

Ask HN: Why is the "Google, what were you thinking?" link getting killed - bonaldi

"New" is currently rammed with dead links to http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/ -- but it doesn't look like a dupe, since there are no live threads on it, and it doesn't strike me as spam. What's wrong with it?
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bhousel
There is no grand conspiracy involving Google apologism. Everything with a
.co.ke domain is auto-killed by the HN submission process.

I just tried it myself with some other random Kenyan domain:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460932>

~~~
jiaaro
... ok, and the obvious question: "Why are .co.ke domains auto-killed?"

~~~
handelaar
Apparently because HN (incorrectly) regards .ke to have second-level domains.
Which it doesn't.

This is a bug.

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EwanToo
I assume it's been manually flagged enough times that any new submissions to
the same URL (or perhaps even the domain?) are now marked as spam and killed
automatically.

That leaves the question of who'd be doing the flagging though, it seems a
relevant story.

------
user24
Clicky: [http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-
you-t...](http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-
thinking/)

Related discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033>

------
paulsilver
I thought it was odd that I couldn't find it, so I submitted to find the
conversation and it went in as a new sub. I can't see anyone else's submission
of it in the first few pages of New.

~~~
janzer
In your profile page set "showdead" to yes.

~~~
paulsilver
Thanks, and yes, I can now see New is absolutely full of the same story.

------
janzer
I just submitted it as well because it didn't seem to be posted.

~~~
hellweaver666
Same here... then I saw this in the new list!

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falling
Easy: HN users' Google apologism.

I participated in a few Google critical discussion in the past few weeks and a
surprising number of them were killed for no apparent reason. They were
lively, non abusive discussion, they just happened to be slightly critical to
Google.

Since I have never witnessed the same for any other topic, I concluded that
the HN crowd doesn't like Google being criticized too much.

~~~
npc
I've witnessed plenty of Google apologism on HN, but to be fair I've also
witnessed a significant amount of anti-Google bias as well. Either way, saying
that HN is deliberately blocking anti-Google sites strikes me as paranoid and
needlessly cynical.

~~~
falling
Not HN, NH's crowd: by flagging those links. Of course the HN code itself is
not biased.

(amended original post)

Of course people will be biased both ways, but I never personally witnessed
dead links on Apple, Facebook or Microsoft criticizing discussions, so that's
my conclusion from personal experience.

~~~
Natsu
It appears that the first submission had a highly editorialized headline and
was submitted by someone who had made no other submissions or comments. Given
the gravity of the accusation, I can easily see someone flagging it without
even reading it. That would be enough to kill it and then the anti-spam code
takes over from there with no conspiracy required, just one or maybe two flags
on a story where someone thought the headline was overly editorialized.

~~~
falling
Correct: no conspiracy required, just bias.

------
yanw
The link was probably nuked because of it's all caps headline, try
resubmitting it now using a headline with less caps.

~~~
EwanToo
There's been lots of submissions with different headlines, it seems any
submission to the URL gets killed immediately. I assume it's a spam filter in
action (and it's actually doing it's own job of keeping 50 copies of the same
story from appearing).

~~~
Natsu
Which is weird in and of itself. Normally, submitting the same thing would get
the first copy upvoted.

Just how were all those submissions bypassing that process?

EDIT: Here's the first link to it. It's the only submission by someone who
joined over a year ago who has no comments and the default 1 karma. And it has
an editorialized headline. I bet it would only take one flag to kill something
like that. Then everything else would be marked as a dupe of something
dead....

So much for "Don't be evil": How Google is doing evil in Kenya (co.ke)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3459756>

~~~
user24
I'm guessing the dupe filter doesn't check [DEAD] links

~~~
Natsu
You might be right. It might just auto-kill instead. Might be worth looking at
the Arc source, but I'm about out of time right now.

~~~
pygy_
Or upvote the killed story, sending the vote to /dev/null.

