Note that the discussion continues in the collapsed comment by tomhow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499848
It says "stub for offtopicness" but, skimming them, literally all comments are on-topic. Not all substantial ('very nice app', 'whats the tech stack?') but a lot of other comments are a normal amount of substantial and also in there... I don't get it, but note that you can expand that subthread
Sorry about this. I've moved most of the comments in the stub back to the main thread.
We've recently had some threads about new product announcements in which the thread quickly fills up with "booster" comments from new accounts or old/dormant accounts that come back to life just to post these comments. The "stub" is a way to hide those comments without penalizing/hiding the main thread and the product it's about.
We were getting some emails and comments suggesting that this was happening here too, so I started trying to address it by moving some comments into the stub, intending to spend more time figuring out which ones were authentic and which ones seemed inorganic, but was slow to get back to it.
I think in this case, most or even all of the comments are actually organic or authentic; people just really love a good chess app!
Sorry for the confusion!
Thank you for clarifying! No worries about the delay of course, we all have more things to do. Do I understand correctly that a 'booster comment' is about steering the conversation / making the product look well-liked to those who open the thread, and not that it boosts the submission up in some way? (If you can say that in light of people gaming it)
In this case the "things to do" was sleep, and the overarching issue is trying to do moderation work that really requires peak cognition when it's late and you're falling asleep, then leaving it half-done.
By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.
Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).
But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.
I can assure you I didn't ask a single person I know to comment on this, most of my irl friends don't even know what hackernews is. All comments, even the ones that are hidden now are organic. Even I thought it's weird that an 8 year old dormant account decided to comment on my post but I have nothing to do with that.
I believe you (and didn't actually think you'd rallied anyone, we thought something else was going on). Sorry for the bother!
If my comment was marked in this sweep, does that mean my account is marked as suspicious/booster?
No not at all, nothing was "marked", just moved temporarily then moved back. Sorry to cause alarm :)
I posted this
``` Hi ,Congrats on the launch. I built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback. ```
Not sure if that's why it was moved to `stub for off topicness`. I wonder if it is some kind of categorisation logic based on text.
I'm also wondering if it's an automatic classification. Wouldn't expect that on HN, but the posts in there are so random that it almost must be.
As for that specific comment, to be fair, I could actually understand: promoting your own product in someone else's thread without really saying anything at all about the submission (topic) that was posted could be seen as off-topic. I don't really mind it (I don't think I voted on it), but I could see a human also classify it that way
Yeah , that's fair. More than promotion i was trying to suggest i had also built something similar and kind of understand the product space. It's this dev thing, can't shake it off i guess. But i get what you meant.
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
Why would you in 2025 only build for iOS?
This was a swift app. I wanted a bit more native feel and didn't go for react native.