Ask HN: Why so many dead comments lately?

5•mattm•2h ago

I've noticed a lot more dead comments lately in cases where the person is writing reasonable comments. You'll need showdead turned on in your settings to see the examples.

Take this thread as an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818698

The OP has a new account but all his replies are within the guidelines.

Here's another account with a dead comment in that thread. Most of their comments, while brief, seem perfectly reasonable. The account is 2 years old but most comments are dead https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josefritzishere

In this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574167) all of this user's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=backlava12) comments were marked as dead. The user has an established account and all comments seemed within guidelines.

Has anyone else noticed this more recently? Is it perhaps a result of trying to identify AI-bot accounts?

Comments

smt88•2h ago

HN’s mods have said they have huge amounts of code fighting spam alongside human workers, and they deliberately don’t discuss their tactics in order to avoid an arms race between themselves and the spammers

PaulHoule•2h ago

I dunno. One of my pet peeves of the last few months is that somebody posts an AI generated blog post and it's not good enough that we can click on it to read it so they also post an AI summary as a comment. Like... we can click on the link and read your post. Haven't you ever used HN before... Oh, I see, you created this account six hours ago.

I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.

oulipo•1h ago

Everytime you make a comment about how Grok is led by a pro-fascist team, you get downvoted and your comment gets locked

dormento•1h ago

I take it is due to automation, mostly. Every single website that has some sort of user-contributed content, forums, source code repository, social media, anything that has comment or upload capability of any kind whatsoever is being bombarded by a massive torrent of crap, and hn is no exception. The internet has no good defense against it, therefore people have to resort to captchas, geoblocking, shadow banning, proof-of-work portal solutions, cloudflare (eek!) and adjusting detection thresholds "just right" so things feel usable.

Hat's off to the mod staff, things feel "alright" even with the current situation.

ezulabs•1h ago

Self promotion posts are one thing, not sure if it applies to the examples you gave, good luck if your hn user name and your github user name is same when you have low karma.

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Comments

Ask HN: Do you offload your coding to AI, or keep your skills sharp?

Ask HN: Why so many dead comments lately?

Ask HN: What job boards are good these days?

Ask HN: Which harness do you use with Qwen3.8 27B? And why?

Ask HN: Declarative vs. Imperative

LinkedIn is a terrible quality website

Anyone using a Wispr Flow alternative that is non-cloud?

Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?

Tell HN: Substack obfuscating text to break reading mode

Ask HN: How do GitHub Copilot and Anthropic Claude compare in cost?

Ask HN: When is fine-tuning a small LLM worth it?

Porting a clearing-house money market to a smart contract

When Claude CLI asks for feedback, responding authorizes conversation capture

Ask HN: Which is cheaper: ChatGPT tokens or a 2nd Pro 20x subscription?

Ask HN: How do your teams share and distribute agent skills?

Tell HN: Firefox's default browser check dark pattern triggers Windows BSOD

Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?

Ask HN: Why does it matter if no one reads your novel as long as the AIs do?

Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

Is Claude 20x actually 20x?

Ask HN: Dead Internet

Ask HN: Remember N8n? Anyone?

Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023

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