Ask HN: When do postings get removed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When do postings get removed?

4 pointsmingyeow12 comments

(update: Apparently admin misunderstood that I created 12 new accounts to vote it up. What happened was that I tweeted about it, and folks registered to vote it up)

Hi folks, i posted about hiring a great hacker for Discoverio/MrTweet. It got onto the front page. But then it was curiously removed - and the page it was on is now empty. This is extremely curious. I do not think there was any violation - all I did was to tweet and ask my community to check it out. When do postings get removed?

Original: http://r4.sharedcopy.com/6j6mhd Now (empty): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658481

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When you create 12 new accounts to upvote it.

Hi Paul, this is an misunderstanding - All I did was to tweet about it using an twitter account that was popular. @mrtweet had about 200,000 followers, so it is inevitable that some of them created accounts to vote it. I definitely did not create any new accounts.

On its face, your posting seems topical to me; there have certainly been other non-YC company posts seeking coworkers/cofounders/etc. Your company and previous writings/comments are interesting.

But, campaigning for upvotes ruins the signal provided by article scores, especially if campaigning is done among an outside audience whose only interest in this site is boosting stories as a mutual favor.

Also, asking a large group to do something, knowing that "it is inevitable" many will follow-through, makes you in some sense responsible for the activity. ("But for" your request, it wouldn't have happened.) So be careful what you ask for!

For reference, the tweet was:

@mrtweet: Help us recruit the best engineers to serve YOU better. Vote here to help our hiring outreach (top left): http://bit.ly/AJ4vI

This is a GREAT reply, and I really appreciate the very thoughtful comment that you wrote.

I completely agree that what I did was inappropriate given the fabric/culture of Hackernews, which is why I understand why it got killed.

My original thinking was that it would be cool if I could show the community that I had passionate users, because hey, everyone likes to work with folks who really cared and nurtured their users. =)

Your submission got killed. Not the end of the world. Find something relevant to post (maybe something not about you), and get on with your life and your startup. Best of luck.

Hi! I am ok that my submission got killed - but not if it is killed for the wrong reason. I definitely did not "create 12 accounts" to vote it, all I did was tweet about it.

In any case, I have utmost respect for the community, and I definitely want to play my part in making it work.

Thanks for all the clarifications

You posted a random job ad to Hacker News and it got flagged. Part of what makes Hacker News Hacker News is that established people in the community can snipe off-topic posts from the site, and that happened to you.

Ok, but i see ycombinator related jobs all the time. So this is only for ycomb jobs?

Yes. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

There have been a few other job postings on YC, but they tend to be unusual -- either revealing that the hiring organization is awesome or clueless. Since posting a job can be fairly expensive, it's a good idea to be careful. I've written at least one job ad targeting the kinds of people who visit news.yc (not for a tech position, though), but posting it would be counterproductive.

Submissions that get flagged often enough are auto-killed. Have you looked on the site with your "showdead" flag (a user-configurable option in your user profile) turned on?

Hmmmm.... thanks! I saw that, and it was killed. I wonder why though, i certainly did not think it was spammy, and I took a lot of care to write it in a way that I thought the community will appreciate

Like most sites as they get larger, what gets trashed and removed becomes a lot more capricious as what offends some sub-group (or challenges them) tends to get removed, while others are complacent.

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