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Ask HN: Why are a large proportion of legit posts being marked [dead]?
- unimpressive 15y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaelkscott Notice his karma is lower than his highest ranked post right now. In a now deleted post he claims he lost 900+ karma overnight. Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero. EDIT: And if anything like that happens on a mass-scale and PG doesn't have a transaction rollback in the wings...
- mikecane 15y ago>>>Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero. I don't see anyone here criticizing HN or its community practices. We're just all trying to figure out what's been happening.
- unimpressive 15y agoNo, I mean the spammer/cracker megadownvoting you into oblivion. (And if you come to any other conclusion as to what's behind this after seeing that, I'd love to hear it.) EDIT: Well, like another poster stated, they could have been linking a whole bunch of spam links with attractive titles to exploit the HN link glitch to garner the dude the 900+ downvotes. But I'm not sure you can get 900 clicks that way...
- mikecane 15y agoYeah, seeing Polls submitted under various accounts and at least one person losing karma points makes me wonder if that's likely too. If it's done, we'd be able to appeal because it wasn't done for legitimate cause by those with the power at HN.
- tomjen3 15y agoPG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. As for being hellbanned, well I have 3 after my name for a reason.
- unimpressive 15y ago>PG can't roll back, because he isn't using a database backend. I was afraid of that... May I ask why? Too much resource usage? Arc doesn't have a DB API?
- Estragon 15y agoWho cares, really? It's all play money.
- unimpressive 15y agoWell of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
- abtinf 15y agoVia email, I asked PG about this 7 years ago. me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)." PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
- unimpressive 15y agoThank you for answering. At the same time however, I'm not really sure what to think about that. On the one hand future proof is a massive win. On the other no rollbacks seems like a risky way to operate. I hope he keeps regular backups of the data files.
- mikecane 15y agoI think we're not being let in on a silent war happening here. It seems bogus points are being assigned to submissions and they are then being killed. It started several hours ago. See first hints here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069 And someone else noticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740
- acangiano 15y agoThis is most likely what's happening. I submitted an interesting book review. The kind that would get routinely ignored on HN. It immediately got 8 points. Very odd. I expect it to die any time now.
- mikecane 15y agoI've rarely had submissions killed. But I was surprised when mine got ten points within moments of posting it. That made me suspicious and since then it's the likely reason for submissions being killed: Someone is giving everything bogus points.
- gruseom 15y agoYou guys are more on the ball than I am. When my post got instant upvotes I thought, "How pleasant that so many people are interested in dataflow computation". Probably HN's software is detecting the suspicious voting and killing the posts.
- jacquesm 15y agoI've seen the same thing happen on this article that I wrote last friday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775365 It went up like a rocket and disappeared just as fast. I didn't submit it so I have no clue whether or not the submitter gamed the system but it sure looked weird. Given the subject of this thread that's actually an on-topic link :)
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- mikecane 15y agoWhat worries me now is this. Recently some people showed how points could be assigned to posts by clicking on a link. Now I wonder if maybe some of us have been somehow infected and are somehow contributing these points without knowing? Is that even possible?
- Estragon 15y agoDo you mean a XSRF-style attack on upvotes? Could be, but I can't imagine why...
- mikecane 15y agoI'm not a coder, so I don't know how it could be done. I was just thinking of those "evercookies" that can't be killed in a reasonable manner.
- dfc 15y agoYou can't imagine why Eve would want to trick Alice and Bob into upvoting one of her submissions she had an interest in? Or you can not imagine why Eve would want to trick Alice and Bob into upvoting other submissions so that they got killed and her submission received more attention?
- daegloe 15y agoIt appears that duplicate submissions are getting through as well.
- z_ 15y agoThey will be resurrected Monday coming.
- danso 15y agoI submitted this NYT article, "Does the iPad Have One Button Too Many?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788937 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788937 It got five votes in 3 minutes -- I know HN'ers love Apple talk, but that's a little fast. And the submission is not in the top 100 of submissions. It could also be that I'm just autobanned for some reason. edit: FWIW, about half an hour ago, the submission was revived. Thanks(?)
- mikecane 15y agoI've been refreshing and I saw yours go dead. I have never seen so many posts on the New page get points like this. Someone is clearly hacking HN. I hope it can be stopped before this site is ruined. As it is, everything submitted today that was worthwhile will not be seen by the HNers. No chance for those submissions at all. Edited to add: Oops. Not dead. Was thinking of a different submission. But that it got points along with every submissions surrounding it is proof that a hack is happening today.
- Alex3917 15y agoIt sounds like people are using bots to upvote other peoples' stories so that they get autokilled, thus making it more likely that their own stories reach the front page.
- unimpressive 15y agoThat's...brilliant. Sort of reminds me of my concern about bots artificially inflating google rankings for competitors to get them banned. (Which apparently turned out to be unwarranted.) EDIT: By "brilliant" I mean brilliant in that twisted security breaker kind of thinking that slightly creeps most people out. EDIT2: As the post below points out, in retrospect it's pretty weak. But then, most things of this nature seem pretty weak in retrospect. In my opinion the fact that it's so weak is the whole beauty of it. It's a simple oversight that wasn't obvious until pointed out. Regardless the perpetrator is an asshat.
- Alex3917 15y ago
- untog 15y agoThere is- or has been- something very strange going on lately. At the height of the GeekList mini-controversy last week the HN thread discussing it[1], which was in third place on the front page, was flagged and killed. The second discussion that was created[2] was also killed. Then I posted a blog entry[3] which also got to the front page, then was also flagged and killed. At that point I just gave up, because what can you do? It seems like the flagging mechanism is far too powerful- just a few reports and the entry gets shunted back seven pages. A few more and it's gone entirely. It's worrying for two reasons: one, that original Geeklist discussion had some great points being made, and a lot of users were obviously engaging with it before a minority decided to dispose of it. Two, there's a clear minority on here that would like to see discussions about sexism in tech removed from HN. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378 [3] http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/19740556298/why-are-posts-about-the-geeklist-controversy-being http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/19740556298/why-are-posts-...
- gravitronic 15y agoMaybe it's due to the lack of a "downvote" button for submissions?
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agoI've noticed that there's a new kind of "political correctness" which, quite paradoxically, maintains that complaints about sexist and racist behavior cannot even be discussed (on the grounds that political correctness is somehow more abhorrent than the behavior that is being critiqued)
- tjic 15y ago> (on the grounds that political correctness is somehow more abhorrent than the behavior that is being critiqued) Or perhaps PC stuff is not so much abhorrent as deeply deeply BORING and un-related to what we want to read here at HN?
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- mikecane 15y agoOK, look at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788970 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788970 That's like the tenth frikkin poll that's shown up here today. Are individual accounts hacked too?
- mikecane 15y agoAnd now we get another poll submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3789065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3789065 Something is happening here and it's very bad.
- richf 15y agoI lost 4 karma points off a dead post.
- dclaysmith 15y agoThis seems to go beyond individuals killing story. A few hours ago ALL stories were killed... This is a screenshot of the /newest (page 2 now) that shows the gap in submissions: http://i.imgur.com/hLkwa.png http://i.imgur.com/hLkwa.png
- mikecane 15y agoNow I'm beginning to think that perhaps some accounts here might have been compromised: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3789224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3789224 Those who run HN might want to check out all those fake poll submissions today for likely suspects.
- benohear 15y agoI had a similar thing happening to a submission I made the other day. It quickly climbed up the ranks, then it dropped to 27 then it vanished. However, about 20 minutes later it got re-instated and spent most of the afternoon on the homepage. No idea what went on.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoI read with showdead on, so I always see the comments from the hellbanned. If I think the comment is worthwhile, I upvote it anyway. I don't know if it does any good, or if it maybe eventually leads to them being unbanned, but I try to help out if they're contributing.
- matt1 15y agoI had the same thing happen twice earlier today. I hit a huge milestone on a product I launched on HackerNews about two months ago, spent a few hours writing a blog post about it and lessons learned, and posted it on HackerNews around 11am EST. Within 50 minutes it had 17 points and had climbed up to about #13 on the front page when all of the sudden it disappeared [1]. I signed out of my HN account and checked the comments link and sure enough the page was blank, indicating that it had been killed. I was talking to a friend on GChat at the same time this was going on. He reposted it, thinking that it was killed because of an algorithmic fluke (which was probably true) [2]. The new post gained 9 points in 10 minutes and then was killed as well. The only thing I can think of is that because that friend upvoted the original post (and he's upvoted some of my previous posts), combined with how quickly it shot up the front page, somehow caused it to be flagged and automatically killed. I'd still love to repost it both to share my product's milestone and to get feedback from the community, but I'm afraid it will be killed again. Any recommendations? I'm all for stopping spam and voting rings, but it shouldn't be at the expense of legitimate posts. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788402 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788402 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788806 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788806 Edited to add: I noticed a lot of the new posts around the same time had several points within a few minutes of being posted. Almost none had 1 point, which I thought was odd. I think someone might have written a script to upvote articles from multiple fake accounts, thereby causing HackerNews's voting-ring algorithm to mistakenly identify the posts as spam.
- ekpyrotic 15y agoYou can see that uptick in upvotes here: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/ http://hnpickup.appspot.com/
- jacquesm 15y agoWow, what a waste. That's a really good post and it is a pity that it became the subject of this nastiness. Maybe you could petition PG for a re-run? I'm sure lots of people would like to read what you wrote. (If you're interested and can't find the link, the article is here: http://www.leandomainsearch.com/2000 http://www.leandomainsearch.com/2000 ).
- mikecane 15y agoI thought things were calming down. As of 2:08PM EDST, I'm seeing almost every submission on New immediately get points again.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 15y agoSome people just submit a lot of posts. Not pointing fingers, but here's one: (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=daegloe http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=daegloe) 30 posts in less than 3 hours.
- mikecane 15y agoWow. Maybe he needs a blog or linkblog. I think one day I did 5 and I felt bad but I thought all were germane to hacker interests. Generally I am not submitting everyday.
- Steko 15y agoMaybe the algorithm was modified to give some initial karma based on the users past submissions and this is running into the spam filter settings?
- losethos 15y agoIt's all fake. Just mind games.
- pcvarmint 15y agoWake me up when I can downvote. Until then this discussion is moot.