Ask HN: How is it possible that HN is free of SPAM?

[drmacak]

Lately I was really surprised by the sheer amount of spam on web like for example in YouTube comment section. Where you can find whole groups of spam bots creating fake discussion about crypto investment etc. And Im honestly wondering how is that HN is still that SPAM free and yet that simple page. Is it only possible by having good mederators?

[solardev]

We have an excellent moderator, dang, and also the new person who just joined (forgot their name, sorry). And users can flag things that seem spammy.

If you turn in "showdead" in your preferences, you can see all the spam. They're just hidden by default.

[gus_massa]

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671

> Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.

> Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.

[toomuchtodo]

Mods and a well tuned algorithm.

[sitkack]

The power of the "flag" is extremely strong. If you look at /new, you can see all the spam, esp if you go to page 3+