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Ask HN: How can I make pending comments posted from a new account visible?
1 points by 2510c39011c5 3271 days ago
I just created a new account a couple of hours ago, hoping to participate in some discussion with a certain level of anonymity. But it looks like the comments that I submitted with that account have all been marked as "dead" by the system, and are not visible to users whose "karma" is less than a certain value. As some posts that I was replying to were submitted by some accounts with very little karma (< 300), I doubt my posts could be seen by them.

I tried to put non-trivial information in each of my posts, and I absolutely have not used any aggressive language. But how can I make those posts visible to some account with little karma, so I could participate in a good discussion in a timely fashion?

3 comments

  I just created a new account a couple of hours ago, 
  hoping to participate in some discussion with a certain 
  level of anonymity.
Presumably, if a mod thinks you're sockpuppeting, they just ban the account.

Anyway, the only way for us to judge the validity of your claim that you put non-trivial information in them and didn't use aggressive language is to... read the comments you made. But you can't show us the comments, since you didn't want to link them to 2510c39011c5. Funny little dilemma.

Perhaps the question could be rephrased as, "how to make any comment posted by an account created less than 5 hours ago visible by any other accounts?"

It looks like the system does not allow a new account to initiate a discussion thread; so I have to ask with an account with a certain accumulation of karma in order to solicit that information.

Obviously not all new accounts are dead-by-default, because we can see comments from new users. So either you triggered some obscure-by-design antispam measure, designed to be intentionally hard to reverse engineer, or a moderator manually banned the user.
They probably would give better visibilities to those new accounts created from certain well-known IP address ranges...

And their visibility mechanism seems to be a bit involved...as for now, each of my three different HN accounts has a different view scope for posts in a same thread...

Seems these days it is much more difficult for a new account of vague origin to participate in a discussion here than it was a few years ago...

I understand your intention. Quite a few of the responses on salary discussions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698712) are throw-away accounts where existing HN users value anonymity.

Below the headline you should see

"1 point by [whatever that account name] 1 hour ago | flag | vouch | hide | past | web"

Click the 'vouch' link.

thanks for the pointing...

but for some reason that I am not quite sure, I do not have this "vouch" nor "flag" option for any of the posts that I have the read access...seems the discussion system here works in a way that involves more parameters than "karma" alone...

Questions like this should be addressed to the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com.
I was hoping to get some quick solution by asking here, so I could join that conversation before its fad fades...

But yes, generally, questions like this should be emailed to the moderators and then wait for their response...