It seems that over the years HN has gotten a little more "restrictive" I guess you could say, around new accounts. The reasons for that seem fairly obvious, eg,

It seems that over the years HN has gotten a little more "restrictive" I guess you could say, around new accounts. The reasons for that seem fairly obvious, eg, spam. I think a lot of people mistake HN primarily as a platform for promoting their own commercial sites. So the mods seem to have implemented more rules to make it less attractive for people to just show up, create an account, and start pushing self-promotional stuff. The thing is self-promotion is allowed on HN, even explicitly so (see: Show HN). But that's not, as I understand it, how the powers that be want people to primarily conceptualize HN. First and foremost, it's a platform for, um, what's the phrase, "satisfying your intellectual curiosity" or whatever. The self-promotional stuff is a side-bar to that, not the headline on the marquee sign so to speak. Net-net... you have a new account, your thing got auto-flagged or whatever. The solution, as others have pointed out, is just to email the mods (and/or hope somebody will "vouch" for your post, which apparently they did). Beyond that, make sure to read the site guidelines[1] and FAQ[2]. Most of what you need to know is there. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html