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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a nobody in every sense of the word. I didn't go to a fancy school; I didn't join a startup or a unicorn; I've worked as a corporate web dev for 20 years using ASP.Net and C#; I know very few people in tech (and no one high up).

My posts are never "shadow deleted" they in fact sometimes get a boost from the mods when they though it just missed the mark timing-wise (i.e. interesting post, but some breaking news thing happened, and I didn't get the love).

The moderators only car about keeping the discord civil (as civil as possible), and the posts relevant/interesting for their niche.

There probably is a "club" - but not being in it doesn't get your content shadow deleted. It just wasn't interesting enough at the time to get votes.

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I am not the original poster, so what's your explanation for why his two attempts were both deleted?

Who knows - maybe different mods have different criteria/bias? Maybe today is a slow day?

I mean, this post isn't really big news, it feels like it's just barely scraping by the notability/interest level required to make it on HN. Mostly, I just think the presence of some kind of cabal or conspiracy is a lot less likely than "mods are human and thus subjective and inconsistent".

They weren't deleted, the account was brand new when they were posted so they were probably killed by the spam detector. Questions about stuff like that should just be sent to hn@ycombinator.com, that's in all the site docs.

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

They are speculating, but there is no telling if it ever even happened. I tend to believe the site's news was just more interesting than what OOP posted.

That's Paul Graham's account, so maybe not just speculation. I didn't realize he still read this site. Not to jump on to OPs paranoia but I kind of thought he was frequenting some secret meta-HN site that still talks about entrepreneurship. Paul, if you see this, let me in! I swear I won't complain about capitalism!

It's my account, not Paul Graham's.

It appears my memory has failed me yet again. Sorry about that, pvg!

Hmmm sounds like something Paul Graham would say.

Makes me wonder if anyone has ever made up a sovereign citizen-style conspiracy theory except the person is a government agency. Like the man somehow just assigns a real person to be one rather than be employed by one, represent one, etc. There's some complicated legal reason for this and, of course, it gives you some sort of superpowers and/or freedom from consequence. Seagal-style movie trailer practically writes itself: Thomas Ptacek IS NSA.

I flagged this comment.

That would be a bad spam detector but it's obviously not one HN uses, not sure how you reached that conclusion.

That’s what I inferred from your comment

Nothing like your inference was in my comment, beside the seemingly obvious fact nobody would use such a 'spam detector'. But either way, you can trivially verify this yourself just by looking at /newest.

> the account was brand new when they were posted so they were probably killed by the spam detector

Right, that's what I wrote. It doesn't say 'all posts by new users are killed without review'. Like, why would anyone do that? How would the site work?

If I had to guess, their username contains "idiot" and so might have tripped up the spam detector.

But you can always email the mods. They're very responsive.

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