5 ms·
Ask HN: Why was my submission stillborn?
I've been hunting around through the various FAQs and guidelines and I don't seem to be able to find an answer to this. Yesterday or the day before I submitted an item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811776
I went to add a comment to it, but there was no "reply" text box. I asked a colleague, and he said that he couldn't see the item at all.
Why should that happen?
Thanks.
- stonemetal 15y agoThe post is Dead. Your coworker could see it if they turned showdead on in their profile. There are two ways things get to the dead state. There is a race between votes and flags that you can loose(x number of flags will kill something unless it gets Y number of up votes first but the flags will make it drop into obscurity faster.) The other is for PG to decide to kill something.
- mark-r 15y agoI just turned on showdead but I still can't see anything at the link.
- allenbrunson 15y agoI am not in any way an official voice around here, but I am a longtime reader. Having a look at the articles on that site, I don't think it's the kind of submission that is appreciated around here. My guess is that it was killed by an editor. If your next reply is "why not let people vote and decide for themselves," then the answer is that it doesn't work like that. People see that this site involves a lot of voting, then assume that it's a democracy, controlled by the readers. Nothing could be further from the truth. pg and the editors have the final word on everything. They kill a whole lot of submissions and comments for a variety of reasons: off-topic, spamming, inflammatory, insensitive, and so on. If they didn't do this, the site would have dissolved into anarchy long ago.