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Tell HN: I'm worried that certain posts are made and deleted to hide news
This post might be a paranoid reaction on my behalf, but I've run into this issue twice in three weeks. In both cases, the news portrayed was negative for someone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165839 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004568). I totally understand flagging a post because you believe it doesn't have a place on HN, or deleting your own post for the same reason. However, the latter approach makes it markedly more difficult for someone else who thinks differently about the post to make it on their own, and can therefore be used to willfully prevent discussion.
Again, my reaction could just be interpreting malice where there is none. However, please do not take away the privilege to agree to disagree with each other from topics of conversation where we are still able to act with civility with one another.
- LinuxBender 8y agoYou can go into your settings and enable "showdead" to at least see if something was indeed marked for review.
- tareqak 8y agoThanks. I have that on already. Usually, trying to submit a story that's already been submitted takes you to the already submitted one, but when the story is deleted by submitter, you just get a message.
- wmf 8y agoHN loves bashing Facebook and the Citizen Lab story did get some discussion on the front page. I think HN has so many problems with discoverability in general and this particular subproblem (if it exists) is not even the biggest one. BTW, you can add something like ?please_give_me_a_second_chance to URLs to bypass dupe detection, but if you abuse it then other factors may kick in.
- gus_massa 8y agoIt's a bad idea to delete your own post. If you do too much times the mods may ban your account. Delete the post only when you made a (big) mistake. -- About https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004568 "Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab" See https://hn.algolia.com/?query=undercover%20apnews&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=undercover%20apnews&sort=byPop... It was submitted three times before your submission. That's probably the reason the dupe detector blocked it. Anyway, it was resubmitted again two times after you submission and one got 463 points and 172 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131729 I don't see nothing shady there -- About https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165839 "Facebook's security team tracks posts, location for 'BOLO' threat list" I don't understand what problem you had when you tried to submit it. It looks like a normal post that didn't get traction.
- tareqak 8y ago> -- About https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004568 "Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab" My experience with the duplicate detector is that it takes you to the duplicate. It didn't that time, and I got an error message. When I tried looking up the URL on hn.algolia.com at the time, I didn't find it (I just copy and paste the full URL). > -- About https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165839 "Facebook's security team tracks posts, location for 'BOLO' threat list" https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-tracks-posts-location-for-bolo-threat-list.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac... is the original URL that didn't work for (note the 'www' subdomain). It's possible that hn.algolia.com can be slow at times and I'm interpreting that delay combined with the error message as something fishy. Thank you for the reply `gus_massa .
- gus_massa 8y agoAbout the first one: I had to tweak the search for a while until I got a meaningful set of results. Sometimes it's no easy.