mvandemar

It appears that HN has put some sort of ban on my site from appearing on the homepage, regardless of the community votes. Someone submitted a piece I wrote today, it did send some traffic to my site, I came here, voted for it myself as I do when I find one my my stories here, and then waited to see if there were any comments. What I noticed is something that I saw the last time someone submitted a story of mine here... regardless of the vote to time ratio the submission never showed anywhere but the "New" category. If you look here, you can see that it is indeed showing up, with 4 votes in 53 minutes:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-new-submissions.png

The one underneath it has less votes over a longer time period, with only 3 points, and it is showing in the "Popular" list, at #46, whereas mine is nowhere to be seen:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-popular-page2.png

The same thing happened a few weeks back when I wrote a piece about Matt Cutts, that involved the HN community itself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163390

You can see on that someone else noticed the behavior too, and asked about it. They never did get an answer though. Personally, I assumed that perhaps there was some moratorium on discussing HN on HN, and that a moderator had prevented that particular story from getting any exposure. That story did hit the front page very briefly, enough for 3 people to visit it, and was then removed (I am getting that from the traffic reports). There have been other stories that people have submitted from my site that have gone popular in the past, usually ones I have written about Mahalo or Jason Calacanis, and since I did get those 3 hits from the homepage 3 weeks ago I am pretty sure it was that exact story that caused this.

Don't get me wrong... I am in no way trying to imply that my site has any "rights" when it comes to HN or even being submittable at all, let alone the right to be voted to the front page. If the HN mods don't want people submitting posts from my site here so be it. I will even remove the icon from Socializer on my site if they want me to. I am very curious as to why it happened though. My tin-foil hat self automatically goes to "Maybe Matt Cutts saw the submission and asked a mod to kill it", but it's also just as likely that they didn't like the implications behind me saying that Matt was using the HN community to accomplish some hidden agenda, or that even the mention of HN in a story triggers some guideline. If that were the case though, I am still unsure why it would have been a permanent thing.

Does anyone have any insight into this? Thanks.

Lately I have seen more than a few "why is this here?" type comments on topics that have already gone popular on HN. The bottom line is that happens because not everyone has the same interests, and this is a social site with many different people on it.

If the fact that you have to share this wonderful digital playground with the other kids really, really bothers you, then this is for you. It's a Greasemonkey script called "HN Toolkit":

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

Part of the functionality is the ability to blacklist submissions, either by keyword in the title or in the domain (or entire domains, whichever way you want to look at it). It cycles through the list of stories and matches each against the blacklist, adding style = 'display: none;' to each match found.

Hope this helps.