I experienced the same thing about a week ago. Though I had more votes on my post than other post posted earlier, it still was not displayed on the main page. I could not figure why.
I sent an email for explanation to HN, but did not get an answer.
Are there hidden arbitrary rules? Is everything disclosed? Can HN silently kill a post? If so, I think this would be unethical...
Users can flag a post. If enough users flag a post, the post can be auto-killed. Something about what you posted made several people think "This is spam."
From the guidelines, I see: "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)". Fine, I have no issue with a Karma implementation.
But, I don't think my article was about spamming. I was just announcing the new release of JXTA/JXSE 2.6, an open source P2P project initiated by Sun Microsystems in 2001. This is not different than PostGre announcing a new release (for example). I don't see why it would attract 'negative' Karma.
My issue is that I don't see the flag link. Moreover, there is nothing telling me if I have attracted 'negative karma' at all. If people 'vote' that way, I believe they should assume it and this information should be displayed (if not to inform the poster of spamming).
After all, HN is about providing opinion about posts. I don't see why negatives should not be revealed and accounted for publicly.
Conversely, I can imagine people instrumentalize this 'flag' link to kill a post not in their interest. Far fetched, but possible. There is a gap to 'get away with murder'.
I believe more transparency about negative karma would not hurt HK overall, and would improve overall experience of newcomers.
Flagging is not negative karma, it is marking something as spam. You don't see a flag link because you don't have enough karma.
As to your post, a new version of PostGres is interesting to many people. Release of open source P2P project - not so much. However, your post is actually a blog post that has some interesting info in, so I'd suggest with a better title your post would have appeared much less spammy and encouraged more clicks (e.g. "As of today, JXTA 2.6 is a mature library for P2P in Java". But not that. Just like that. Not that.)
As to transparency, no-one sees how many flags a post has (except pg I guess and some automated algorithm.) People must simply make an honest assessment themselves if they think a post is off-topic/spam. By not showing the number of flags pile-on effects are avoided. Multiple flags are required to kill a post, so it would have to be a large, shady conspiracy to bury your P2P software - perhaps the flags came from riaa1 through riaa10!
Ok, I get your suggestion about title. You say my post has interesting info.
Problem is, I still don't know whether people considered it a spam or whether there has been a glitch last week (I mean, why hasn't it been displayed on the main page?).
I have no problem if some people found it a spam, but I think I have a right to know then. Isn't it a legitimate request? There must be a possibility to display that info to the poster only?
P.S.: I am adding my link here again so people can judge whether it is spam:
I sent an email for explanation to HN, but did not get an answer.
Are there hidden arbitrary rules? Is everything disclosed? Can HN silently kill a post? If so, I think this would be unethical...
Can someone from HN clarify? Thanks !!!