Ask HN: Why so many [dead] replies?

4 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by cyanclouds

Item id: 49082821

16 Comments

Bender

4 hours ago

The site is being flooded or more like hammered with AI submissions. If you have ideas for how to fix this please do suggest them.

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

I don’t believe that. Almost all the ones marked [dead] are real, normal comments simply disagreeing with the official HN viewpoints.

brazukadev

4 hours ago

if you have a theory already why did you ask a question?

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

Who said I have a theory? I just don’t believe it’s AI since I’ve seen the [dead] comments.

I don’t know what the reason for a mod to mark so many harmless often useful things as [dead] could be.

Sometimes a mod will appear and totally rip a person apart for what I felt was a regular comment. I see power tripping mods here have a mental breakdown over non-issues and ban people and remove all their comments ever posted.

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

They’ll go back years deleting old comments that were fine just to “get” the user even more.

Problem is you’re ruining the site

brazukadev

3 hours ago

"I don't have a theory"

goes to describe a theory. Did your comments in your other HN account get killed for no reason and that is why you are mad and saying the comments are real?

not all killed comments are AI comments but a good amount of them are because they are bots trying to farm karma. We see the ones that doesn't work but many cases just work and we don't notice.

rvz

4 hours ago

> If you have ideas for how to fix this please do suggest them.

Raise the overall minimum required karma to 1100 such that any user with <1100 karma:

- Is throttled for 1 comment every 2 days.

- When commenting they can comment with a maximum of 40 characters in the text box.

- They cannot post links (if you post a link === [dead] comment).

- 90 day waiting period until the user can post submissions.

Job done.

brookst

4 hours ago

Probably leads to long term site death as fewer new people have the patience for that, and older users age out/die.

Who’s going to keep coming back to post one 40-char comment every two days?

It’s a real problem. Being able to pull in reputation from other sources might help: link established GitHub or (shudder) LinkedIn accounts? Or build the long-fantasized anonymous web of trust reputation thing?

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

I’d never use it.

It already seems like most of the comments are that Simon guy and Chris Marshall NY lol. There’s like 10 people left who are allowed visibility.

Seems like the whole site will soon be [dead]

There are far more shill/bot comments that HN gets paid for btw (Claude, kagi, and that bs)

brazukadev

4 hours ago

on that I will agree, simonw is the allowed AI spammer.

JohnFen

3 hours ago

You may as well just ban new users altogether.

brazukadev

4 hours ago

there are some AI bots working full time replying many threads. The HN moderation system doesn't ban them but kill all their posts.

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

They’re not AI comments. They are very often regular people just sharing viewpoints which many times seem totally fine.

Sometimes they will [dead] a joke just because it was a joke. Not even offensive just grumpy mod doesn’t want humor so it’s gone.

But that is gutting the site of all its good content.

All that remains is “kagi” “Claude” and the same 4 topics

fsflover

2 hours ago

> Sometimes they will [dead] a joke just because it was a joke.

This not Reddit. Jokes are rarely appropriate here.

> Not even offensive just grumpy mod doesn’t want humor so it’s gone

A lot of dead comments receive flags from users without mods involved. I flag silly jokes sometimes, too.

> They’re not AI comments

You can't argue this without providing examples.

cyanclouds

4 hours ago

Not just replies but submissions.

A mod literally reworded my title and it doesn’t say that anywhere lol

Come on guys

fsflover

an hour ago

> A mod literally reworded my title

Why are you so vague? What was reworded into what exactly?