Ask HN: My recent show HN post got flagged need guidance
hi recently i shared my work which is an opensource platform i made and yesterday i shared its details and its repo link on hackernews under show hn it gained good traffic reaching 16 points under 1 hour but got flagged now i need help understanding why this happened and how can i unflag it or how i can share my work with HN community
There are a few reasons, it seems. If you address the following things, you should be much better off to post in this forum.
- You posted the same thing more than once. This could be seen as spam. Try one really good, detailed post, instead of many okay ones.
- Your account is pretty new, and newer accounts have no reputation. Again, people could think you are a spam account. Try looking around this forum more, and making some good comments. This will help build your reputation here and give you a better understanding of how things work.
- Your project seems to have been developed with heavy help from AI. This is fine, but AI coded projects can sometimes be poor quality and low effort. People likely assumed your project was poor quality and low effort. When using AI, try to at least do the writing yourself. Use AI for the code, but write the project description and things like the `README.md` by yourself.
- Your descriptions of the project were somewhat unclear. You could gain from crafting a better, shorter, more direct [elevator pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch). This will help people understand what you've built better.
- A lot of your post and comments have poor grammar and spelling. Again, this a sign of low effort. You should try to make your writing more correct with grammar and spelling before posting. If you need help with this, a good idea is to ask AI to review your writing before posting, and then rewriting based on the grammar/spelling mistakes it brings up. (Please note though that you should still write everything in the final post yourself.)
People on this forum appreciate effort. That's probably why your posts were not received well. Some people on here saw a lot of signs in your posts that are common with low effort content. That's why you were flagged.
That all being said, personally, I wouldn't have flagged your post. It was a little rough around the edges, and I'd urge you to polish what you put out to the world more, but overall I think you did follow this site's rules.
Even if you didn't, that is no excuse for people on this site to insult you as they have. You are welcome here, and I wish you the best, friend.
thank you so much for guide it really helped me understand how the platform works and i really appreciate your kind words and your efforts explaining the issue to me initially it was kind of rough for me when i saw comments first time after the post went live but the comments out on this post helped me alot
Although I've no idea about this but while reading comments, I got to learn about this issue and thanks for sharing. I'll be careful when I share my first project here in some time.
I got the same problem with my posts and comments. They were flagged, which was obvious for me after i activated the "showdead" option in my profile, or they got marked as "shadow-dead" and I only found out via the public JSON API. "Shadow-Dead" means, for me, everything looked okay, but no one else saw my post.
After that, I asked an HN Mod what the problem was, and they thought my posts were created by GenAI, and because of that, they were flagged. And he gave me the advice that I don't use GenAI at all for HN, not even to polish my crappy text.
Hope this was helpful, wish you a good Day
Thankyou good day to you too
I didn't flag it, but some recommendations:
* Start all sentences with a capital letters and end them with a point.
* Is the code AI generated? If it is people will not like it unless the project is super original.
* I still don't understand what it does, or to be more clear, why it is better than ChatGPT. I think it's self hosted, but I'm not sure how many people care about that.
I didn't flag it, but... it was the third time you submitted the same thing, wasn't it?
> i need help understanding why this happened
I don't know for sure but, as others have pointed out, yesterday's submission was the third time you'd posted it to Show HN. People have a low tolerance for dupe posts, especially if they're perceived as excessive self-promotion.
Also, your work might be seen as vibecoded and therefore "ai slop". I dont know if it is, but all it takes is a perception.
Finally, your work might be seen as a commercial threat by some people here - causing them to flag it.
> how i can share my work with HN community
Write a technical article about some aspect of what you've done. Talk about the challenges and how you solved them. Include a link to the repo. Put it in an external site (even github) and submit a link. If its interesting then people will notice.
any guide will be very helpful for me as i am quite new here
Read the comments people wrote against your submission.
I have no special insight, but I think this commenter cut to the core of the problem:
> "I came to the comments because the web page for Enzo explains everything except what the hell it does. Then I couldn't understand the [submission] comment either."
I think you need to practice your "elevator pitch" technique before you submit here again.
It looks like you have a new account and your only posts and comments are about promoting your project. Self-promotion is tolerated to a degree, but shouldn't be the primary or only thing you do here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321198
It just looks like slop. Now, I wouldn't flag because of this, but someone else might.