Remind HN: Go to Noobstories, flag spam

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

by sorbus • 16 years ago

61 34 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

gte910h• 16 years ago

I do not understand

vibhavs• 16 years ago

Noobstories contains links posted from newly-created user accounts. The category is intended for moderation and tends to have more spam than others - the OP is asking you to flag spam articles on Noobstories to maintain the overall high-quality of HN.

PCheese• 16 years ago

How does one "flag as spam"? I don't see any such links on either the article discussion page or the user page.

Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652503

dschobel• 16 years ago

Yikes, 2 out of every 3 submissions (as of right now, at least) are [dead].

This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.

pg2• 16 years ago

Don't worry, that's normal. Low, in fact, because this is a weekend.

There are already such solutions, and those are what killed most of these submissions. But I'm happy to have humans helping out too.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Jesus.

Can't you make hn links non-follow? At least of the newbies?

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

> This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.

I noticed most of the accounts whose submissions were killed were created just a day ago. Perhaps it would be best to disable submission of stories by accounts that don't have a certain number of karma points and/or haven't existed for a certain number of days?

There would then be the issue of HNers who wanted to submit stories/comment anonymously occasionally, but that might be best solved by having a "submit anonymously" option.

jbellis• 16 years ago

how are we supposed to find the noobstories link normally?

MarkSweep• 16 years ago

At the bottom of the page there is a "lists" link. noobstories is listed there.

wealthyox• 16 years ago

I never knew there was so much spam. I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

> I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer.

The fact that you write this more or less already proves your point. Spammers would not engage in conversation (at least, not normally).

tomjen32• 16 years ago

It would seem then, that the solution would be to ban new postings by users who don't have at least 10 karma.

charliepark• 16 years ago

I'm sure the scenarios and solutions have been thought through, but this is an issue that frustrates me, especially in the mornings, when activity is lighter, and there's a higher noise-to-signal ratio. (Or maybe that's just when I notice it more.) I flag what I can, and I'm sure the automated filters do catch most (per PG's comment), but there seems to be a really easy way to combat most of this:

1. accounts need to be active for X days before they can comment (at all) 2. accounts need to have a karma score over Y to submit posts

Wouldn't that resolve most of these stories?

oconnore• 16 years ago

#1: No, increasing the latency of the time it takes to post spam has nothing to do with the throughput.

#2: Probably not a good idea. It's very hard to get lots of karma from comments alone, and you start to cut in on actually useful posts, like a new founder posting a link to his/her company at launch.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Re #2, it'd only take even needing 4 or 5 karma to dissuade the majority of spammers. And hard? The majority of my > 10k karma comes from comments - possibly even over 90%.

It's not far fetched to expect people to have posted one or two comments a couple of people vote up before being able to submit and it'd decimate this problem.

ez77• 16 years ago

It would help to have the "noobstories" header on the main HN page. Only after typing in the URL http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories is that header visible.

hellrich• 16 years ago

Related to quality: Is there any possibility to filter the RSS feed?

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Why not restrict submissions to users with over, say, 10 karma? Only a tiny subset of spammers would write comments to get over that hurdle (though it would only take a couple of reasonable ones). Has this been discussed extensively before?

duck• 16 years ago

Yeah, I've thought the same thing as it seems like it would be helpful (but still possible compared to something like the dribbble invite system).

Also, another idea I had would be to make link submissions cost karma. It could even be dynamic based on your average story up-votes (i.e if you submit stories that get up-votes it costs you 1 karma, otherwise more).

In the end, this is PG's site and I'm sure he has thought of (and tried) a lot of things.

sprout• 16 years ago

That makes anonymous posting difficult to do without degrading the quality of the site.

robryan• 16 years ago

I wonder if a post anonymous button would work or would it just lead to an overuse of anonymous posting. Something reasonable would be to restrict it to 1 anonymous topic a week and only anonymous replies in that single topic.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

Related: go to noobcomments [0] and downvote trolls and spammers, and give upvotes and thoughtful responses to those who deserve them.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

taitems• 16 years ago

Is there a list of all the hidden HN pages located somewhere? There appear to be a few pages that you can't get to in your top navigation bar, eg:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/best

- http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

- http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

aresant• 16 years ago

Look at the bottom left of the page - left most menu says "lists" and takes you to http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Remind HN: Go to Noobstories, flag spam

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