I had the same thing happen twice earlier today. I hit a huge milestone on a product I launched on HackerNews about two months ago, spent a few hours writing a blog post about it and lessons learned, and posted it on HackerNews around 11am EST.
Within 50 minutes it had 17 points and had climbed up to about #13 on the front page when all of the sudden it disappeared [1]. I signed out of my HN account and checked the comments link and sure enough the page was blank, indicating that it had been killed.
I was talking to a friend on GChat at the same time this was going on. He reposted it, thinking that it was killed because of an algorithmic fluke (which was probably true) [2]. The new post gained 9 points in 10 minutes and then was killed as well.
The only thing I can think of is that because that friend upvoted the original post (and he's upvoted some of my previous posts), combined with how quickly it shot up the front page, somehow caused it to be flagged and automatically killed.
I'd still love to repost it both to share my product's milestone and to get feedback from the community, but I'm afraid it will be killed again. Any recommendations?
I'm all for stopping spam and voting rings, but it shouldn't be at the expense of legitimate posts.
Edited to add: I noticed a lot of the new posts around the same time had several points within a few minutes of being posted. Almost none had 1 point, which I thought was odd. I think someone might have written a script to upvote articles from multiple fake accounts, thereby causing HackerNews's voting-ring algorithm to mistakenly identify the posts as spam.
Wow, what a waste. That's a really good post and it is a pity that it became the subject of this nastiness. Maybe you could petition PG for a re-run? I'm sure lots of people would like to read what you wrote.
I'm not too worried about my post; as others have pointed out this seems to be happening to a lot of legitimate submissions and that's the bigger problem.
We can only speculate as to what actually happened without some sort of analysis from pg, but hopefully it's something that's not too difficult to fix. We'll see what happens.
I realize its not the best thing to happen to HN but do we really think its fair/appropriate/considerate to "petition" pg every time someone's submission is flummoxed?
If the algo is killing good content we want on HN, then pg either has to fix the bug (I'm going to go ahead and assume this is very hard) or just manually fix the individual stories.
This has been happening to me recently as well, last month I blogged about a project that people have generally been finding interesting , posted it on hacker news and it climbed up to the top of the front page then suddenly disappeared
I had seen this before and made sure to not post links to the submission anywhere (apart from on the post itself, as a replacement comments)
Within 50 minutes it had 17 points and had climbed up to about #13 on the front page when all of the sudden it disappeared [1]. I signed out of my HN account and checked the comments link and sure enough the page was blank, indicating that it had been killed.
I was talking to a friend on GChat at the same time this was going on. He reposted it, thinking that it was killed because of an algorithmic fluke (which was probably true) [2]. The new post gained 9 points in 10 minutes and then was killed as well.
The only thing I can think of is that because that friend upvoted the original post (and he's upvoted some of my previous posts), combined with how quickly it shot up the front page, somehow caused it to be flagged and automatically killed.
I'd still love to repost it both to share my product's milestone and to get feedback from the community, but I'm afraid it will be killed again. Any recommendations?
I'm all for stopping spam and voting rings, but it shouldn't be at the expense of legitimate posts.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788402
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788806
Edited to add: I noticed a lot of the new posts around the same time had several points within a few minutes of being posted. Almost none had 1 point, which I thought was odd. I think someone might have written a script to upvote articles from multiple fake accounts, thereby causing HackerNews's voting-ring algorithm to mistakenly identify the posts as spam.