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by newsat13 3319 days ago
> We're unlikely to publish all that because doing so would increase two bad things: attempts to game the site, and meta nitpicking.

So security by obscurity helps at times.

5 comments

Someone once did an analysis on HN posts and their ranking relative to the time they were posted and votes. And they found posts with certain keywords were heavily penalized and sort of soft banned from the site. IIRC it included stuff like "NSA" and "HN" and posts from certain sites like reddit and youtube (but I could be remembering.)

Having the full list of banned keywords, or even acknowledging there is a list, could cause drama. And it's easily evaded if people know about it, like when reddit banned "Tesla" posts got through by misspelling it "Telsa".

There's also other stuff like a controversy filter, that detects articles with more comments than votes and penalizes them. I try to avoid commenting in articles that are getting close to the limit to avoid triggering it.

of course it helps, i don't think anybody's ever denied that. It just shouldn't be relied on.
It's not about security, just content curation.
Reddit has a similar approach if I'm not mistaken.
Passwords are security through obscurity too. Things would be a lot less secure if all passwords were publicly available.
Security by obscurity is precisely defined as security that relies on the algorithm/implementation itself being private to be able to function. Key material being private does not qualify for this. The alternative is that security through obscurity becomes such an all-encompassing term as to become meaningless
In that case, 256 bit encryption keys are security-through-obscurity too, they're just realllllly obscure.
Indeed. The difference between "Security by obscurity" versus login/passwords is really scale.

Usually, some numbnut "programmer" sets a no-login and a simple password as a secret service account. It invariably is found, and badness ensues.

Whereas login/password is a 1/password_space chance of getting it. It's the combination of a default hidden account and no way to know/change it.