

Ask HN: Why the "obvious" HN submissions? - fogus

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?
======
jacquesm
They'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>

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
OT: 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>

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
That 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
Cheers admin! will do.

------
mahmud
SPAM 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
What's the reason they don't immediately post their spam?

~~~
jamesbritt
There 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.

------
pg
I 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.

~~~
jacquesm
Would it be possible to allow non-admins to kill noobstories ?

That would make the response a lot more snappy.

~~~
weaksauce
Or have high ranking people have more flag weight?

------
noblethrasher
I 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.

------
byoung2
I've wondered about the motivations behind these posts too. If anyone can shed
some light, please do.

