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Is there a particular reason for so many [dead] submissions for 404media? I suspect a lot of people on HN rely on GitHub for work and personal projects, so any

by Terr_ 10mo ago

Is there a particular reason for so many [dead] submissions for 404media? I suspect a lot of people on HN rely on GitHub for work and personal projects, so any changes in its reliability or governance are of-interest. If there's some new accountability-sink [0] process going around banning people, I wouldn't want to be a victim just because (for example) I have some "hacking" code for brute-force decoding an easter-egg message from a game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

brw 10mo ago
I've asked dang about this before and he answered that it gets killed automatically because of the sign-up wall on some of their articles and that their articles weren't considered suitable for HN in the past: > does that mean every 404media.co article submission gets killed immediately by software and has to be vouched for before people can vote/comment on it? Yes. > Is that the case for every site with a signup wall as a sort of penalty It depends on whether there are workarounds. Last I checked, 404media.co didn't have those. Your counterexample proves that it does, at least sometimes. Or maybe they changed something? I'm open to unbanning that site but I'd like to be more sure than I am that this will continue to be the case in the future; and I guess I'd also like to see a few more good (for HN) articles from there before unbanning it. For a long while, all the articles I saw were pretty shallow and fluffy. That was in 2024 so perhaps it's time for a re-evaluation. I'll shoot him another message.
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  At present, all I'm seeing is a dismissable popup to sign up for a newsletter. Not that I can reasily rule out something far more annoying if I were to make more visits without clearing cookies, or with other articles, etc.
  - brw 10mo ago
    This one does not have a sign-up wall no, however some of their other articles do (e.g. https://www.404media.co/inside-the-telegram-channel-jailbreaking-grok-over-and-over-again/ https://www.404media.co/inside-the-telegram-channel-jailbrea..., also from today)

by Terr_ 10mo ago

brw 10mo ago

I've asked dang about this before and he answered that it gets killed automatically because of the sign-up wall on some of their articles and that their articles weren't considered suitable for HN in the past: > does that mean every 404media.co article submission gets killed immediately by software and has to be vouched for before people can vote/comment on it? Yes. > Is that the case for every site with a signup wall as a sort of penalty It depends on whether there are workarounds. Last I checked, 404media.co didn't have those. Your counterexample proves that it does, at least sometimes. Or maybe they changed something? I'm open to unbanning that site but I'd like to be more sure than I am that this will continue to be the case in the future; and I guess I'd also like to see a few more good (for HN) articles from there before unbanning it. For a long while, all the articles I saw were pretty shallow and fluffy. That was in 2024 so perhaps it's time for a re-evaluation. I'll shoot him another message.

Terr_ 10mo ago
At present, all I'm seeing is a dismissable popup to sign up for a newsletter. Not that I can reasily rule out something far more annoying if I were to make more visits without clearing cookies, or with other articles, etc.
- brw 10mo ago
  This one does not have a sign-up wall no, however some of their other articles do (e.g. https://www.404media.co/inside-the-telegram-channel-jailbreaking-grok-over-and-over-again/ https://www.404media.co/inside-the-telegram-channel-jailbrea..., also from today)