Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lagniappe 657 days ago
What's up with all the flagged comments?
4 comments

I flagged some (most? not sure) of them as booster comments, presumably by friends trying to help the submitters out. HN users aren't supposed to do that and YC founders are given strict instructions not to do it (and scoldings when it happens), but it's impossible to prevent completely. People's friends try to "help" them and don't realize that it's actually the opposite of helping.

See the "Comments" section of the Launch HN instructions for YC startups (https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html) for an example of how strongly we emphasize this.

If I see this many questions that could have been taken straight from an FAQ, all followed up with “great question, we do so and so..”, my alarm bells go off. Shady marketing indeed.
There was even more before. Some has been removed completely.
If you turn on 'showdead' in your profile you can see all killed comments. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)

There's only one level of removal beyond that ("[deleted]") but we never do that as moderators. "[deleted]" always means either that the author deleted the post themselves or asked us to do it for them.

Thanks. I have it on but I had the window open for a while and went into the profile of one which then longer had any comments so I guess they removed it themselves.
I'm also confused. They seem positive and constructive. Do mods detect that these are some kind of automated bots?
I observed at least two brand new accounts posting some variety of “kudos”, not flagged into oblivion (yet). Gives me the ick, i guess it’s better to know mem0 is a shady marketer (maybe they are also a shady operator).