4 ms·
Ask HN: Recent uptick in spam and advertizing on HN?
I've been seeing alot more spam, self-promotion, and advertisements (notoriously about recovering lost crypto, hacking, etc.) on HN recently. There was one story I saw about looking for wedding dresses, and the OP of that story made a thread advertizing (and self-promoting?) a store for wedding dresses.
I've looked into a profile of a spammer I see frequently, and they made some good submissions/comments, mostly obscurred by the spam they made.
Anyone else noticing this?
- slater 3y agoNot really. But check your profile settings, you might have "showdead" on.
- mdwalters 3y agoI have it on. Mainly because I see some stories that shouldn't have been dead. Most of the spammy stories I saw wern't dead, though.
- bediger4000 3y agoI'm with you. Lots more ads, spam, self promoting, and it's not flagged to death
- mdwalters 3y ago> and it's not flagged to death Agreed. One story I found that was self-promoting didn't get flagged to death even to this day.
- slater 3y agoThat's when you email the link(s) to hn@ycombinator.com with a short description.
- warrenm 3y agodid you flag it?
- bediger4000 3y agoI personally have been flagging a lot more submissions because of spam, self promoting and obvious culture wars BS. I used to write negative comments, but someone pointed out the HN guidelines, so now I flag conservatively (in the engineering sense of the word).
- bitxbitxbitcoin 3y agoAre you looking at new more often than before? I lurk there often and it's been pretty par for the course.
- loveparade 3y agoI haven't noticed more outright spam, but I've noticed many "borderline clickbait" articles that are get suspiciously highly upvoted. They tend to be flagged after a while, but only after spending quite a long time on the front page. I think people have finally figured out how to cheaply raise bot accounts to promote their clickbait articles on HN. LLMs that make it easy to raise fake accounts with good karma might have to do with that.
- the_only_law 3y agoI’ve seen it but it’s usually [dead]
- warrenm 3y agoI only check-in when I've got downtime at $WORK (or before the workday starts) I've seen ... maybe 3? spam posts this summer - but all were already flagged by the time I clicked "flag" (less than 5m after sbimission)
- warrenm 3y agorelated - I only ever check /newest for posts (never the front page)
- eimrine 3y agoFor me HN was, is and will be an endless stream of Lisp-related topics. When the amount of Lisp-related content would decrease, that will be a panic time for me.