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Ask HN: Why is the "Google, what were you thinking?" link getting killed
"New" is currently rammed with dead links to http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/ -- but it doesn't look like a dupe, since there are no live threads on it, and it doesn't strike me as spam. What's wrong with it?
- janzer 15y agoI just submitted it as well because it didn't seem to be posted.
- hellweaver666 15y agoSame here... then I saw this in the new list!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- estel 15y agoNope, it just appears that way without showdead.
- paulsilver 15y agoI thought it was odd that I couldn't find it, so I submitted to find the conversation and it went in as a new sub. I can't see anyone else's submission of it in the first few pages of New.
- janzer 15y agoIn your profile page set "showdead" to yes.
- paulsilver 15y agoThanks, and yes, I can now see New is absolutely full of the same story.
- EwanToo 15y agoI assume it's been manually flagged enough times that any new submissions to the same URL (or perhaps even the domain?) are now marked as spam and killed automatically. That leaves the question of who'd be doing the flagging though, it seems a relevant story.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yanw 15y agoThe link was probably nuked because of it's all caps headline, try resubmitting it now using a headline with less caps.
- EwanToo 15y agoThere's been lots of submissions with different headlines, it seems any submission to the URL gets killed immediately. I assume it's a spam filter in action (and it's actually doing it's own job of keeping 50 copies of the same story from appearing).
- Natsu 15y agoWhich is weird in and of itself. Normally, submitting the same thing would get the first copy upvoted. Just how were all those submissions bypassing that process? EDIT: Here's the first link to it. It's the only submission by someone who joined over a year ago who has no comments and the default 1 karma. And it has an editorialized headline. I bet it would only take one flag to kill something like that. Then everything else would be marked as a dupe of something dead.... So much for "Don't be evil": How Google is doing evil in Kenya (co.ke) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3459756 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3459756
- user24 15y agoClicky: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/ http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t... Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033
- falling 15y agoEasy: HN users' Google apologism. I participated in a few Google critical discussion in the past few weeks and a surprising number of them were killed for no apparent reason. They were lively, non abusive discussion, they just happened to be slightly critical to Google. Since I have never witnessed the same for any other topic, I concluded that the HN crowd doesn't like Google being criticized too much.
- npc 15y agoI've witnessed plenty of Google apologism on HN, but to be fair I've also witnessed a significant amount of anti-Google bias as well. Either way, saying that HN is deliberately blocking anti-Google sites strikes me as paranoid and needlessly cynical.
- falling 15y agoNot HN, NH's crowd: by flagging those links. Of course the HN code itself is not biased. (amended original post) Of course people will be biased both ways, but I never personally witnessed dead links on Apple, Facebook or Microsoft criticizing discussions, so that's my conclusion from personal experience.
- npc 15y agoEven saying "HN's crowd" is deliberately flagging legitimate links that are critical of Google is cynical as well. I must ask though, if you think HN is filled with people who are so uninterested in legitimate discussion, then why are you posting here? I'm not trying to be accusatory, but to me, posting on a site where people are not interested in honest discussion would feel like a huge waste of time.
- falling 15y agoYou are making my words sound worse than intended. It's not cynical: there cannot be an unbiased community so, by your reasoning, neither you or me should be part of any. I'm just saying that, by the nature of Google as a company and of this community, the crowd here is more likely to be favorable to Google and take their side on issues, and this is evidenced by my own experience.
- bhousel 15y agoThere is no grand conspiracy involving Google apologism. Everything with a .co.ke domain is auto-killed by the HN submission process. I just tried it myself with some other random Kenyan domain: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460932
- jiaaro 15y ago... ok, and the obvious question: "Why are .co.ke domains auto-killed?"
- bradleyland 15y agoGiven that the"New" page is jammed with submissions, it's probable that they were auto-killed for spamming.
- handelaar 15y agoApparently because HN (incorrectly) regards .ke to have second-level domains. Which it doesn't. This is a bug.