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My comment was because my last three submissions were blocked. I emailed the moderator the first time it happened, and he said the algorithm probably thought it

by boznz 2y ago

My comment was because my last three submissions were blocked. I emailed the moderator the first time it happened, and he said the algorithm probably thought it was self-promotion as I cross posted it to medium.com which I now know everybody hates. By blocked, I mean the articles showed as normal on my browser but was hidden to anybody else. I did not use the "Show HN" option because I have had articles submitted in the past from my website without this issue. I am not a prolific poster, maybe 2 or 3 a year, and appreciate HN efforts to keep the spam out, so I will give it another shot on my next original article using the "Show HN" option. Ironically my last submission that was rejected was exactly about this https://rodyne.com/?p=1400 https://rodyne.com/?p=1400

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
Right, I seem to get the same result on things I post from my medium publication - which started after I posted some links to some time travel stories I wrote in a post about time travel which seemed to me to relate and which got a few upvotes. After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked (at least for a bit) the thing is I only post things here that I think fit the site, which is about 10% of what I write, and I am a relatively prolific poster. Looking at my current submissions - in the last 30 submissions one was to an article I wrote. Why? Because I thought it fit HN, just like all the other things I post I think fit HN. Personally I think that's being a relatively well-behaved user of the site, but evidently not.
- joenot443 2y ago
  Lots of people submit their own work to HN all the time to great success. If your post was flagged, it probably just wasn’t as relevant to the community as you might have imagined. Perhaps take it as constructive criticism on your writing, rather than blaming the poor reception on the community.
  - raydev 2y ago
    Funny to call it "constructive" when the reasoning for the flag is absent.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    so I wrote >After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked and you responded >If your post was flagged please take that as constructive criticism (explanation if you don't get my point: I did not use the word "flagged")
jsnell 2y ago
You shouldn't use Show HN for an article or blog post. See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html I suspect the suggestion was made due to you talking about books originally, which (given a sample chapter) are the one stated exception to written materials being out of scope for Show HN.
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
I asked about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612321 it seems that a lot of my submissions over the past 7 months to my own stuff were with Medium's link shortener and that gets banned, mainly because if you follow a link from Medium's stats the url is the shortened form. I noticed you mentioned Medium, perhaps your problems also stem from the same source?

by boznz 2y ago

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

Right, I seem to get the same result on things I post from my medium publication - which started after I posted some links to some time travel stories I wrote in a post about time travel which seemed to me to relate and which got a few upvotes. After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked (at least for a bit) the thing is I only post things here that I think fit the site, which is about 10% of what I write, and I am a relatively prolific poster. Looking at my current submissions - in the last 30 submissions one was to an article I wrote. Why? Because I thought it fit HN, just like all the other things I post I think fit HN. Personally I think that's being a relatively well-behaved user of the site, but evidently not.

joenot443 2y ago
Lots of people submit their own work to HN all the time to great success. If your post was flagged, it probably just wasn’t as relevant to the community as you might have imagined. Perhaps take it as constructive criticism on your writing, rather than blaming the poor reception on the community.
- raydev 2y ago
  Funny to call it "constructive" when the reasoning for the flag is absent.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  so I wrote >After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked and you responded >If your post was flagged please take that as constructive criticism (explanation if you don't get my point: I did not use the word "flagged")

jsnell 2y ago

You shouldn't use Show HN for an article or blog post. See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html I suspect the suggestion was made due to you talking about books originally, which (given a sample chapter) are the one stated exception to written materials being out of scope for Show HN.

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

I asked about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612321 it seems that a lot of my submissions over the past 7 months to my own stuff were with Medium's link shortener and that gets banned, mainly because if you follow a link from Medium's stats the url is the shortened form. I noticed you mentioned Medium, perhaps your problems also stem from the same source?