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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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