Noob stories on HN | Hacker News Reader

Noob stories on HN

news.ycombinator.com

85 pointsnetworked27 comments

A word of warning to others: if you visit that page and actively flag, you may lose your flagging privileges. It happened to lots of us here when the Snowden story first broke - a lot of folks who regularly visited /newest to upvote/flag incoming stories lost their flagging privileges due to legitimately flagging the duplicates/blog spam/crap about the Snowden leaks. I can remember going to page 2 and 3 on /newest and 25 of the 30 stories shown would be dupes or crap about Snowden that was unworthy of HN. We got "punished" for doing what we thought was the right thing. And FYI - there is no timeout for lost flagging privileges that I know of.

I suspect that > 50% of the stories on /noobstories are flag-worthy but do yourself a favor and just flag 1/10th of the stories you think are bad/unworthy. It's an unfortunate side effect of the flagging/downvoting policy here at HN.

For what it's worth, I lost flagging privileges around that time, and appear to have got them back. There may be a timeout based on magnitude of "illegitimate" flagging or something like that.

Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout - I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread, it appeared to be related to my comment.

I actually upvoted the Snowden Ted talk story from a couple days ago to have it deleted and my karma dropped by .7 overnight. Thought that was weird. If they are going to hellban stories why not just do it with code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

There's also the "over" one which allows you to set a points threshold.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=50

Idea for pg: Consider preventing accounts under a certain age (and/or karma) submitting stories. The limit could be really low (say, 24 hours and/or 5 karma) and I'm guessing it'd knock off 90% of the spam/trash problem..?

I would personally feel that that wouldn't help as much, as many of the new accounts are just people wishing to express their (perhaps unpopular) opinion without putting their main account and thus themselves in negative light.

Seems a bit extreme. Two of the stories currently on that list made it to the front page.

Or make it cost 10 karma to submit a story. But keep self-posts free so they could still be done anonymously.

(or implement Chaumian blind tokens to transfer karma between accounts...).

Is there somewhere that describes all of the hidden features of HN? I hadn't seen these lists before and didn't know about the >250 karma colour changing. I assume there must be more features hidden somewhere too.

You get a reliable, safe, and fuel efficient jetpack at 4000.

The best is getting pg to follow you on Twitter after 10k

One neat feature I remember being around but can't seem to find a reference to so that I can use it again is some GET flag that reorganizes the front page to only count votes from users with old enough accounts. (Interestingly it didn't change that much so I stopped using it.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Thank you!

How are so many of these dead? If they are from new accounts, how have the accounts been banned so quickly?

Some sites are autokilled. For example, because they create new accounts to send spam. A few years ago pg posted a list and it was longest than I expected.

Most of the URL shorteners are autokilled, because someone can hide a banned site using it.

And I guess that Youtube has some kind of penalty, because there are a lot of off-topic submissions and many of them are dead, but not all.

What is this? I don't quite get it. Looks like a page of stories that simply didn't make it to the front page...

They're stories submitted by newly-created accounts.

It appears to be a page of stories with new users.

Possibly intended as a quasi-response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 ?

Not a response to that story but I accidentally discovered /noobstories while searching for a link to the feature suggestion thread for a comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761. I then discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/lists while skimming the feature suggestion thread.

Funny how I missed those two for years despite finding four out the six things on /lists individually. Is /lists linked to from a static page on HN?

Wow, noobstories are awful https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

It's the leftmost link in the footer.

Now that's embarrassing. Apparently I never bothered clicking that link. Maybe "User/comment lists" would have been more encouraging, if a bit clumsy-looking.

It's all posts by new users only (hence the green user name)

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