3 ms·

Ask HN: How much censorship is there here really?

5 points by arisAlexis 10y ago

So even if I have 231 karma points I decided to Show HN from a new account to confirm my suspicions mainly because of a recent article I read about moderation here. I find it unreasonable that a new account's posts are [DEAD] immediately and I can only suspect that it has been hidden because it deals directly with a well known SV startup that copied the idea after my site was online. Anybody has a similar experience? I hope this post stays a little bit online.

detaro 10y ago
(Just observations as a user that spends way to much time on HN and /new in particular) > I can only suspect that it has been hidden because it deals directly with a well known SV startup that copied the idea after my site was online. I think you vastly overestimate the amount of attention that's paid to new posts – it seems like you are suggesting someone saw your post, decided that it YC doesn't like it and shadowbanned you immediately? From what I've seen, that's not the case, moderation often has long delays. With a new account, spam filtering of some kind seems way more likely. Which is difficult: there isn't much signal for new accounts, on the other hand, if you look at /new with showdead on (so you can see hidden posts), a lot of spam comes from new accounts, and nearly no spam comes from accounts that didn't start as spammers. I don't know how the filter works, but possibly creating a new account when you already had one triggered the filter additionally? (assuming you did it in a way that the system could detect this) I'm not a fan of all moderation decisions here (e.g. I don't like the policy of rate-limiting users vastly differently, and would like more transparency for the ranking), but I also think many people see conspiracy where I can't see any, and it's not the most obvious explaination.
DanBC 10y ago
What did the mods say when you emailed them to ask about this?

3 ms·

Ask HN: How much censorship is there here really?

5 points by arisAlexis 10y ago

detaro 10y ago
(Just observations as a user that spends way to much time on HN and /new in particular) > I can only suspect that it has been hidden because it deals directly with a well known SV startup that copied the idea after my site was online. I think you vastly overestimate the amount of attention that's paid to new posts – it seems like you are suggesting someone saw your post, decided that it YC doesn't like it and shadowbanned you immediately? From what I've seen, that's not the case, moderation often has long delays. With a new account, spam filtering of some kind seems way more likely. Which is difficult: there isn't much signal for new accounts, on the other hand, if you look at /new with showdead on (so you can see hidden posts), a lot of spam comes from new accounts, and nearly no spam comes from accounts that didn't start as spammers. I don't know how the filter works, but possibly creating a new account when you already had one triggered the filter additionally? (assuming you did it in a way that the system could detect this) I'm not a fan of all moderation decisions here (e.g. I don't like the policy of rate-limiting users vastly differently, and would like more transparency for the ranking), but I also think many people see conspiracy where I can't see any, and it's not the most obvious explaination.
DanBC 10y ago
What did the mods say when you emailed them to ask about this?