At Memgraph, I worked as a Developer Advocate — part of the Developer Relations team. When you’re creating content for developers, the logic is straightforward: you want that content to reach the people it’s meant for, so you show up where they already are. That means cross-posting to dev.to, Hashnode, Medium, LinkedIn.. wherever your audience hangs out.
Hacker News is another natural stop. For those unfamiliar: HN is a social news aggregator run by Y Combinator, focused on technology, startups, and anything that satisfies intellectual curiosity. The community is technical, the discussions are substantive, and a post that lands well there can drive serious traffic.
I created an account, started reading, got involved in discussions, and occasionally posted some content. At some point I enabled the showdead option in my profile settings — HN lets you see dead submissions if you turn it on explicitly. If you’re not familiar with how this works, the hacker-news-undocumented repo on GitHub documents a lot of HN’s hidden mechanics, including shadowbanning. A [dead] submission is killed by a moderator or by the software and only shown to users who have showdead enabled. Users with at least 31 karma can vouch for a dead submission to restore its rank, but there’s no public list of banned domains and HN won’t notify you when your post dies. What I saw when I turned showdead on surprised me. Dead links everywhere. The default experience hides all of that, so most users have no idea how much content quietly disappears. But once you turn it on, the scale of it becomes obvious.
Turns out HN has a list of domains whose submissions are automatically marked as [dead]. Dev.to is on that list. Hashnode is on that list. LinkedIn — same story. A [dead] post is invisible to everyone except the person who submitted it. So you submit your link, it appears in your own browser as if it’s live, and you think everything is fine. Meanwhile, nobody else sees it. You can post for a year like that and never know.
HN moderator dang confirmed this publicly back in 2021 when someone asked why dev.to links kept dying: the site was banned because of too many low-quality posts and too much promotional behaviour. Not your posts specifically — the platform as a whole. You’re collateral damage.
The frustrating part is that dev.to is actually a decent platform for writers. The community engages, people leave real comments, and it’s genuinely easy to publish there. But its open signup model attracted enough spam and SEO garbage over the years that it earned a bad reputation with the filters that matter.
Not all platforms are treated equally. Medium links go through fine and can get upvotes and comments like any other submission. LinkedIn is a different kind of problem — not a formal ban, but most content there requires a login to read, which HN users won’t bother with.
So if you share your content on HN for the first time and the link goes dead, keep that in mind — it’s not necessarily you or your content. HN might just have a problem with the platform you’re publishing on.
If you want to share your content on HN but you’re publishing on a banned platform, your best shot is to republish it somewhere that isn’t blacklisted. Your own domain is the obvious choice — publish there first, and treat everything else as a mirror. You can still cross-post to dev.to or Hashnode for the community and discoverability, but the link you share on HN always points home. This is similar to the POSSE principle — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — the idea that your own domain is the source of truth, and you’re not at the mercy of other platforms and their rules.
There’s no perfect answer here. It depends on whether HN matters to you at all — and for many types of content, it simply doesn’t. But HN is a genuinely good community. The feedback is real, the discussions go deep, and the audience reads carefully. If that’s where you want your content to land, it’s worth playing by the rules the community expects, and that starts with knowing which platforms HN quietly ignores.