[nnurmanov]

My submission was killed immediately. It took me weeks to build the product and days to polish the documentation. At one point, I even went 24 hours without sleep working on it—only to have the submission killed instantly.

I emailed @dang at [e-mail] but never heard back. What should I do now? I’m scared to repost because I don’t want to risk a permanent ban.

[altairprime]

> My submission was killed immediately. It took me weeks to build the product and days to polish the documentation.

You have <200 karma on an account created 3300 days ago, and I see months-long plus gaps in your participation this year alone, with almost no appreciation or replies from others. You’ve posted the same repository link twice today so far in comments on other posts. So it doesn’t seem like you’re much invested in being in this community, except to promote your brand slash project slash self, and the algorithms would likely take that into account when considering and killing your links. The mods can make a judgment call exception, and you’ve emailed them already so nothing more to do there. (If you hadn’t already emailed them, I likely would have reported you by email to them as a self-link forum spammer, so that saves me bringing you to their attention, too.)

> What should I do now?

Participate genuinely on HN on topics unrelated to whatever self-links you want to post, without referring to yourself, your projects, your businesses. Not because some algorithm might be counting your comments — and anyways, I assume if such exists, it counts unflagged comment net-upvotes that aren’t in marked flamewar or offtopic threads! — but because if you treat this community as a drive-by bulletin board to staple your flier to and move on, we’ll usually just ignore or tear down your flier (with user flags) and move on.

> I emailed @dang at [e-mail] but never heard back. What should I do now?

I emailed the mods at hn@ this weekend five or six times about various issues (this is about my typical weekly email volume to them) and, unusually, haven’t yet heard back, except in one case and it was a super easy one with a super brief reply; presumably there’s competing concerns with YC/HN/IRL as is sometimes the case and I imagine they’ll catch up eventually.

> I’m scared to repost

That’s an appropriate reaction. Barring a change in participation, I would definitely not try to circumvent the algorithms until the mods reply to your email or a few months has passed.

[nnurmanov]

Actually, my mornings start with reading HN; I am more of a reader than a writer :) But I see your point: if you find it useful, then repay it with a contribution.

I agree on the repo link as well; it was indeed selfish on my side. HN is one of the few places where you can read human content, so let's keep it that way. Lesson completely learned on my side.

Communicating with mods about issues could be a good idea too, but I shall keep it to a minimum. Apparently, they are super busy fighting AI :)

[altairprime]

Yeah, if you have a long lurker history, that makes it difficult to assess whether your intentions are genuine or not. I lack visibility into ‘voting’ participation levels as a normal user. That’s why I ask the mods to review things (and beg people to email them rather than post mod questions as post comments!) rather than, in nearly all circumstances anyways, asking for a specific mod outcome. They know far better than we do what the full circumstances are.

[zloy88]

Um, I am also new here. This makes me kinda scared how I will ever be able to post something under /show - I really don't know much about HN yet. Would it ever be allowed that I can ask for feedback for my beta project here? That's what I actually hoped for.

[altairprime]

The person I’m replying to posted three or more links to their project in unrelated threads in 24 hours or less. Presumably you will not be quite so aggressive :)

Show HN has been absolutely flooded since generative code AIs became popular, so if the site lets you post a Show HN, then you’re generally welcome to once. If nothing comes of that, best wait a while (like, weeks) while you continue participating.

(I’m not a mod, if dang/tomhow show up and comment then whatever they say takes precedence.)

[zloy88]

Oh well, didn't know that. Yea, there is already a hard barrier now before you're even allowed to post something. I will try to participate. Been missing out on HN for way too long it seems. Def. don't want to post any AI slob :D Thanks for reply though

[altairprime]

It’s generally a solid rule for any community, though it tends to be much more common IRL or on forums and message boards but less so on ‘link posting’ websites.

[natpalmer1776]

My experiences and observations of the moderation on HN is that there doesn’t usually seem to be an unreasonable response to real people trying to engage in a genuine manner.

If you are a real person trying to show something that you made, I wouldn’t worry about getting permanently banned without recourse and just post again, sometimes mistakes happen.

[nnurmanov]

I guess HN has become an AI/vs human battleground:)