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I 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
by matt1 15y ago
I 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 ).
- dfc 15y agoI realize its not the best thing to happen to HN but do we really think its fair/appropriate/considerate to "petition" pg every time someone's submission is flummoxed?
- vacri 15y agoIf that's the only path to resolving the issue, why is it unfair/inappropriate/inconsiderate?
- DiabloD3 15y agoIf the algo is killing good content we want on HN, then pg either has to fix the bug (I'm going to go ahead and assume this is very hard) or just manually fix the individual stories.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>do we really think its fair/appropriate/considerate to "petition" pg every time someone's submission is flummoxed // As it appears this is the only way to appeal against what appears to be a bad algorithmic story rejection then IMO yes this is fair and appropriate. If there were moderators or a user moderation process then these sorts of issues would get picked up there. Of course PG is perfectly within his rights to ignore any such submission, depends on the purpose of the site really.
- blhack 15y agoI don't really think we need to go and petition anybody to resubmit this. There was probably a bug in the algo. When the bug is fixed, just append some garbage CGI parms to the end of the url, and submit it again. http://www.leandomainsearch.com/2000?resubmit=1 http://www.leandomainsearch.com/2000?resubmit=1
- matt1 15y agoYeah, no need to petition. Assuming the bug is fixed (and it sounds like pg is working on it), I'll post it again on Tuesday around 11am EST and we'll see where it goes.
- DanBC 15y ago[2] is no longer dead, but has no comments.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- daleharvey 15y agoThis has been happening to me recently as well, last month I blogged about a project that people have generally been finding interesting , posted it on hacker news and it climbed up to the top of the front page then suddenly disappeared I had seen this before and made sure to not post links to the submission anywhere (apart from on the post itself, as a replacement comments) http://arandomurl.com/2012/03/27/pouchdb-is-couchdb-in-the-browser.html http://arandomurl.com/2012/03/27/pouchdb-is-couchdb-in-the-b...