Detecting spam on Hacker News

Detecting spam on Hacker News

There's been a concerted effort to spew crap all over Hacker News in recent months. As someone who rather enjoys seeing quality posts up there and really despises this kind of spam, I am ruthless about flagging this harmful garbage. This morning, someone had the gall to post asking "why my story got dead".

Let's just ignore the fact that something with such broken grammar needs to be killed. That's a given. Let's instead look at what else is going on here.

techieapps.com is full of garbage posts. It is nothing but stolen posts from other places which have been mapped into Engrish of some flavor. They usually get away with it, but this post went too far. I won't say how I identified it, but I imagine anyone with half a brain can figure out what I did.

I'm also not going to link to the stolen post. You can find it in a comment in that "why my story got dead" post, above. I will, however, point to the original post they ripped off.

Take a look at both of them and try to come up with any other explanation. It's just not going to happen.

If you have the ability to flag posts on HN and care about seeing quality, I advise you to flag anything from them into the ground.