That site, along with several similar ones, is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and too much promotional behavior.
The problem is by then most of the damage is done. HN algorithms clearly work off some amount of time based decay. It basically suggests getting a stable of people to vouch when whenever you post something.
I don't think people consider the entire site spam. It's user-created content after all. But if 99% on a site is spam and your articles are not, you may want to consider posting them somewhere else, ideally your own blog, to avoid suffering from the site's bad reputation.
The same goes for medium.com. There are good articles on Medium, but 95% of it is low-quality or spam, so I generally avoid these links or come in with the expectation that an article is likely spam.
Interesting observation. I wonder if these are issues intrinsic to the sites themselves, or if instead there’s some fundamental law that states once a publishing platform reaches a critical mass of popularity, it ceases to yield high-quality content (on average).
I do wonder how Substack is thinking about this problem. They obviously have a different business model than Medium, but I think they are still susceptible to this issue.
It's unfortunate because of all the platforms it is one that gets the most human interaction in terms of real thoughtful humans willing to discuss things. I've tried a lot of platforms and dev.to is the best as writer from this perspective. Medium has better stats but that is about it.
It's super unfortunate that the best place to write is also the place most blocked. HN isn't the only one. Reddit also by default blocks dev.to. There are plenty of low quality articles on both sides.
I think the moral of the story is that there is too much garbage out there and a computer algorithm is incapable of making the distinction. HN is fine risking being behind the curve if it saves it readers from wading through it. That's a fine tradeoff but means it leaves things on the table.
Honestly? Probably. I flag a huge amount of medium posts too. Currently the top few are pretty obviously spam, though. I do vouch them out of spam also.
The vast majority of the other posts are basically non-interesting or barely-technical stolen content from stackoverflow, spam blogs, amazon affiliate links hidden in a blog post, undisclosed + no "show hn" self promotion.
I just realised that it's a 15 year old so I might be a bit harsh, but it's also actual hashtag and keyword spam to pollute search results (#buygme), doesn't work, violates multiple python styles/formats, doesn't have whitespace which is critical for python, ...
The donation button is kind of the icing on the cake for this.
I'd say that's sort of beside the point. Sure it looks hideous, but it's also brain dead. Comparing against a hard coded password works for some things, but highly sensitive information in a scripting language really isn't one of them. If you wrote that beautifully it'd be just as stupid.
dev.to covers a domain in which it is possible to be right (passes the unit test, is accepted by the customer) or wrong.
That makes it ring more hollow than Medium does, because much of Medium is rants and musings that could be right, wrong or "not even wrong" and it wouldn't matter.
I don't go to either dev.to or Medium if I can help it. Do they even offer free reads at Medium anymore?
Oh man, TIL that on HN, when people talk about 'dead links' they mean something specific and different to what the rest of the internet means when they talk about dead links.
The original question should have said posts, not links. HN generally doesn’t describe the actual submitted URLs as dead, just the submitted post that contains the link.
