

Ask/Tell HN: What's with all the spam lately? - samarudge

I'm a frequent F5'er of /new, today I've noticed a huge increase in spam posts from new users, is this some new spam bot or have I just not noticed till now?<p>Examples;<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941195<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2940981<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2940973<p>(and a few others I ether CBA to find or look like they've been deleted, including weight loss, hotels, weird looking drugs and lots of other stuff)
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_delirium
I haven't seen a huge increase in spammy _submissions_ per se recently (though
I don't have data, and do think there's definitely one compared to 6 months
ago), but it does seem like they stay undead longer. I'm not sure if the
flagging threshold went up, or if not enough people are flagging spam. It'd be
cool if more people did. The New page is already pretty noisy when it comes to
finding interesting new stuff (it seems most people just read the front page,
so the first 2-3 votes are very luck-based), and having it be spammy just
makes it less likely that people will read it and/or find the interesting
stuff on it.

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robfitz
I've been hounding /newest pretty regularly for the past couple weeks as well,
and it seems fairly steady..

I don't understand why people keep bothering, as there's no way it's showing
results. I'd assume HN is wrapped into some brilliant-auto marketing package
somewhere.

Last I heard, the magic number was 5 flags within an hour, so I think we just
need more people actively flagging.

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rawsyntax
I'm not sure, but my submissions are being marked as dead automatically now..
So I guess HN thinks I'm a spammer. What's interested is one submission that
got 10 upvotes before getting dead'ed

