What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The f...

pg · on July 3, 2009

Try e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=686224

maxwell · on July 3, 2009

Or http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47550

allenbrunson · on July 3, 2009

pg has said in the past that it's because of spam. allowing the urls to stay live in that case would give them unwarranted google juice.

EDIT: pg says it's because he doesn't want people following spam links. i stand corrected.

pg · on July 3, 2009

It's not page rank (links are nofollow till they get 5 karma) but traffic. I want spammers to realize they get so little traffic from HN that it's not worth posting here.

garply · on July 3, 2009

Yeah, I recently had to post a completely irrelevant reply in a dead story to ask someone who had gotten there in time to paste me the link.