The first one's comments were killed because our software classified them as genai.

The second was banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630011

The third got caught in a troll filter and, looking at the comment history, I think the software made the right call.

I take it is due to automation, mostly. Every single website that has some sort of user-contributed content, forums, source code repository, social media, anything that has comment or upload capability of any kind whatsoever is being bombarded by a massive torrent of crap, and hn is no exception. The internet has no good defense against it, therefore people have to resort to captchas, geoblocking, shadow banning, proof-of-work portal solutions, cloudflare (eek!) and adjusting detection thresholds "just right" so things feel usable.

Hat's off to the mod staff, things feel "alright" even with the current situation.

I dunno. One of my pet peeves of the last few months is that somebody posts an AI generated blog post and it's not good enough that we can click on it to read it so they also post an AI summary as a comment. Like... we can click on the link and read your post. Haven't you ever used HN before... Oh, I see, you created this account six hours ago.

I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.

I'm not sure if commenting on this thread will help since I recently discovered I'm affected by this when a kind stranger replied to one of my recent comments saying they had to "vouch" for me, so you might not see my comment anyways

I think in my account got flagged because of three things

1. Age, it's a pretty recent account, I used to have another one that's like 8yo by now (if not more) but I lost access to that email (and I could've benefited from a username change, so I decided to create a new one)

2. I created this account using a VPN, I have a slight suspicion that it caused me to be soft-banned from the start, but I can't confirm

3. HN probably implemented more strict filtering due to the advance of LLMs

If I were to pinpoint on a exact cause I'd say it's more likely that 2 and 3 are contributing much more than 1