

Ask HN: How can I avoid the HN Slap? - mwetzler

Help! Today marks the 5th+ post we&#x27;ve made that has received the HN Slap, meaning it has been downvoted by a bot or mod from a front page position to a #50 or lower slot, say, #12 to #50, in two seconds.<p>I really appreciate any advice you have to solving this mystery! Hacker News is near and dear to me; most of our early customers came through HN! I&#x27;m well aware of automated voting ring detection and flame-war detection, but I&#x27;m still left perplexed about our recent posts, which involved neither. In fact I&#x27;ve had to warn teammates and friends NOT to vote for pieces, for fear of setting off the mysterious algorithm.<p>In a broader view, I&#x27;m concerned that the community might be missing out on some good content. The sporadic nature of the slaps leaves me to wild speculation -- do all non-YC company posts get the slap? Is one of our competitors a mod?<p>If any of the mods have a minute, I&#x27;d really appreciate it if you can help detect any pattern to these flaggings! Are they being done by bots or humans? Why?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6445904 17 CTOs Share Their Greatest Fears
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6528923 What CTOs Fear Most
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6087380 Our First Outage
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6587906 How Keen IO Uses Storm<p>&quot;17 CTOs share their greatest fears&quot; and &quot;What CTOs fear most&quot; were very well received. However, both received the slap once they hit the HN front page. The second post was popular enough it made it BACK to the front page, only to be slapped down AGAIN! In the case of the first CTOs post, I sent an email letting the CTOs and their companies know it was live and on HN. I suspected this may have triggered voting ring detection due to getting too many votes at the same time. I&#x27;ve been very careful NOT to repeat my mistakes on that one, but the second post still got the slap when it came out a few weeks ago!<p>Another post to get the slap was a detailed technical post by our CTO called &quot;Our First Outage&quot;. Front page one minute, gone down into the depths the next.<p>Today&#x27;s post, &quot;How Keen IO Uses Storm&quot; was also well-received, but it got the slap from #30 to #75 just about as soon as it hit the front page this morning.<p>We&#x27;ve posted these pieces from different HN accounts but the end result always seem to be the same -- if it&#x27;s related to Keen IO it gets the slap!<p>Once exception was my post on Friday about blogging, &quot;How to Write Good Blog Posts&quot;, which, ironically, is probably the least technically relevant to the community of them all. It got to stay front page for a couple of hours and didn&#x27;t get the slap! That disproved my hypothesis that my account or our domain was in some way marked for destruction, but also added validity to my hypothesis there may be a mod who doesn&#x27;t like us who happened to be out on Friday. Now I just sound like a crazy person!<p>I&#x27;ve obviously already spent too much time speculating on this mystery -- please put me out of my misery!! :)
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pg
You keep setting off the voting ring detector.

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mwetzler
Thanks for responding. I wonder if we just have too many friends on HN? We are
not asking people to vote. Hmm....

I didn't tell anyone about today's post, although we did tweet about it. Maybe
getting too many votes in a short period did it? Or is it the relationships of
the voters to my account (e.g. some of the voters have voted for my posts in
the past?).

Next post I'll try radio silence on all channels except HN. Will creating a
new account help?

Now in a weird position where I need to actively communicate to people not to
vote for our pieces... hmm....

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triaged
We've noticed this as well - even after being super strict about not
encouraging friends to upvote.

