The number of submissions per hour keeps growing and so is the number of spam, off-topic or previously banned user accounts. I currently see 12 of the last 30 submissions are marked [dead] with one flagged, the others were auto-blocked by algorithms. (I have no knowledge about the algorithms other than observing as an outsider). More users are needed to go through the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest list and click 'vouch' on interesting submissions. I regularly do but even just reading every headline is time consuming.

How much karma is required to see the “vouch” option?

I think 30 (https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...)

Ah, I guess I never looked at dead comments.

This documentation just taught me about the showdead option. Lots of good information here. Thank you.

It's likely because you have the 'showdead' option enabled in your HN account settings.

(HN gets a LOT of spam submissions)

Seconding this; my HN feed got so much cleaner after I turned off the showdead option

Any references to support this?

[dead]