related stuff gets submitted.

turn off showdead in your profile.

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