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Ask HN: Why the "obvious" HN submissions?
I've been on Hn for a couple years now and have only recently noticed a proliferation of "obvious" submissions. The exact meaning of "obvious" is debatable, but no one would argue that things like google.com, facebook.com, and the like are especially so. Should I flag these submissions or is there a good reason for them?
- byoung2 17y agoI've wondered about the motivations behind these posts too. If anyone can shed some light, please do.
- jacquesm 17y agoThey're usually by newbies to see if that submit button really works. They probably should be banned automatically somehow, they add a lot of noise to the new page and sometimes they last quite long. Flagging them helps getting rid of them, the more people flag the sooner they're gone. Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories Another explanation is that link spammers use something general to see if they can post 'any link' without further credentials, usually the same author will follow up with a spam link a couple of minutes later. Some hours of day the amount of spam is quite amazing. With HNs rise in popularity this will probably get worse, so getting rid of the spam early is an excellent way of discouraging it, and that includes such 'trial balloon links'.
- mahmud 17y agoOT: Since I have enabled showing dead links I have noticed one submitter whose stories have been killed for no clear reason: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=billpg http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=billpg He has been around long enough. His stories are about average, not really excellent, but there are worse stories. Yet his last four stories have been flagged to oblivion or removed by someone. I have googled the stories themselves and they were fairly OK. Can someone shed a light on this?
- pg 17y agoThat was a mistake. (He submitted something from hubpages.com, which is very popular with spammers, but which was mistakenly set to autoban instead of merely autokill.) In general, though, please send me an email about situations like this rather than posting about it.
- mahmud 17y agoCheers admin! will do.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mahmud 17y agoSPAM bots "tasting" the site. They will come back later to see if the post is still there, and if so, they hit the site with the actual "payload".
- jules 17y agoWhat's the reason they don't immediately post their spam?
- jamesbritt 17y agoThere are adaptive filters that more readily allow posts from users or E-mail addresses that have had previous good posts. That is, a first post is more carefully filtered.
- steveklabnik 17y agoIf a new account submits 20 stories, it's probably spam. If an account that's been around a month and has 3 submissions that weren't flagged starts to submit one story a week... is it spam? Maybe. Maybe not.
- noblethrasher 17y agoI don't check the classic HN page enough to know whether or not they're diverging a lot lately but as of now they do look pretty dissimilar.
- pg 17y agoI don't know. They're always submitted from newly created accounts. I don't know if it's spambots or new users trying out the submit feature. Probably a mix, but mostly the former. It can't hurt to flag them, though they'll always get killed eventually anyway.