Ask HN: Stricter Submission Guidelines? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Stricter Submission Guidelines?

12 pointstinkerrr11 comments

It seems like websites create accounts that then just keep posting their content (mostly kinda unrelated to what HN is about anyway, just to get some clicks). I am not trying to pick on anyone in particular at all, but here are some examples - https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=WealthyGorilla -> account created 1 day ago, posted 9 links (all very thin content, IMHO) all from the same website. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ventureblend -> account created 9 days ago, 6 links, all from same website (again, IMHO, thin content). Is it possible to enforce stricter submission guidelines or am I completely imagining up a problem that doesn't exist?

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The other users who have replied to you have it right, but I'll add that in case of spam we go much further and start banning things. The line between "spam" and "thin content" isn't precisely defined, of course.

Some but not all of this is automated. We're working on automating more of it.

All: when you notice stuff like this, hn@ycombinator is your friend. We always look into it closely, if not immediately, and we will always get back to you.

Thanks for this information. Sorry I didn't know about hn@ycombinator, otherwise would have just emailed them. In any case, I hope at least one other person learned something new today!

Sites that do that eventually get their submission privileges revoked. (i.e. all submissions are autokilled, respective of the destination url)

If you have showdead on, here's a blatant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=TheSurge

Ah thanks, that's what I wanted to know. It's nice to know there's a procedure for this, and I hope the workaround isn't too straightforward for anyone looking to abuse the system.

Do you know if the submission privilege revoking is done automatically or by a moderator?

Generally, when you see abuse on HN, the right thing to do is send an email to hn@ycombinator.com rather than post it publicly.

I've recently been trying to work out simple but useful heuristics to just detect this kind of abuse without creating too much load. Since I don't have access to all of the data, it's mostly been observation and keeping notes.

Automating just detection of the most obvious abuses is feasible and fairly straight forward, but automating action is somewhere between difficult and nigh impossible.

The reason is simple; there are many great HN users who will regularly submit links to their own work, like blog posts. In fact, a few of the folks on the HN leader board [1] will share their own work fairly regularly (ColinWright, DanielBMarkham, jgrahamc, ..., and in years long past, also patio11, jacquesm, ...). Of course, when they submit their own stuff, it's usually really interesting, and they also submit other interesting stuff from other sites (not their own).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

I think it's an alert that is sent to a mod, but could be wrong - I had this happen to me a while back when I posted too much from my own blog. Any user that submits an inordinate amount of articles from any one site (regardless of their affiliation with that site it seems) will have their articles marked dead on submission, but may be able to get that lifted by the mods with a warning to spread their submissions around a bit.

Somewhat related... When making new submissions I use your search feature to check if somebody already submitted the same (and often find it is the case...). Could this be automated by warning users on the submit page after the enter the link into the text field?

It's kind of painful to do the search then sort by date manually. IMHO it is a simple way to avoid duplicates...

When you submit a site, HN should show you a list of the closest matches to that submission as a preview and give you the opportunity to just reply to one of the existing threads. Although for this to work, I think Hacker News' URL matching might have to be a bit stronger, and maybe include something like metadata collection.

If the URL is exactly the same, the search is unnecessary since it just adds a vote to the existing submission.

It would be nice to limit the number of JavaScript-related posts per day as well.

How is that a problem? OP was complaining about user promoting their own websites constantly.

Or is it that you're uninterested in JS-related posts?

I personally don't like anything Apple-related; be it WWDC, new products, changes in pricing or policies, daringfireball (especially), or even an app some enterprising fellow happen to release to the App Store.

My trick is to simply ignore the lot of them and move on to the next link. If you feel the front page is dominated by stuff you don't find interested, make sure you check out the new queue and vote in the things you are interested in.

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