[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of cap...
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Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
First off, this thread is NOT a petition to rally against the
moderation team. Considering the deluge of trash they deal with
every day, I think they are doing a valiant job and are to be
commended. Consider it merely a place to discuss, which is what HN
does best. That said, it's becoming more and more obvious every
day that there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and
specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads. I worry
about the integrity of the discourse here and if the ever growing
wave of garbage will overtake staff resources to deal with it. Is
it time to implement captcha for HN? If so, should it be out of the
box, or a new mechanism more tailored to the security and privacy-
centric nature of the HN readership? Are captchas even still
effective enough in the age of AI to warrant their use?
Author : Rooster61
Score : 50 points
Date : 2026-01-08 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
| chaps wrote:
| This wouldn't solve anything.
|
| To see what I mean, take a screenshot of a random captcha that
| needs solving and ask an LLM to solve it for you. It will do it
| accurately.
| rfw300 wrote:
| "Captcha" doesn't refer to any specific type of puzzle, but a
| class of methods for verifying human users. Some older-style
| captchas are broken, but some newer ones are not.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Since before LLMs were even an issue, there have been
| services that use overseas workers to solve them, with the
| going rate about $0.002 per captcha. (and they solve several
| different types)
| gilrain wrote:
| This is both true and misleading. It implies captchas
| aren't effective due to these services. In practice,
| though, a good captcha cuts a ton of garbage traffic even
| though a motivated opponent can pay for circumvention.
| chaps wrote:
| I'm aware. But I'm also aware that breaking these sorts of
| systems is quite fun for a lot of nerds. So don't expect
| anything like that to last for any meaningful amount of time.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| It _would_ set the bar for a viable bot slightly higher. I'm
| not sure that's enough to justify it though.
| losvedir wrote:
| I've been thinking the same. I'm actually building a little site
| that presents a textarea that you can type your comment into and
| it will track its changes over time (typing, editing, pasting,
| etc) and provide a little playback widget so someone can see the
| composition of the comment. The idea being you can include a link
| to the playback in your comment that you post here and someone
| can eyeball it and see if it looks like you really spent some
| time writing it, vs just pasting in LLM slop. Of course, a
| sophisticated agent could _simulate_ writing the comment, but I
| think it could still help in general.
| rd wrote:
| I don't know why more school districts don't force this for
| essays. It's so straightforward with Google doc editing history
| too. And yeah, sure, you can get around it if you _really_ want
| quite trivially, but I imagine it would solve for 99% of
| students, and force them to actually engage with whatever AI-
| generated stuff they inevitably type by hand more than they
| were before.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| Money is more focused on rolling out AI as fast as possible,
| rather than dealing with the side effects of that.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I have no problems typing an essay out.
| dizhn wrote:
| A generic playwright script taking agent's output as input
| could do this easily. Especially if it's just a few sites.
| keyringlight wrote:
| One caveat, you might want to account for text that the writer
| deleted staying deleted/hidden. I'm not always the best at
| proofreading before submitting, but I'll often cut tangents I'm
| prone to ramble onto. Accidental pastes from other sources that
| are meant to stay private would be another issue if the history
| tracker grabs everything that goes into the text box.
| rd wrote:
| I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user"
| feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension
| (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN
| time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and
| we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory.
|
| I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are
| called out, and the community tends to agree, but those that have
| any plausible deniability are given far too much leniency, and
| people will over-index on the guidelines to give them the benefit
| of the doubt.
|
| I don't think a captcha is the solution, as it'll degrade
| conversation by an OOM though.
| ada0000 wrote:
| +1. even blocking keywords could be nice, e.g. i don't use AI
| for coding and don't care much for news about claude code.
|
| captcha would make it more of a hassle to post comments.
| elashri wrote:
| I have a userscript that takes a list of keywords, domains and
| user names on HN. I host the json file containing the list on
| git instance and I use userscript plugin on iOS safari which
| would support this userscript. This is the lowest friction
| solution I found that would work on different devices.
|
| I find HN much more tolerable this way.
| SockThief wrote:
| That kind of feature would be welcome.
|
| Blocking domains would be nice too. Like substack or medium.
| I'm happy to just ignore them, but it sure would be nice to
| filter them out if possible.
|
| I get that it's complicating the system and keeping it simple
| is perhaps for the best.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is an anti-goal for HN. There are forums that silo
| themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you
| can get without any of those kinds of features, with a single
| global pool of conversations and participants. That's not to
| say there's no value in siloing, just that it's specifically
| not what HN is exploring.
| lagniappe wrote:
| >There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is
| an experiment in how far you can get without any of those
| kinds of features,
|
| Normally I'd agree, but we have shadowbans, which really irks
| me.
| tptacek wrote:
| Only for actual bad actors --- spammers, overt griefers,
| and people evading bans. A lot of HN's shadowban rep comes
| from Paul Graham's stewardship of the site (this whole site
| was a side-hustle of a side-hustle for him) and ignores
| over a decade of Dan's work professionalizing it.
|
| Almost everyone banned on HN is banned publicly, with a
| public message explaining why.
| lagniappe wrote:
| >Almost everyone banned on HN is banned publicly, with a
| public message explaining why.
|
| I would love for this to be the case, however I quite
| extensively investigate this phenomenon and this does not
| match what I've seen. I'd like for us to be better than
| shadowbans. In some cases, I don't even get to vouch,
| it's just a comment that is banned-banned. It feels the
| worst when they're saying something substantive to the
| conversation and we have no means to surface the comment.
|
| Some type of annual amnesty consideration or something of
| that nature is in order, or soon we'll recreate other
| echo chambers that are slowly fading out.
| tptacek wrote:
| Every time I've looked into it, when you see suddenly and
| without reason ban-banned after a string of real
| comments, the backstory has been that it's someone with a
| track record under other usernames.
|
| At some point, no matter what HN does, being comfortable
| with its moderation requires you to take Dan's word for
| things. I take his word for it on shadowbans.
|
| Ironically, I'm irritated with moderation in the other
| direction: ten years of "if you keep breaking the
| guidelines under alternate accounts, we'll ban your real
| account" sort of makes my blood boil (people having long-
| running alts does that too), but I roll with it, because
| I couldn't do the job better than Dan and Tom do.
| lossolo wrote:
| They're also shadow banning/silently disabling your
| votes, and they will not inform you about this. You think
| you're voting on stories or comments, but you aren't if
| they perceive your behavior as "upvote too many flamewar
| comments, culture-war/ideological battle comments, or
| otherwise low-quality comments for HN" and "if a user has
| a track record of upvoting comments that break the
| guidelines and/or downvoting good comments, or voting in
| ways that seem unfair - e.g., voting based on political
| side or personal acrimony, rather than on the objective
| merits of the comment itself".
| tptacek wrote:
| This seems like an especially silly complaint on a site
| that is clear on the label about votes being just one of
| many signals deciding placement on pages and threads.
| We've known since 2008 that the HN experiment doesn't
| work if it runs off raw votes; you just get a front page
| full of memes.
| lossolo wrote:
| If this were clearly public (like written in the rules)
| then maybe it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But if it
| isn't, it's good for people to know, so they understand
| how their voting habits can affect whether their votes
| count, right? That's why I mentioned it.
| caminante wrote:
| Preach it.
|
| I'm still amazed at how Reddit weaponized the block feature.
|
| If you block someone, you not only can't see their posts, but
| you ice them out from replying in the rest of the thread.
| ktallett wrote:
| Do we have any users here that have such controversial or meme
| esque opnions that require blocking every single one?
| pamcake wrote:
| Spammers plastering /new with self-promotion posts is a thing
| and filtering those out would be useful. I don't see how more
| CAPTCHAs would improve the over-all situation, on the other
| hand.
|
| On the more benign side, maybe some people enjoy the musings
| of amichail on Ask but I could honestly do without.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I don't see a many habitual problem accounts. Do you? I guess
| there was the arguably special case of a certain OS
| enthusiast...
| pepperball wrote:
| > I don't see a many habitual problem accounts.
|
| It's usually old/high karma accounts, as they can get away
| with it easier
| pepperball wrote:
| > I don't see a many habitual problem accounts.
|
| It's usually old/high karma accounts, as they can get away
| with it easier. Throwaways that establish themselves for a
| time too, but those are usually dealt with _eventually_
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| An account doesn't have to be problematic for you to not want
| to see their comments. I have several handles in mind where
| I'd add them to such a list if it were a feature. Nothing
| against the people in particular, but sometimes when I see a
| handle (like others said, very often old accounts with high
| karma), I already know what they will go on about merely just
| based off the title of the submission and having
| unintentionally gleaned what topics they usually comment on
| just by being on HN for a while. It's a waste of time to read
| those comments, at least for me. Wouldn't hurt them if they
| lost my attention. I am not bothered by it enough to vibe
| code a browser extension for it, though. That threshold is a
| bit higher, I did it for blocking certain domains; there is
| only so many times I can sit through an article or an "essay"
| which should have been a podcast.
| xnx wrote:
| Not sure what extensions work in Safari, but I think I used
| this one for awhile in Chrome:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699 /
| https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist
| al_borland wrote:
| The problem with extensions on Safari is that they now need
| to go through the App Store. So you can't just code it up and
| run it. It would require signing up for a developer account,
| paying $99/year, and all of that stuff.
|
| You can run temporary unsigned extensions for development
| purposes, but they are removed after 24 hours or whenever you
| quit Safari, which would make using it daily a non-starter.
| notherhack wrote:
| That extension already exists and works well. "Comments Owl for
| Hacker News"
| swat535 wrote:
| I don't think that kind of feature would be useful for HN.
|
| The one thing I like about this place is that it's well
| moderated and you have shared opposing view points engaging
| (mostly) respectfully.
|
| My personal and political views couldn't be further from most
| HN users (I'm both a Conservative _and_ a practicing
| Christian), yet I appreciate taking part in various discussion.
| I enjoy reading about point of views that directly challenge
| mine.
|
| Let's keep HN respectful and accessible.
| pepperball wrote:
| > That said, it's becoming more and more obvious every day that
| there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and
| specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads. I worry
| about the integrity of the discourse here and if the ever growing
| wave of garbage will overtake staff resources to deal with it.
|
| Welcome to the world you built
| orsorna wrote:
| Your inflammatory accusation aside, is there even any
| indication that OP worked to push such efforts? Believe it or
| not, I think most HN users are not directly contributing to
| writing tools that "enshittify" the internet and are collecting
| a wage writing other kinds of software.
| pamcake wrote:
| HN already enforces ReCAPTCHA for registrations. More CAPTCHAs
| will not do much if anything to improve.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Posts like this should just implement the poll feature. You'll
| have your answer in 24h. Then go and quibble with your data.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
| l33tbro wrote:
| A preliminary discussion is more efficacious than polling
| uniformed users.
| iammjm wrote:
| > "there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and
| specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads"
|
| Do you have some examples of this? I am on HN almost every day,
| and I read a lot of comments, and I haven't noticed this
| regnodon wrote:
| You're right! It's just the flavor of the month (quarter?
| year?) complaint.
|
| Enslopification is coming for everyone, everywhere, at all
| times.
|
| Everything is already slop and will be slop, and will have been
| being slop.
| khannn wrote:
| NO
|
| "Me furiously trying to decide what a EURO thinks a motorcycle
| is" for 60s
| freeplay wrote:
| Captcha is only effective at annoying legitimate users. If there
| is any incentive to do so, bots have no problem bypassing/solving
| them.
| gilrain wrote:
| Is this your experience as a sysadmin or a user? As a sysadmin,
| this is an absurd statement in contradiction of my everyday
| reality.
| properbrew wrote:
| I think it depends on how determined the actor is. I see all
| the range from your simple scripts to full on mimicking real
| user behavior that I can only really spot from the honeypots
| they hit.
|
| You'd probably catch most the low hanging fruit for sure, but
| you would cause friction for real users.
|
| I say this as someone who has enabled captcha on some of our
| more critical endpoints, there's definitely a place for it.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://2captcha.com/
| JohnMakin wrote:
| There are dozens, if not far more, of captcha solver API's
| for extremely cheap. Captcha is very shallow bot "security"
| theater, they just deter the cheapest attempts.
|
| latest greatest versions of captcha are more resilient to
| these types of services, but it's a cat and mouse game. I
| would recommend that you, as a sysadmin, learn at least the
| most basic things about this stuff.
| electroly wrote:
| My website's contact form has a reCAPTCHA and it _still_ gets
| spam sent through it (though vastly less). They pass the
| reCAPTCHA somehow. My contact form literally only emails _me_
| and they still do it.
| imiric wrote:
| That is a losing battle.
|
| Even if you manage to make bot usage more expensive, which is all
| a captcha can do, the content posted by humans in discussions and
| shared links is increasingly generated by machines.
|
| It's ironic having a community of people object to the same
| technology they helped build. Enjoy the show, and learn to live
| with it. It's going to get much worse before it gets any better,
| if at all.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _they helped build_ "
|
| The overwhelming majority of developers have never worked
| anywhere close to LLM tech. AI is a very small field requiring
| specialized expertise.
| iamnothere wrote:
| I agree, having never worked on AI or anything privacy
| invasive for that matter. HN is not a monolith.
| dewey wrote:
| This won't work, HN is a high enough value target (Not a random
| site where bots try to spam some guestbook) that people would
| adapt to that quickly. Headless browsers, browser extensions,
| outsourcing captcha solving etc. - there's too many ways to do
| that if you are determined unless you want to also throw captchas
| at regular users for every action.
| pogue wrote:
| Do you have some examples of ai slop posts?
|
| There are quite a few third party apps for Hacker News, such as
| Hacki (ios/android). [1]
|
| Something like using a third party app that includes forms of
| spam filtering like checking when the user joined, how many posts
| they have, amount of 'karma' (or whatever it's called here). You
| could implement blocking individual users & etc etc. This app
| _does not have that_ but it could be forked and modified or talk
| to the dev...
|
| That might be a better solution than trying to implement all
| types of annoying captchas & other extremely annoying checks on
| HN's side.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki
| tptacek wrote:
| The value of an HN post or comment that people actually see is so
| much higher than the value of a CAPTCHA-solve that there's no
| point in even talking about this.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Totally. Captcha should be thought of as rate limiting, not
| anti-spam.
| b112 wrote:
| I just realised that one day, an AI moderated board will receive
| such a post from an AI, not a human. And then a captcha only an
| AI can solve will appear, and the board will be rid of all "human
| slop"
| regnodon wrote:
| But would they still let us read the board though, just not
| post?
|
| How dystopic. And you're probably right.
| paganel wrote:
| Seeing "is this a bike?" captchas on a forum like this one would
| mean that the web is well and truly dead. Bring it on, for all
| intents and purposes, and 2fa also, while we're at it.
| jmward01 wrote:
| This is evolution in action. An ecosystem is generating with
| different things populating it. Is there a better method than
| captcha out there? For instance, hide things in html comments
| that only bots would see and if they are reacted to then flag
| that as a bot account and silently hide their comments (so that
| another account isn't created)? Do this randomly so that it is
| hard to find but bot code would catch it. Or other things like
| text with the same background color so only a bot could have seen
| it. Basically, instead of staying defensive, go on the attack?
| jrh3 wrote:
| What's wrong with simple categories for comments... Informative,
| Funny, Flamebait, etc.
| acheron wrote:
| Don't blame me, I voted for CowboyNeal.
| regnodon wrote:
| Is complaining about the rise of AI Slop itself a sub-category of
| AI Slop?
| chasebank wrote:
| We've always wanted to build a service which provides
| authentication through credit score verification. Whether its
| applied to dating apps, product review sites, HN. I'd sure love
| to filter by 650+ only. I'm certain it's illegal but it sure
| would help.
| calgoo wrote:
| The rest of the world thank you for not including us. Also,
| this leads to the dystopian way where you loose all your access
| based on someone stealing your details and you have no way of
| fighting it off.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Hell yes! Not just a social credit score, but one that
| permanently locks in/enforces a class system. Tech bros even
| manage to enshittify social credit scores to be even more
| shitty. Amazing work.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I think you should first ask if captchas are at all effective at
| stopping bots.
|
| (They are not and haven't been for a long, long time)
| kevinh456 wrote:
| Captchas are not effective. You can pay 2captcha less than a
| penny per captcha and humans solve them for you.
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