

Noob stories on HN - networked
https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

======
ScottWhigham
A word of warning to others: if you visit that page and actively flag, you may
lose your flagging privileges. It happened to lots of us here when the Snowden
story first broke - a lot of folks who regularly visited /newest to
upvote/flag incoming stories lost their flagging privileges due to
legitimately flagging the duplicates/blog spam/crap about the Snowden leaks. I
can remember going to page 2 and 3 on /newest and 25 of the 30 stories shown
would be dupes or crap about Snowden that was unworthy of HN. We got
"punished" for doing what we thought was the right thing. And FYI - there is
no timeout for lost flagging privileges that I know of.

I suspect that > 50% of the stories on /noobstories are flag-worthy but do
yourself a favor and just flag 1/10th of the stories you think are
bad/unworthy. It's an unfortunate side effect of the flagging/downvoting
policy here at HN.

~~~
ewoodrich
For what it's worth, I lost flagging privileges around that time, and appear
to have got them back. There may be a timeout based on magnitude of
"illegitimate" flagging or something like that.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the
day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual
in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who
lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout
- I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging
privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread,
it appeared to be related to my comment.

------
staunch
[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

~~~
bjxrn
There's also the "over" one which allows you to set a points threshold.

Example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=50](https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=50)

------
petercooper
Idea for pg: Consider preventing accounts under a certain age (and/or karma)
submitting stories. The limit could be _really_ low (say, 24 hours and/or 5
karma) and I'm guessing it'd knock off 90% of the spam/trash problem..?

~~~
krrishd
I would personally feel that that wouldn't help as much, as many of the new
accounts are just people wishing to express their (perhaps unpopular) opinion
without putting their main account and thus themselves in negative light.

------
dantiberian
Is there somewhere that describes all of the hidden features of HN? I hadn't
seen these lists before and didn't know about the >250 karma colour changing.
I assume there must be more features hidden somewhere too.

~~~
mkr-hn
You get a reliable, safe, and fuel efficient jetpack at 4000.

~~~
sharkweek
The best is getting pg to follow you on Twitter after 10k

------
captainmuon
How are so many of these dead? If they are from new accounts, how have the
accounts been banned so quickly?

~~~
gus_massa
Some sites are autokilled. For example, because they create new accounts to
send spam. A few years ago pg posted a list and it was longest than I
expected.

Most of the URL shorteners are autokilled, because someone can hide a banned
site using it.

And I guess that Youtube has some kind of penalty, because there are a lot of
off-topic submissions and many of them are dead, but not all.

------
geerlingguy
What is this? I don't quite get it. Looks like a page of stories that simply
didn't make it to the front page...

~~~
ddinh
It appears to be a page of stories with new users.

Possibly intended as a quasi-response to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761)
?

~~~
networked
Not a response to that story but I accidentally discovered /noobstories while
searching for a link to the feature suggestion thread for a comment in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761).
I then discovered
[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) while
skimming the feature suggestion thread.

Funny how I missed those two for years despite finding four out the six things
on /lists individually. Is /lists linked to from a static page on HN?

~~~
plorkyeran
It's the leftmost link in the footer.

~~~
networked
Now _that 's_ embarrassing. Apparently I never bothered clicking that link.
Maybe "User/comment lists" would have been more encouraging, if a bit clumsy-
looking.

