[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I see lots of clearly AI
generated posts recently in HN and mostly coming from new accounts
(green), it is more noticeable in the Show HN section. I wish the
team can either restrict new accounts from posting or at least
offer a default filtering where I can only see posts from accounts
with certain criteria. I don't want to see HN becoming twitter,
which is full of bots and noise, as this would be a really sad day.
Author : Oras
Score : 347 points
Date : 2026-03-08 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
| SG- wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised HN isn't used to share more
| malware/githubs with new accounts too.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The target audience for malware authors/distributors typically
| isn't a community full of technically literate software
| engineers, security practitioners, reverse engineers, malware
| analysts, etc.
|
| Same reason that burglars don't typically target security
| camera stores and robbers don't typically target police
| departments - it's basically a fast-track to early detection,
| which disrupts the main objective of the adversary.
| cebert wrote:
| HN does a good job moderating and blocking spam from new
| accounts.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Used to. The job has apparently gotten a lot harder now.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| Amen. I think the purpose of the bots is to create high-upvoted
| accounts for the purpose of later flag and downvoting things
| they've programmed the bots to suppress.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "shownew" : "no|yes" option would be nice.
| gnabgib wrote:
| If everyone turned off new account visibility, we'd just see
| the same noise 30 days later.. not sure that helps.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| During that time, one would assume mod action would filter
| out the undesired, thereby "seasoning" accounts.
| BalinKing wrote:
| I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e.
| and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban,
| because I see this sort of behavior from non-green accounts as
| well.
|
| EDIT: I meant (but totally forgot) to qualify that my "proposal"
| would only apply when the LLM-ness is self-obvious--idk, make up
| a "reasonable person" standard or something. Presumably, the
| moderators would err on the side of letting things slide. Even
| so, many comments I've seen are simply impossible for any
| reasonable person to claim as "human-written"--the default
| ChatGPT style is simply too distinct.
| delichon wrote:
| The moderators are supposed to just know it when they see it?
| It's that black and white to you? Or are lots of false
| positives a price we have to pay?
| lokar wrote:
| It's only going to get harder has people continue to model
| their writing on LLM style.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I guess it's been fun but the internet is well and truly
| dead
|
| If not already, then soon
| robotresearcher wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| You know it's bad when reading "you're absolutely
| right..." causes you to oscillate between wanting to
| laugh and also violently destroy the computer.
| Rapzid wrote:
| You are viewing this through exactly the right lens. But
| here is the kicker..
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| Can use AI to detect that
| andai wrote:
| Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI
| but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too.
| Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even
| more concerning!)
|
| Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button?
|
| Then again it's a nuanced issue. I see AI used in a large
| percentage of writing now, so would this rule apply to the
| article as well?
| xpe wrote:
| > Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it
| was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it
| out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is
| honestly even more concerning!)
|
| I find the above comment concerning, so I ask: to what
| degree is the above commenter calibrated to ground truth?
| How would they know? How would we know?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_a
| ssessm...
|
| It seems to me comments like the above are overconfident in
| the worst ways.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button?
|
| We already have flagging and downvoting?
| hamdingers wrote:
| Abusing the flag button by reporting LLM generated posts
| and comments (which are not breaking any current
| guidelines) seems like a good way to get your flags
| ignored.
| echoangle wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290841
|
| It is against the rules though
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| I would be worried the reason for the flag wasn't
| _immediately_ obvious. Maybe if there was a drop-down for
| the rule being violated it would help.
| zahlman wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261561 seems like
| a better source for the policy.
| layer8 wrote:
| Flagging isn't only in case of breaking the guidelines.
| From the FAQ:
|
| _What does [flagged] mean?
|
| Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or
| otherwise not belonging on HN._
|
| In other words, submissions get flagged that users
| believe don't belong on HN. LLM-written submissions can
| be one such case.
| BalinKing wrote:
| Sorry, updated my original comment--I meant to qualify it to
| only those cases where it's blatantly obvious. Obviously a
| lot of ambiguous comments will slip through as a result, but
| I agree with you that false negatives are better than false
| positives.
| vel0city wrote:
| Your comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are
| vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account
| overly using them are blatantly AI.
|
| I don't think your account is AI just by these few
| comments, but I would like to point out that most rubrics
| one might use to determine what is obviously AI might end
| up including the way _you_ talk.
|
| If there was a truly accurate tell, some algorithm you
| could feed a few sentences in and it could tell you "yep,
| this is 100% AI", then yeah sure use that. I don't know you
| could realistically build that machine, especially when it
| comes to the generation of text.
| mroche wrote:
| _Your comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are
| vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account
| overly using them are blatantly AI._
|
| I've always found this funny. Doesn't macOS' default text
| substitution enable (annoying to me) things like em-dash,
| smart quotes, etc?
| scratchyone wrote:
| For what it's worth, there are modern LLM detectors with
| extremely low false-positive rates. The tech has advanced
| quite a bit since the ZeroGPT days. Personally I've
| gotten very good results from Pangram Labs. Still can't
| directly ban people though because false positives are
| always possible.
| zahlman wrote:
| Is that false-positive rate from your own testing, or the
| author's claims? What is the source of ground truth?
| BalinKing wrote:
| I am explicitly _not_ claiming that all AI-generated
| comments, or even most of them, can be reliably
| determined. I am specifically talking about comments
| which--based on a variety of unsubtle tells--are
| _unambiguously_ LLM-generated.
| shimman wrote:
| Something we need to remember that AI was trained on every
| public internet comment, the vast majority of which are legit
| terrible. The biggest tell that someone is using AI is having
| multiple paragraphs saying the same point over and over
| again. Even trolls are more succinct.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Dammit, am I going to get banned for rambling?
| zahlman wrote:
| In some fraction of cases, it's really obvious.
|
| I would argue that those cases are really the ones that cause
| an LLM-specific harm, i.e., which make people feel like they
| aren't exclusively among fellow humans.
|
| If someone posts something that doesn't clearly read LLM-ish,
| but is otherwise terrible, it's not really different from if
| the same terrible thing had been written by hand.
|
| I don't think anyone who objects to LLM comments is really
| demanding a super-low false negative rate. Just get rid of
| the zero-effort stuff. For example, recently I've seen a lot
| of comments from new accounts that are just sycophantic
| towards TFA and try to highlight / summarize a specific idea
| or two, but don't really demonstrate any original thought
| (just, like, basic reading comprehension and an ability to
| express agreement). And they'll take a paragraph to do so,
| where a human with the same level of interest in the material
| might just say "good post" (granted, there's an argument to
| be made for excluding that, too).
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The guidelines haven't even been updated to say that AI
| generated posts and submission aren't permitted even though
| it's been the policy for a couple of years now if one searches
| for postings by the moderators. So outsiders and new HN users
| have no reason to know that it's not allowed. I'm sure there
| are reasons for it but the inaction is all very mysterious from
| an outsider perspective.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Do this with submissions, too. Or at least put some indicator
| that it's AI generated.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I am more annoyed by the anti-AI luddites filling the
| comments with low value complaints than I am by quality
| content written partially by an LLM.
|
| Those low value complaints add nothing to the conversation,
| and the content didnt make it to the front page because it
| was bad. If the sole objection is "AI bad", keep it to
| yourself....its boring.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Without engaging in more ad hominem, that are wrong by the
| way, what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it
| is?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's one thing to have an AI-label. It's another to
| completely derail a conversation with a likely false AI
| accusation.
|
| Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122272
|
| You have to scroll a few pages before the actual article
| is discussed.
|
| "This was LLM generated" is likely to float to the top of
| an article. That's where the best comments about the
| article deserve to go, not an off topic comment. An AI
| label should be much less obtrusive.
| sowbug wrote:
| Join me and downvote them relentlessly.
| zahlman wrote:
| > You have to scroll a few pages before the actual
| article is discussed.
|
| Or you could collapse the one thread containing those
| comments.
| esseph wrote:
| > what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it
| is
|
| 1. Your guess is not always correct
|
| 2. Over time, AI content will get harder to guess until
| it is indistinguishable from human content
|
| 3. You're not helping anyone by posting "this is AI".
| Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's not helpful. It
| just adds to the noise.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'm not suggesting anyone post "this is AI", the
| submitter should vouch that it's AI or eventually get
| banned for spamming.
|
| Ideally there could be a label on the submission that
| states it's AI
| BalinKing wrote:
| I think a steelman interpretation of the parent is that
| _entirely_ LLM-generated projects should be disallowed.
| There 's a lot of submissions on Show HN that seem
| completely vibe-coded to me (like, including the README),
| which is a very different situation IMO from someone who
| simply used Claude to write some--or even most--of the
| code. When even the human-facing portion of a submission is
| LLM-generated, it bothers a lot of people (myself
| included).
| scratchyone wrote:
| Agreed. Having some level of human input makes a
| submission at least meaningful. If the entire repo and
| all text is generated by an LLM, does it really matter if
| the human is the one posting the link? It's functionally
| indistinguishable from automated spam.
| ryandrake wrote:
| In every single article's comments now, there's always
| _someone_ coming out of the woodwork to post "This article
| is written by LLM." These comments are about as useless as
| "The website's color scheme is annoying" and "The website
| breaks the [back button | scrollbar]." (which, by the way,
| are not allowed per the HN guidelines[1])
|
| If anything should be banned, it's low-effort "This is AI"
| commentary. It adds absolute zero to the conversation.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
|
| I'd argue that: whether or not the article (or reply) was
| written by AI is a tangential annoyance at this point.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I very much agree.
|
| The number of comments I see complaining about "it's not
| this, it's that" and other "LLMisms" definitely
| frustrates me more than the original content.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I was thinking he same thing but didn't want to post my
| complaint about other commenters becasue I think that's
| against the rules too?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I generally don't but I think it's defacto-allowed in
| these "meta HN rules discussion" threads.
| fubdopsp wrote:
| It's much more than a "tangential annoyance" and it adds
| a lot to the conversation--among other things, it
| establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is, well,
| spam and unwelcome.
|
| Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on
| them--these are all acts of human communication. Farming
| any of these steps out to an LLM completely breaks down
| the social contract involved in participating in an
| online forum like this. What's the point?
|
| It's the exact same effect that's playing out in many
| other areas where LLMs are encroaching: bypassing the
| "human effort" step has negative side effects that people
| who are only looking at the output are ignoring.
|
| I actually find your opinion so infuriating that it's
| taking all my composure to not reply with something
| nastier. If you guys want to spend your time reading
| shitty LLM spam posts with shitty LLM comments, why don't
| you find another site to do it on instead of destroying
| this one.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Hey, I'm not a fan of LLM slop articles and blogspam
| either and if I could hold back the tide, I'd try to. But
| I'm just saying that pointing it out each and every time
| is just going to become its own form of spam. We're
| quickly entering a world where 99+% of what is written
| online, be it blogs, amateur news, or actual professional
| journalism, is LLM generated. You hate it, I hate it, but
| it's coming. The state of journalism is already in
| shambles and line must go up, so "everything written by
| AI" is sadly inevitable. Posting every time to remind
| people of that? I mean by the end of 2026 you might as
| well have a bot commenting on every article that it's
| probably LLM generated. I argue it adds no signal to the
| conversation.
| fubdopsp wrote:
| I still think it has strong normative value. Maybe at
| some point when norms have become firmly established
| these comments will be pointless and spammy but I don't
| think we're anywhere close to that point yet.
|
| A lot of blogging is essentially self-expression and that
| stuff won't be taken over by LLMs (it defeats the whole
| point). Other blogging is done with some kind of
| sales/promotional/brand purpose and the extent to which
| LLMs will dominate this will depend on how we as a
| society react to it (see the AI art battles) since if
| people react negatively to it it becomes
| counterproductive.
| zahlman wrote:
| Perhaps it would be better to have comments that praise
| apparently human-written text?
|
| I understand where you're coming from. I've been posting
| complaints about LLM-written articles almost as long as
| I've been here. (My analysis is definitely more complex
| than a search for blacklisted Unicode characters or
| words.)
|
| But I've let off on that, partly because I agree the
| guideline is meant to encompass that kind of criticism
| (same with my comments about initial page content not
| rendering with JavaScript, honestly) but largely because
| it just seems futile. It's better material for a blog
| post than HN comments (and would be less repetitive).
| Springtime wrote:
| To provide a heads up to others for who feel similarly
| for whether something is worth spending time with there
| isn't a problem speculating if something is produced by
| AI if there are indicators of insufficient human
| authorship but that's a big _if_. If incorrect such
| comments themselves become noise.
|
| In its worst form I've seen now many times in other
| communities users claim submissions are AI for things
| that are _provably_ not, merely to dismiss points of view
| the poster disagrees with by invoking calls to action
| from knee-jerk voters who have a disdain for generative
| AI. I 've also seen it expressed by users I expect feel
| intimidated by artwork from established traditional
| artists.
|
| Thankfully on HN it hasn't reached that level but I have
| seen some here for instance _still_ think use of em
| dashes with no surrounding spaces is some definitive
| proof by pointing to a style guide, without realizing
| other established style guides have always stated to omit
| the spaces (eg: Chicago Manual of Style). This just leads
| to falsely confident assessments and more unnecessary
| comment chains responding to them.
|
| What one hopes for with curated communities is that
| people have discriminating taste at the submission and
| voting level. In my own case I'm looking for an
| experience from those who have seen a lot of things and
| only finds particular things compelling and are eager to
| share them. Compared to some submission that reaches the
| front page of say popular programming language docs that
| just provide another basis for rehashed discussion (and
| cynically since the poster knows such generalized
| submissions do this and grow karma).
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > it establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is,
| well, spam and unwelcome.
|
| It is welcome though. Being on the front page regularly
| is evidence that people enjoy it or find it informative.
|
| You may feel that others shouldn't be ALLOWED to enjoy
| it, but that's just your opinion and is almost always
| tangential to the actual topic.
|
| Worse, you seem to believe that it needs to be labeled to
| help you identify it. Why? If its good enough that you
| need help to spot it then its obviously of sufficiently
| high quality.
| DevelopingElk wrote:
| I have commented once or twice on articles being AI
| generated. I don't put them when I think the writer used
| AI to clean up some text. I added them when there are
| paragraphs of meaningless or incorrect content.
|
| Formats, name collisions or back-button breakage are
| tangential to the content of the article. Being AI
| generated isn't. And it does add to the overall HN
| conversation by making it easier to focus on meaningful
| content and not AI generated text.
|
| Basically, if the writer didn't do a good job checking
| and understanding the content we shouldn't bother to
| either.
| tasuki wrote:
| I think your comment was generated by an LLM and hereby vote
| for your immediate and permanent instant ban.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I think that your comment was generated by Eliza, and hereby
| vote for you to get a karma boost for being Legit Old School,
| then an immediate and permanent instant ban.
|
| I'm joking, of course. If your comment was generated by Eliza
| it would have started with "How do you feel about 'I think
| your comment...'" :)
| layer8 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that?
| atoav wrote:
| Eliza was one of the first chatbots from the mid to late
| 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| that's interesting, tell me more about one of the first
| chatbots from the mid to late 60s
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| BTW, what ELIZA implementation are y'all using? The Emacs
| Doctor?
| layer8 wrote:
| What would it mean to you if we were all using the Emacs
| Doctor?
| zahlman wrote:
| (I think you missed the joke.)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I've seen people admit it. I've even seen a commenter say
| that they were an agent. We can do these cases.
| jmusall wrote:
| Then nobody would admit it, so the problem persists. Except
| maybe for fully automated accounts. Those should of course
| be banned anyways.
| rerdavies wrote:
| I think all submissions to HN should be submitted via snail-
| mail, and must be handwritten. That would solve the problem.
|
| /heavy sarcasm
|
| That being said, my mother used to insist on hand-written cover
| letters from job applicants. Her rationale: it takes effort, so
| it weeds out all the applications from people who are just
| randomly spraying out applications for jobs they are not
| qualified for.
| layer8 wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't think that it would solve the problem:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=handwritten+mail+service&udm.
| ..
| brewdad wrote:
| First interview question is to submit a handwriting sample.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Marking the sarcasm here really ruins your humour.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For now there is already a pretty effective mechanism in place,
| downvote and/or flag those comments that you think are across
| the line in that sense.
|
| But in principle I agree with you, the rule for me is 'if it
| wasn't worth your time to write then it certainly isn't worth
| 1000x times other people's time to read'.
| dmix wrote:
| People accuses everything of being LLM generated these days.
| That'd be a tough rule to enforce.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Other than this being probably challenging to enforce fairly, I
| think I agree that if you had strong proof of an account
| largely or completely posting comments/stories/whatever that
| was adulterated by an LLM, that is really probably ban worthy
| like you said.
| lich_king wrote:
| Many HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to
| distinguish between AI text and non-AI text. Some of it seems
| to be a knee-jerk reaction to some of the occasional, one-sided
| stories of people who were accused of using LLMs and fired from
| their jobs. And some of it seems to be just hedging so that we
| don't develop a culture that could penalize _their_ LLM-
| generated posts or code.
|
| My main problem with that is that you can just generate an
| infinite supply of LLM op-eds about LLMs, and is this really
| what we want to read every day? If I want to know what ChatGPT
| thinks about the risks or benefits of vibecoding, I'll just ask
| it.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Hmm, some LLM text is hard to detect, sure.
|
| Some is also horribly easy. If the text is full of:
|
| - Overly positive commentary and encouragement
|
| - Constant use of bullet point lists, bolding and emoji
|
| - This quaint forced 'funniness', like a misplaced attempt at
| being lighthearted
|
| - A lot of blablah that just missed the point
|
| - Not concise and to the point, but also not super long
|
| Then that really screams ChatGPT to me.
|
| I think it's because this seems to be the default styling of
| ChatGPT. When people tailor their prompt to be more specific
| about style it's a lot harder to detect but if they just dump
| a few lines of instructions about the content into it, this
| is what you'll get. So the low-effort slop is still pretty
| easy to detect IMO.
| withinboredom wrote:
| LOL. You just described your own comment!
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Well just the bullet points but in this case I thought
| they were warranted. ChatGPT uses them whenever and ever.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Let's turn HN into a place where we all grow old together until
| it slowly dies when we do.
| dang wrote:
| That's indeed the problem with restricting new users. Existing
| community members always want to do that, but it's a recipe for
| not surviving.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is largely the same pattern that happened during the crypto
| hype cycle, spam posts and complaints. It will likely subside as
| reality sinks in.
|
| There are still quality submissions by new accounts and HN is
| good at pulling those needles from the haystack.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Devils advocate take: I think the quality of the ShowHN projects
| are in fact getting higher, at least the ones that land in the
| front page. The issue is that projects that used to take weeks,
| months, or even years of work now can be done in a weekend or so.
| It's been democratizing, but it also means that when we look at
| these posts we (rightly) see that these new projects aren't that
| much effort _with AI assistance_.
|
| So maybe we should just be honest about this: our standards have
| raised. We want to see Show HN posts that require effort and
| dedication, that require more than a few hours of prompt
| flogging.
| Oras wrote:
| But the issue is not only show HN, even generic posts are
| increasingly from new accounts, some of them are reaching front
| page too.
|
| One example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884481
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This made the frontpage two days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275291
|
| Read the comments and you'll see it took time and effort,
| from people who know at least a little about what they're
| saying, to point out that it's AI slop that doesn't live up
| to the claims written in its own docs.
| pluc wrote:
| Well it's not just that... picture a community group talking
| among themselves and then some rando shows up, yells "I built
| this thing that you all might like", hangs out for an hour and
| then is never heard from again.
|
| I think that's great in moderation as it stimulates ideas and
| discussions, shows us what folks are working on, etc... but
| this can't become Product Hunt. The reasons for posting here
| should be vastly different than posting on Product Hunt.
| krapp wrote:
| Except the quality hasn't been getting higher. Most of those
| projects wouldn't be considered HN worthy if a human being had
| made them, they only get the praise they do because they were
| generated by an LLM and as such they aren't projects so much as
| demonstrations of the latest model's capabilities.
|
| Also the purpose of Show HN along with HN in general is to
| spark intellectual curiosity and create interesting
| conversation, and nothing about LLM generated code does that,
| because the person who prompted the AI to make it doesn't
| understand it and can't discuss it in any depth.
| andai wrote:
| I was thinking about this the other day. If someone made
| TempleOS today, people wouldn't be as impressed, because they'd
| just assume they used AI.
|
| They'd assume this, even if they hadn't used AI, and even if AI
| didn't have to ability to pull it off.
| Springtime wrote:
| That dev made many videos about its creation and motivations
| though and along with their personality I think people would
| be understanding.
| monster_truck wrote:
| I disagree in that the last few I can think of have involved
| things like services that do not really explain what they do
| properly and then ask for full permissions to your github
| account, or claim to be far more than they are (ie "I made this
| thing" but it's just a shim for someone else's stuff).
| verdverm wrote:
| I'd pose a different perspective, that Show HN in non-hype
| cycles tend to have a higher self-imposed bar before posting.
| With the democratizing, there are many posts where time from
| first commit to Show HN is on the order of hours, 25m being the
| shortest I have personally seen. I would contend that community
| standards have not changed meaningfully, but due to the
| underlying mix changing, the front page changes too.
|
| That being said, there is an above average, low quality
| submissions sub-trend, that are obviously trying to plant a
| money tree. This is largely driven by the "look ma, no hands"
| Ai tools like OpenClaw, mixed (venn) with the crypto crowd
| looking to make easy money with near-zero effort.
|
| With that being said, I have definitely seen some real bangers
| that have large Ai contributions. So I am generally in favor of
| minimally changing how HN works today. One small change would
| be adding to the Guidelines and FAQ, giving the agents
| something to read before posting (such that they know that
| automated submissions are not allowed[1])
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| zahlman wrote:
| > It's been democratizing, but it also means that when we look
| at these posts we (rightly) see that these new projects aren't
| that much effort _with AI assistance_.
|
| This also appears to cause a serious shift in the _kind_ of
| projects that are submitted (i.e.: towards things that are much
| more accelerated by AI assistance).
| neom wrote:
| I almost emailed dang this morning to offer to help out tho I'm
| not particularly technical. Few solutions I thought of: 1 -
| honeypot, hide some links llms can follow if stuff gets posted in
| it, unlikely to be a human. 2 - Make an captcha that _only_ llms
| can answer, I recently made 2 social networks, one that humans
| couldn 't join by making the submission question too difficult to
| figure out quickly. 3- Use an LLM to detect LLMs, the other
| social network I did for fun (that a small number of people use),
| an llm that looks for moderation issues does a good job of
| flagging them. 4- Invites but vary the number you have to give
| out by account age + karma. The first 3 seem like they'd stop
| some % for some time, but eventually get old.
| fragmede wrote:
| Reverse captchas are fun. Click this button 10,000 times to
| prove that you're a robot!
| vivid242 wrote:
| We need new ways to prove our humanness.
| ai-psychopath wrote:
| in a world of smart LLMs acting dumb is human proof
| castral wrote:
| I don't understand how this is supposed to solve anything, and
| I've seen it suggested as a solution multiple times. If you
| restrict comments to older accounts, all it's going to do is make
| the bot creators speculatively open and proactively age accounts
| for future use.
| kn100 wrote:
| I would argue that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of
| the good. Adding a cost to commenting that requires aging
| accounts I think might discourage fly by night operations and
| "experiments".
| Oras wrote:
| I wish for karma based too if we managed to get filters. I want
| to see posts only by accounts with {x}+ karma points.
| Springtime wrote:
| Would be fine for a personal filter but if used globally
| would incentivize karma gaming. You can get high karma from
| reposts of past popular submissions (an author who was in
| prison who reached the front page even half-joked/resented
| once how many common Wikipedia articles land on the front
| page for the nth time).
| elpocko wrote:
| You want other people to deal with the things you don't like
| and filter stuff for you, to improve your own experience and
| shield you from the filthy masses. God beware you have to
| endure a comment you don't like, your royal highness.
|
| I'd rather see you gone than the people you complain about.
| Springtime wrote:
| Filtering is a valid form of improving signals. If there
| there was a reliable heuristic for users posting low effort
| content that was better then the user would be considering
| that instead.
|
| If someone in a chatroom for example is being spammy with
| their messages at the expense of noticing posts one finds
| more relevant then blocking them isn't due to considering
| them some filthy pleb but improving their experience. If
| the user being filtered never becomes aware there's no
| reason to be offended, either.
|
| Edit: also I wasn't the one to downvote you if that makes
| any difference.
| elpocko wrote:
| HN is already heavily moderated. Low-effort posters and
| spammers get downranked immediately, based on their
| behavior. OP is simply intolerant and unable to function
| in a social setting.
|
| Minimum karma and account age filters are discriminatory,
| anti-social features that should not exist on any social
| site. The people asking for such features are intolerant
| jerks, no different from ageists or ableists. They are
| parasites, because they want the people who are not
| intolerant jerks to do their filtering for them, and keep
| the site alive by doing so.
|
| What would happen if _every single user_ enabled their
| minimum karma filter?
| Springtime wrote:
| This thread is evidence that some are unhappy with the
| state of a core HN feature due to users posting what they
| judge to be low effort content, so it does get through.
|
| The comments here are about possible mitigations. Based
| on this feedback dang has apparently now restricted new
| accounts from posting Show HN threads, so globally now
| there is a form of filtering users from being seen by
| others based on a heuristic.
|
| Your initial comment is written with the impression that
| the poster wanting to improve their chances of higher
| effort content is making some judgement on the posters
| themselves as though they're conceited ('filthy masses',
| 'your royal highness') when they're merely considering
| one approach to reducing noise from their feed.
|
| I myself in this very comment chain have already posted
| that I disagree that filtering by karma would help due to
| gaming issues but I don't see the problem with the user's
| _goal_.
| krapp wrote:
| >What would happen if every single user enabled their
| minimum karma filter?
|
| Hacker News would be a much better place.
|
| In fact, filter stories as well as users. I want to
| filter out any story with fewer than three upvotes and
| _any_ flagged comments. That would improve quality
| tremendously.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| My system has been working pretty well: using some
| extension or another that has mute functionality, if I
| see a person post an extremely low quality comment, I
| look at their comment history for two or three pages. If
| there is no comment of value in that set, I mute the
| user. The board gets better each day.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| Core function of HN Front page is based on "other people
| filtering stuff for others". Filtering out by any criteria
| (karma, account color, first letter of the nickname,
| whatever) doesn't automatically mean that someone is a jerk
| as you have stated in the comments nearby. It just means
| that someone is selecting the information to consume and
| does not harm anyone (perhaps besides the selective person
| who might miss interesting info due to selection).
| bakugo wrote:
| Have you taken a look at reddit recently? It's absolutely
| infested with bots farming karma, either by reposting old
| popular posts, or simply posting AI generated comments.
|
| Actively encouraging this will only make things worse.
| andai wrote:
| Several of the posts I've seen are from autonomous AI agents,
| which don't currently seem to have that kind of long-term
| planning.
| dom96 wrote:
| My prediction is that nothing short of human verification is
| going to solve this.
| dang wrote:
| And also invest more effort in karma farming. In other words,
| if we raise the bar for Show HNs we'll probably see more
| generated comments in the threads.
| vunderba wrote:
| This already happens now. Go look through a few of the "Show
| HN" authors - you'll inevitably see around several accounts
| that are 50-100 days old with a karma of 1 to avoid a green
| label.
|
| The OP is talking about posts, not comments. The simplest
| solution might be to prevent someone from posting a "Show HN"
| until they've earned twenty-five or fifty karma, to demonstrate
| that they've been actively participating on Hacker News rather
| than using it solely to promote themselves.
| brewdad wrote:
| This leads inevitably to karma farming bots who upvote each
| other's submissions a la Reddit.
|
| It's a speed bump at best.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| A speed bump might still be preferable to nothing.
| zahlman wrote:
| I have seen accounts that were dormant for years suddenly
| start posting frequently, all with slop. (I don't know if
| this represents people having an epiphany about AI use, or
| accounts being compromised or just what.)
| rjh29 wrote:
| I don't understand why we put locks on bicycles, a determined
| person can just saw them off.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I'd suggest instead a lower threshold for [dead]-ing posts and
| submissions by new accounts when flagged by HN users.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised how well it's going.
|
| From the perspective of usually just swinging into a post from
| the front page, when I do see green, it's usually overtly
| political trolling, and dead from the start. So I had assumed new
| account = everyone sees your post in gray, at least for a week or
| two.
|
| I don't envy the "Show HN:" case. It can be intractable, story
| time:
|
| Last week, there was a "Show HN:" post for a GitHub link, made it
| all the way to #2. It was a Flutter app, written up as if it did
| all the stuff you'd want from an open source LLM client. I said
| to myself "geez, I knew I took too long to deliver the thing I've
| been working on for 2 years. the MVP version is insanely
| popular."
|
| -- only after digging into the repo for 10 minutes, with domain
| expertise, did I realize it was a complete Potemkin village,
| built by Claude. And even then, I was afraid to post something
| pointing this out because it required domain expertise, and it
| could have read as negative rather than principled.
|
| All that to say, some subsets of The AI Poster Problem now
| require having intimate domain expertise and 10 minutes to
| evaluate it. :/
|
| Additionally, the Claude 4.6s and GPT-5.4s are _better than me_
| at posting on HN now. : / And I've been here 16 years. The past
| couple days, any comment I write involving some sort of judgement
| or argument is by Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4, via: 1) dump HN post into
| prompt 2) say "I feel $X about this, write me an HN post that
| communicates this but not negatively".
|
| I'm a little ashamed to admit if you look through my post
| history, you'll definitely see a repeated pattern over 16 years
| of someone who is very negative and has a hard time communicating
| it constructively. They're smart enough now to extrapolate
| observations in the way I want to, while avoiding my own tarpits.
| neom wrote:
| My only problem with the last part is that your tarpits are
| you, and personally: I want to know you, not some version of
| you filtered or softened by AI. That to me is what makes HN
| great, how...jarring the reading experience can be, it's really
| fun and interesting to see how people communicate their ideas -
| I think it's admirable that you're making an effort to become
| more kind and communicate more positively, but fingers cross
| you don't lose "your voice"! :)
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| How about this: ask your LLM to review your post, "does it
| follow HN rules?", "how would others read it", "If I were the
| other person, how would I feel about this reply" , "is it
| convincing to you?" that sort of questions. That'll help, and
| it'll still be your voice.
|
| And beware of what's already in context. Sometimes ideas that
| seem obvious given antecedents are not so obvious when taken in
| isolation.
| abtinf wrote:
| I really wish there was a setting whereby I could simply hide all
| _comments_ from accounts less than a year old. The correlation
| with LLM slop is simply off the charts.
|
| It almost feels like new accounts should be treated like new
| posts -- it is sort of a service that a select few are willing to
| undertake to upvote interesting stories early on.
|
| I wish even more I could block specific users (there are some
| highly prolific, high karma users here who are extremely
| irritating), but that's harder and is probably best handled
| client side.
| neom wrote:
| I have a chrome plugin I made that gives me some personal
| social features (tagging people), it can block:
| https://s.h4x.club/yAuNoQDe
| delichon wrote:
| There is an epistemic silver lining. This is in fact a Red
| Queen's race that cannot be won. So in the end the only solution
| is to evaluate the text on its own merits without reference to
| the writer's status, because that status can no longer be
| reliably detected. For a public feed like this one, the only
| alternative is to ignore it. The fire hose of data will
| inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it
| or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well
| only if we get better at pearl detection.
| saulpw wrote:
| "cannot be won" "only solution" "only alternative". sorry, no,
| that's too black and white. There are other solutions, even if
| they will only work for a couple of days/months/years.
| delichon wrote:
| Don't tell anyone, but I am secretly in charge and open to
| suggestions. Spill.
| Avicebron wrote:
| We can relentlessly bully anyone using phrases like "Red
| Queen's race" unironically. Measly human resistance against
| the vapid strip-miners of semantic value.
| delichon wrote:
| You mean that you don't believe that we are in co-
| evolution with AI? Because otherwise it is a Red Queen's
| race, and it is a useful frame for understanding. For
| example we can make it a race between symbiotes.
|
| If you are Sisyphus, the fact that the hill is infinite
| is useful when planning your day.
| bakugo wrote:
| > So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on
| its own merits
|
| This falls apart as soon as you realize that evaluating the
| text requires far more effort than generating it. If you're
| spending 2 minutes reading text that took 2 seconds to
| generate, you already lost.
| delichon wrote:
| That just means that you can only evaluate a smaller fraction
| of the data. If your goal is to do more than sample it,
| you've already lost.
| dextrous wrote:
| One way that I could imagine a human-only HN could evolve in
| the coming AI wasteland: motivated individuals join small local
| groups and are validated face-to-face at meet-ups. Local
| trusted leads gatekeep their chapter's posts, and this scalable
| moderation works up the tree. Bad leaves get culled out
| reasonably fast, maybe there's some controls at the top level
| that let you see more content "lower down the tree" if you're
| ok with lower SNR. Latency to get a post widely distributed
| grows but I don't see that as a massive problem.
| patrickmay wrote:
| You're giving me flashbacks to PGP key signing parties.
|
| I do like your idea, though.
| foobarian wrote:
| Bring back the key signing parties!
|
| p.s. @patrickmay: jinx!
| Aurornis wrote:
| In my recent experience, local meetups and groups are
| unexpectedly more prone to self promotion and low effort
| spamming.
|
| Local groups have a problem where members admit their friends
| or pressure others into inviting their friends who are not a
| net positive, but it feels too impolite to refuse or to kick
| someone out. Meeting someone in person also develops a sense
| of a social bond that makes it harder to downvote or flag
| their posts.
|
| Local groups have always been a haven for affinity fraud,
| too. Running a scam is easier when you can smile, be
| charismatic, and pretend to be a personal friend before
| springing your ask on to your victims.
| gozucito wrote:
| Agreed. Merit is the only fair solution. If OP noticed a
| garbage post, that means they evaluated a post on merit and
| decided it was garbage. So it works.
|
| We have genAI generating videos and the quality sucks compared
| to human produced and filmed content. People call it out and
| nobody is going to watch a genAI movie at the theater or binge
| a genAI TV show. Merit based filtering.
|
| GenAI for music is not as good as human-generated music either.
| Not a single AI song from Suno or Udio has reached the top40.
| Not even one. 100% of the songs are human because they are
| evaluated on merit.
|
| We have SWE and agentic benchmarks to evaluate coding LLMs on
| merit.
|
| Disclaimer: I am a new account.
| delichon wrote:
| > Disclaimer: I am a new account.
|
| Welcome. Illegitimi non carborundum.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'm somewhat keen to adopt ATProto's feed generators and/or
| labeller concepts to create an alternative /new and comment
| prioritizer
| Aurornis wrote:
| This comment uses a lot of big words but it's full of
| fallacies.
|
| The HN user base is not perfect at detecting LLM content but a
| lot of it does get flagged and downvoted eventually. About once
| a day I'll click on a link, realize it's AI slop, and go back
| to HN to flag it but discover that it's already flagged.
|
| If you turn on showdead you can see all of the comments from
| LLM bots that have been discovered and shadowbanned.
|
| The fallacy in the comment above is simple: It's taking the
| current situation and extrapolating to an extreme future, then
| applying the extrapolated future prediction on to the current
| situation. The current situation does not represent the extreme
| future predicted. A lot of the LLM content is easily spotted
| and a lot of it is a waste of time to read, therefore it's
| right to police and ban it. Even if imperfect.
| zahlman wrote:
| Earlier today I found something that impressed me as awful
| slop, but I was hesitant to flag the submission because as
| far as I could tell _it got the facts right_ (I didn 't try
| to verify some details of who was involved with what, but I
| was familiar with the proposals the article was discussing).
| zahlman wrote:
| The thing is, I can read something that's really terribly
| written and still extract useful information from it. (Suppose,
| for example, an LLM was directed to synthesize information from
| some sources that I wouldn't have thought of doing; or a
| submission simply makes me aware of a blind spot I had. Or I
| look up documentation and find something that's incredibly
| verbose and full of marketing-speak, but the code samples look
| reasonable and can be verified by testing and/or cross-
| reference.)
| bmacho wrote:
| Accounts have to start posting somewhen.
|
| Moderators don't have the capacity (and fairly, it is impossible)
| to check if they are bots or humans.
|
| There are no good solutions, there are hundreds of thousands of
| intelligences out there, trained millions of hours on how to scam
| humans, capable of spitting out text tirelessly and shamelessly,
| and there will be only more of them, tens, hundreds, thousands
| times more.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Comments should be allowed from day one, but submissions should
| require some experience and karma.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newest - Scroll through there
| and there are a lot of [dead] submissions by green accounts.
| They aren't outright banned from submitting, but it often
| triggers auto moderation. It's like posting a link in one of
| your first few comments as a green user, that often results
| in shadow banning automatically.
| dang wrote:
| We're going to at least restrict Show HNs for a while.
|
| I do think this is relevant though: "HN can't be immune from
| macro trends" -
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| Oras wrote:
| For all accounts or just new ones?
| dang wrote:
| Just new ones for now.
|
| I don't want to make HN harder for legit new users, but I do
| think a bit of community participation is reasonable before
| posting a Show HN, so it isn't just a box on some "how to
| promote your project" checklist.
| wormpilled wrote:
| It's really hurting the brand. I can't remember the last
| time I bothered to even check that index. I used to check
| it all the time.
| bakugo wrote:
| /newest is pretty grim, too. Go there and click any link,
| and odds are you won't even need to read the contents to
| know it's AI generated, because you'll immediately be met
| by one of:
|
| - A landing page that looks exactly like every single AI
| generated landing page ever, I don't even need to
| describe it, you already know what it looks like
|
| - An article or blog post headered by an image with the
| Gemini logo in the corner
|
| - A Github repository with CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md and/or
| 50 large commits made in the span of a day
|
| I'd estimate that more than half of new submissions now
| fall into one of the above categories.
| mbernstein wrote:
| There's almost no shot to get hand authored posts some
| views (I tried with one of mine recently). I felt like I
| submitted it and a moment later there were like 20 new
| very obviously AI generated posts ahead of it.
| rubb3rDucc wrote:
| I recently had the same experience with a Show HN thread
| I posted.
| techsystems wrote:
| How new is new?
| verdverm wrote:
| It does seem, anecdotally, that the Show HN is being used
| less since the recent analytic posts that made it to the
| front page.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| i like your humor
| laborcontract wrote:
| Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has
| to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was
| shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to
| create new accounts on the fly.
| rock_artist wrote:
| I really don't like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work
| makes sense more than limiting new users.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| What would this proof of work scenario, instead of
| restricting new user content, look like?
| TZubiri wrote:
| Seems to be a general problem right?
|
| The standard solution is using an email to register account,
| maybe a cloudflare captcha, and then using good network
| logging to group accounts by IPs and chainbanning abusive
| accounts when they are caught by other mechanisms.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The problem is that we might lose some gold.
|
| Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party
| of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they
| were alerted by the story being posted here one way or
| another. And usually when they do it's very interesting.
|
| As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump
| through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too
| long so the thread dies before they can participate.
| Uvix wrote:
| Seems like restricting posts but not comments from a fresh
| account would thread that needle pretty well?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments
| from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or
| disabled.
| Barbing wrote:
| Even something like...
|
| Example[.]com
|
| But don't worry, HN has been thoughtful about links from
| new accounts for months and months (can't speak for
| longer, but maybe/probably). Effort could well be
| duplicative unless I'm unaware of some more granular
| detail.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm surprised posts aren't restricted a bit more. Maybe
| that's just my old school "lurk moar" mentality, but I
| feel like I really need to understand the vibes of a
| community before I start to contribute posts to it.
| Barbing wrote:
| True
|
| Mm, balancing against "long-time lurker, made an account
| just to post this"...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'd suggest: new accounts are read-only for at least a
| week. Then they can comment (rate limited at first,
| gradually relaxed) and vote, and then after some
| additional amount of time and/or karma they can submit a
| post. Maybe some of these mechanisms are already in
| place? Bots can probably game this too but drive-by bots
| maybe won't be patient enough.
| Barbing wrote:
| Immediate comment privileges are really important. Lots
| of examples, but to give a silly one, someone pastes
| their clipboard without realizing it includes their API
| key or their email. Good Samaritans should be able to
| say, "Hey, I just caught something."
|
| And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares
| your work, you should be able to comment on that thread
| without delay.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| This is the only reason I got myself a HN account:
| someone posted a link to a blog post of mine, and I
| happened to see the increased traffic on my VPS.
|
| (And I stuck around after, a few posts are interesting
| enough. All the AI stuff isn't, and there is too much of
| that unfortunately.)
| elaus wrote:
| It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our
| product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20
| new HN users so they're ready to shill".
|
| It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
| mbreese wrote:
| If someone is going to put that much effort into to it,
| let them. I think the ideas here are to try to get some
| low hanging fruit to see if that works "good enough".
| You'll never block all AI generated accounts, but you may
| not have to and still have the desired effect.
|
| But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them
| out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting,
| there are probably other ways to detect that.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I think the right people will stick around. There is a
| certain kind of indivudal that has the paitence to
| understand that a system that restricts new accounts from
| post is a good thing. Of recent, there have been a lot of
| posters that come here from the open web just to try and
| slant opinion.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I am only that kind of individual when I'm inclined to
| post unconstructively - not that I know that, at the
| time. When I'm feeling constructive, friction is likely
| to make me take my constructive energies elsewhere.
| brudgers wrote:
| I believe HN's success is in large part not presuming to
| have a good idea of what "the right people" are.
|
| This doesn't mean it doesn't have a strong sense of what
| bad behavior is. It clearly does.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The SA Forums model does accomplish the goals of
| filtering out noise, but then you're stuck with a
| stagnant community of "the right people."
| moralestapia wrote:
| Totally.
|
| I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but
| flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from
| dang and tomhow's great work.
| hinkley wrote:
| Responding from a new account is different from posting
| from a new account. You aren't vetting people by making
| accounts have a minimum age to post articles. That'll just
| cause people to make accounts before they need them.
|
| Reddit has forums where you need a minimum karma to post to
| certain subreddits and that is typically upvotes on your
| comments, but it could also be upvotes on someone else's
| moderated subreddit.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker
| News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months
| to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in
| one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be
| high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my
| behavior is probably a major outlier.
| oofbey wrote:
| I think yours might be extreme. But I think the anonymity
| here is widely appreciated. And frankly necessarily relies
| on easy creation of accounts.
|
| People share things that they often wouldn't. And somehow
| the culture remains mostly civil. It's a pretty fantastic
| forum IMHO.
|
| Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to
| speak.
| imglorp wrote:
| I appreciate the anonymity. Posting as throwaway is often
| useful to distance the poster from $work or $ex or other
| situations yet contribute to a conversation.
|
| But will it continue under all the login id surveillance
| laws coming up?
| srid wrote:
| > not too much of my post history accumulates in one
| account
|
| I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained
| from avoiding this.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I do it sometimes just to restrict my own pride in the
| account. I get a buzz from upvotes and that upsets me on
| a deeper level.
| bitroughj wrote:
| Same, but also for the opposite reason: a new account
| gives me a chance to do better. If I post lame comments,
| I accept the lameness of the posts attached to a
| particular user name and the hesitation I feel to post
| more lame comments decreases. With a fresh identity, I am
| more likely to avoid lame posting sort of like how you
| avoid going out in the mud in brand new sneakers. A sort
| of repentance; being born again in the digital realm.
| boredatoms wrote:
| I do the same. It simply means theres less accidental
| leakage / self-doxing that could be pieced together if
| you (or llm) read every comment on the account.
|
| Suggestion: Pick a long term account, dump the comments,
| and see what an llm could figure out about the target
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Reddit didn't ban you? I got banned for that lmao
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Never got banned for it, though my "rotations" tend to be
| "a few weeks every year".
|
| even if they did ban me: the account was going to be
| deleted in a short while regardless. So that fear isn't
| present for what's essentially a longer lasting
| throwaway.
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Same, though I'm also surprised how easy I can make new
| accounts for this site. But I love that. Hope it doesn't
| require me to jump through a bunch of hoops in the future.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I think the problem is you can be tracked by your email
| when you sign up for a new account. So I am not sure how
| this can be helpful.
| john01dav wrote:
| This matters when you're hiding from the website. It
| doesn't matter if you're just trying to hide such things
| from the public.
| whh wrote:
| I echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today...
|
| At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has
| been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on
| Instagram, X and Facebook for years.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| I was going to suggest emotional leetcode, but LLMs do well
| on this.
|
| When given a conversation about Alice and Suzy having a one-
| upmanship conversation (my husband rich, my kid is a genius)
| and what emotions they are feeling, and what Suzy could have
| said instead to improve the conversation, it gave accurate
| responses (e.g. they're feeling insecure, competitive, envy).
| II2II wrote:
| That type of question could also turn people off. We
| already have too many discussions where people are quick to
| jump to conclusions and attribute intent, rather than
| asking basic questions.
| brudgers wrote:
| My intuition is increasing the difficulty of account creation
| favors motivated actors and disincentivizes organic
| participation because:
|
| 1. ideological and/or economically motivated actors will just
| see it as a cost of doing business.
|
| 2. Ordinary sign-up friction is more likely to make HN appear
| ordinary to anyone who stumbles upon it.
|
| 3. Sign-up friction is a moat. The strength of HN is
| moderation of what gets in.
| ls-a wrote:
| Wow! I might be witnessing the end of HN
| AlexeyBrin wrote:
| Agree, HN can't be immune to what happens in the programming
| world. Would be great though if we can have a way to mute or
| hide accounts. This way each HN user will be able to clean his
| own feed of articles.
| xupybd wrote:
| That's sad there have been some really neat things shared that
| way but you gotta do what ya gotta do.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I was thinking of setting up a system to highlight sock-posters
| and other consistent-rule-violating accounts, as a 'fun
| project' that might improve the HN experience. But it strikes
| me that the HN staff probably already does something like this,
| they may not welcome a side-loaded project of this sort, and it
| would require some automated crawling of HN (which again may be
| unwelcomed). Finally, I don't actually have experience in this
| area. Is this something that would be welcomed, or unwanted?
|
| My initial thought is to set up a devoted account like
| "sock_puppet_detector", and using the infrastructure from
| https://hackersmacker.org/, add any likely sock-puppets as
| 'foes'.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| 100%. Not sure what the solution is but I have lost interest in
| Show HNs these days. Part of it is because when someone posted
| before, it usually meant they spent a fair amount of time
| thinking, and found it worthwhile to spend energy on the project.
| This was a nice first filter for bad ideas and now no longer
| exists.
|
| Even for posts that are interesting to me, I get the feeling that
| it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using
| LLMs. Nothing against them, but I personally thought of Show HNs
| as doing something for the love of it, the end result being a
| bonus.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I'm not sure if LLM projects doesn't mean they were not made
| with love. It just makes programming accessible to more people,
| but essentially it's still just a tool.
|
| It does take the handcraft out of it, in that sense an LLM-made
| tool would be more akin to IKEA stuff compared to a handcrafted
| work of art (though I struggle to call even hand-made electron
| crap a work of art, lol).
|
| But yeah I know what you mean, they are usually half-finished
| solutions.
| neural_thing wrote:
| Eventually HN is going to need to charge people $1 to post, just
| for spam filtering. Maybe donate the money to open source or
| something.
| carra wrote:
| Charging money does not seem a very good idea in a site like
| this where you expect users to upload all the content. Also
| this would require credit card info which is a massive barrier,
| even if you were to charge just 1 cent.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Pay with karma?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| No credit card. You have to send a $1 bill by snail mail,
| which is proof of "work" (mailing the bill) as well as $$.
| You enter the bill's serial number when you enroll the
| account, and the account activates when the bill arrives. You
| can be pretty anonymous this way.
|
| I once proposed a scheme like this where you would donate to
| charities who would post lists of serial numbers they had
| received, for this purpose, but it never got anywhere. Maybe
| we need it more now than we did then.
|
| I guess instead of mailing a $1 bill, if necessary it could
| be a hand drawn picture of a kitten (artistry not required).
| Authentication would involve checking the paper for pressure
| marks made by the pen. I wonder how many would take the
| trouble to fake that.
| briHass wrote:
| It worked for years for the SomethingAwful forums. A nominal
| charge for the ability to post, with plenty of 'timeout'
| chances for rehabilitation before an outright ban keeps out
| most of the junk.
|
| It feels wrong at first to pay for commenting on a forum, but
| the alternative is almost always a gentle slide towards a
| trash dump. AI means that slide is almost a vertical slope.
| phs318u wrote:
| Those of us old enough to remember Compuserve know that the
| cost of entry was exactly why the quality was so high. I was
| lucky enough that my employer paid for it. I was also active
| on various comp.os.* Usenet forums. Both were great sources
| of quality information but Compuserve stayed "high signal"
| for longer. Usenet - the birthplace of trolling - eventually
| degraded to the point of near uselessness. The signal was
| drowning in noise. Mainly because some people are just
| shitty. Which is worth remembering here. Behind every AI
| agent spamming HN (and everywhere else) is a human who
| thought this was a good idea. Why do they think that? Maybe
| that's the line to pursue for how to deal with this issue.
| reddalo wrote:
| $1 is not going to stop people from spamming. It's just $1
| after all...
| dmix wrote:
| That was Elon's idea for Twitter but the X membership scope
| grew in scope. $1/m sounds better.
| gpm wrote:
| $1 is an incredibly low price to pay for advertising and an
| incredibly high price to pay for legitimately interacting with
| a community. This would have the exact opposite of the intended
| effect.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Ooh, it's time to pull out the classics! Please feel free to
| check the boxes as you see fit, as I am currently too lazy to
| have Claude do it for me. Your post advocates a
| ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
| approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why
| it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your
| particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary
| from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
| ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
| ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be
| affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or
| collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute
| force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and
| then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not
| put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
| ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too
| much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate
| total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email
| users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
| employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses
| in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy
| anyone else's career or business Specifically, your
| plan fails to account for ( ) Laws expressly
| prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling
| authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
| ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all
| email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional
| problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( )
| Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( )
| Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( )
| Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( )
| Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
| ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
| ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
| ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or
| identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
| ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business
| with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers
| themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by
| client filtering ( ) Outlook and the following
| philosophical objections may also apply: ( ) Ideas
| similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
| been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is
| unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject
| of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists
| suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without
| being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve
| wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures
| should not involve sabotage of public networks ( )
| Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( )
| Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to
| trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open
| source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do
| nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email
| addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government
| reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow
| and painful enough Furthermore, this is what I think
| about you: ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it
| would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a
| stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le!
| I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house
| down!
| Lerc wrote:
| There have been numerous stories on HN where someone directly
| involved with the story has created an account specifically to
| engage in discussion about whatever the story was about.
|
| Losing that seems too high of a price to pay. Yes there are AI
| generated comments, in the past there has been script generated
| comments. You can report, downvote, or just ignore and move on. I
| am aware of posts like this existing, but I feel they are being
| effectively managed.
|
| Try not to be too offended about the notion of these posts
| existing. Many of them are not malicious, they just caused by
| users stepping outside what is considered appropriate, but in a
| landscape where the footing is quite dynamic, everyone is making
| their own judgement calls in a field where the consensus is not
| clear, guidance seems more appropriate than punishment here.
| krapp wrote:
| >Losing that seems too high of a price to pay.
|
| Assuming the mods just auto-ban new accounts and require them
| to be vouched and to earn minimum karma before being visible,
| those comments can be vouched up or approved by the moderators.
| The poster won't know that they've been banned, of course,
| because that's how shadowbanning works, so the approval process
| should be seamless for them.
|
| But how often does that happen versus the AI comments and alt
| account trolling?
|
| >but in a landscape where the footing is quite dynamic,
| everyone is making their own judgement calls in a field where
| the consensus is not clear, guidance seems more appropriate
| than punishment here.
|
| The consensus is and has always been clear. Generated comments
| of any kind have never been allowed. People just don't care,
| and that's a problem.
|
| And those comments are malicious in effect if not intent. We're
| here to have conversations with human beings, the intellectual
| and emotional connection is important. What is the point of
| having conversations with a machine, much less _not knowing_
| one is having a conversation with a machine? If nothing else,
| it 's dehumanizing and a waste of time.
| Lerc wrote:
| >those comments are malicious in effect if not intent.
|
| I don't believe that is possible. I think malice requires
| intent.
| macintux wrote:
| Sufficiently advanced destructiveness is indistinguishable
| from malice.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _There have been numerous stories on HN where someone
| directly involved with the story has created an account
| specifically to engage in discussion about whatever the story
| was about._
|
| Yes, and sometimes some of the HN automatic filters kills the
| comments. Remember to "vouch" the comments if they are
| interesting/relevant, a few "vouches" unkill the comments. And
| in extreme cases, send an email to hn@ycombinator.com so
| dang/tomhow can take a look and use some magic to fix the
| problem.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| It used to be so pleasant to read Show HN and find such
| interesting projects, but nowadays it's rare that any project
| posting their GitHub has ever read their source code or even
| comes close to functioning in the way the OP claims.
|
| Such a sad development.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| It's getting really bad. New accounts hours old posting walls of
| AI-generated garbage comments across dozens of topics. Please
| restrict new posters, minimally, and perhaps add a little
| friction to new account sign ups.
| mmaunder wrote:
| That's one way to block those pesky young innovators from
| trampling our lawn.
| tomhow wrote:
| Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals. That's been
| against the guidelines for a long time.
|
| Genuine innovation is what we most want to encourage. That's
| what Show HN has always been about.
|
| The problem now is that coding assistants have dramatically
| lowered the bar for getting a product or tool working, without
| the need for much innovation. We need new ways of identifying
| projects that are genuinely innovative so that their creators
| can be fairly rewarded, rather than being drowned out.
| regera wrote:
| Resistance is futile.
| ai-psychopath wrote:
| can be fun though
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's not like older accounts are necessarily any better.
|
| If you look at the leader board
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), you'll find a few old
| accounts that pretty much do nothing but farm links, posting
| sometimes dozens of times a day, with a very low percentage of
| comments. Their high "score" isn't an indicator of quality; they
| just spam enough that a few get some good upvotes, but most of
| their submissions are low quality.
| starkparker wrote:
| This has long been my biggest issue, much bigger than new
| accounts spamming slop. There are accounts with 10000x karma
| that do little more than feed links from the NY Times and
| similar publications, regardless of their relevance or value.
|
| Each one gets 4-5 karma, a few crack double digits. Post 10 or
| 20 a day over a year or two and they're five figures. Pure
| farming.
| AstroBen wrote:
| What's the point? It's not like karma gets you anything..
|
| ..or are they selling the accounts?
| AlexeyBrin wrote:
| The solution is for the users to be able to mute/hide accounts.
| It won't matter if an account has 10k points, once you mute it,
| you won't see what it posts.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I would actually expect Openclaw bots to be showing up here from
| time to time now, since there's no explicit documented policy
| against them.
|
| (edit: And thus such bots can't easily discover that they
| shouldn't post, afaict)
| lschueller wrote:
| Fully agree. I have the same impression. Especially, the last
| couple of days I've experienced an increase of submissions from
| accounts which were not even 1 hour old. All just promoting some
| fishy ai generated bs.
| xpe wrote:
| Lots of social media platforms need better ways forward. Let's
| focus on things we can measure and enforce. Let's be honest to
| ourselves about we know and what we don't.
|
| Think back to prohibition. Just because we want less public
| drunkenness doesn't mean it is wisest to ban alcohol. One has to
| ask: what is the chance the ban is successful? What happens when
| it cuts the wrong way?
|
| To what degree do we care about (1) "human" versus "AI"; (2)
| comment quality; (3) sensible methods for revealing social
| preferences? I care a lot more about the latter two than the
| first. It doesn't have to be a zero sum tradeoff, but I think it
| is a good starting question.
|
| Let's have that discuss and not try to solve the human vs AI
| classification problem.
| patrickmay wrote:
| I understand and appreciate your perspective. I do, however,
| disagree with your priorities. I mostly read here, but when I
| participate I want to interact with humans, not chatbots. I
| would much rather read a human comment with typos and poor
| grammar than another piece of anodyne LLM output that shows
| only that the responsible party doesn't value the human
| interaction that I do.
| fubdopsp wrote:
| I personally cycle accounts on this site for pseudo-privacy
| reasons. HN does not allow you to delete old comments you made
| and thus the only way to maintain some semblance of control over
| my profile and privacy is to periodically switch new accounts.
| I've been doing this for years now. The only real downside for me
| is that as a new account you don't have the ability to downvote,
| which is super annoying but something I've learned to live with.
|
| I'm not saying your idea is bad necessarily but giving another
| perspective.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I also do this. Pretty much every time I move.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > I don't want to see HN becoming twitter
|
| I find it's worse here now than X. Literally every discussion
| turns into meta and severely politicized. Certain topics you get
| flagged out by a mob for stating facts.
|
| At least on X reply bots are not allowed anymore. Blue checks are
| useless tho.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I find it's worse here now than X.
|
| I disagree, but in any case the easy solution in that case is
| to use X instead of HN.
|
| > At least on X reply bots are not allowed anymore.
|
| In theory, maybe.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Yep - and if you have an opinion on one particular side that
| isn't favored here, it gets flagged.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| HN has mostly turned into a reddit bis since 2023, with tons of
| topics that have absolutely nothing to do with startup, tech or
| programming but are directly taken from of r/news ... I'll take
| bots spamming fake projects over petty divise partisan
| politics.
| tamimio wrote:
| I checked new show HN a couple days ago and it was shocking how
| most were "flagged dead", unlike how it was before the AI
| invasion.
| lukasm wrote:
| I stopped fixing typos as a social signal :)
| mosura wrote:
| I have long believed that whatever comes along to replace the
| reddit/HN etc type site will be based almost entirely on trust
| networks.
|
| i.e. only surface stories posted by or upvoted by those you
| trust, and the inverse with those you distrust.
|
| Then exponentially drop off trust transitively and it could be
| almost workable.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >will be based almost entirely on trust networks
|
| Like Facebook/Linkedin?
| mosura wrote:
| Not close. Both those mistake knowing for trusting.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| The return of Advogato. If you weren't around for it, it had a
| certification system like what you describe, so the stuff on it
| was pretty good. After a while, spammers figured out that it
| had very high search engine placement because of its quality,
| and that pretty much ruined it. It's gone now.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The risk is to build very good echo chambers. One shouldn't
| have to read AI slop or despicable opinions during their free
| time, but some exposure to alternative respectable and not
| idiotic views should be part of the design.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I sometimes feel like a paid newsletter that's curated by users
| would be fun. I'd happily pay EUR5 a month for a weekly/daily
| digest where the comments are en par with HN.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I think this another sign in the flood of slop to come. I really
| suspect SNR (for whatever definition of signal most use) will
| continue to drop and mitigating is going be kind of like bailing
| out the ocean. Maybe a strange consequence of this might be that
| a real Show HN project would be easier to demo and find at
| something like a meetup now, if they weren't all kind of dying.
| Maybe we'll see a revival?
| davemcdaveface wrote:
| I also like that idea What's the criteria you had in mind
| redbell wrote:
| This post from 19 days ago is very close:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804
|
| Additionally, dang had replied on it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421
| randusername wrote:
| How about an opt-in toggle to display the year each account was
| created?
|
| randusername_2022
|
| I'm right on the boundary of the slopocene, not sure if in or
| out.
| duxup wrote:
| Reddit software subs are over run. It's all "look at my new app"
| and they're all the same. Same screenshot style, same shallow
| apps.
|
| Other subs are slowly being inundated with hidden history
| spammers ...
|
| Bad times.
| jsunderland323 wrote:
| I've been mulling over this for a couple of days too. I have a
| project I want to share with the HN community that I put a
| substantial amount of effort into but it was definitely AI
| assisted (as is literally everything today).
|
| I've read all of the source and I drove the architecture but it
| would be a stretch to say I didn't ask for assistance on things
| that felt fuzzy or foreign to me. I also have generally stopped
| typing code. I still don't think the LLM made the project though,
| it feels like my decision making.
|
| If the bar for Show HN becomes no AI whatsoever then you're just
| going to see a bunch of people covering their AI tracks. I'm
| reluctant to post it because I'm afraid of getting blasted by the
| community for using AI. At the same time, it is work that I've
| poured hundreds of hours into, that I'm proud of and that I think
| would be of interest to HN.
|
| I read the Obliteratus post that made it to the front page the
| other day and I agree that is pure slop. While it's frustrating
| that it took up front page space, it's evident that the whole
| community caught on to the sloppiness of it all immediately and
| called it out. I just don't think HN wants to set the precedent
| that no AI code should be shared.
|
| I also saw a week or two ago that someone open sourced a project
| of theirs that wasn't open source in the first place. The reason
| they stated was that they had vibe coded and were embarrassed to
| be discovered. If you want to get a concept out quickly with AI,
| you're now hesitant to open source because of the precedent set
| by the community. I think that's a scary thought to me. I would
| rather know the tools I'm using are AI generated/assisted and
| make the value judgement on if I trust the code and project
| owners.
| thutch76 wrote:
| I'm very wary of this request, though I understand it. I've been
| reading HN daily since around 2014. My involvement was purely
| passive (e.g., I have been a lurker) because I really didn't
| think I had much to contribute that wasn't already stated better
| by others.
|
| I didn't actually create my account until 2021? 2022? I can't
| remember. And I didn't make my first post or even comment until
| just last week.
|
| While I think a minimum post count or reputation metric could
| perhaps reduce the AI generated posts, introducing friction also
| makes it harder for real people to contribute anything
| meaningful.
|
| Furthermore, what does it matter if it's "AI generated"? Is some
| AI content ok? What's the pass/fail threshold on human vs AI
| generated text?
|
| I made a Show post last week where I heavily relied on AI. I'm
| sure there are some "tells." But even so, I spent more than three
| hours working on the content of my post and my first response.
| Would my post have been acceptable to you?
| blks wrote:
| Just write the text yourself, not many people enjoy reading AI-
| generated posts, even edited.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I don't care if the code is generated, i care if the content
| is. I don't want to read another "No complexity. No fuss. No
| buzzwords". "It's not just a tool, its a lifestyle". Its sooooo
| boring...
| pesus wrote:
| If you're going to spend 3 hours making a post, why not just
| write it yourself in the first place and avoid the issue and
| the reputational damage?
| leej111 wrote:
| Way too much blocking on here already....
| manbash wrote:
| Folks here can decide for themselves whether to check green
| accounts' "Show HN" these days. We are all aware of AI slop and
| creep in all shape and form.
|
| Moderation is already taxing as it is.
| razodactyl wrote:
| Humans are better than AI at flagging AI and where they fail is
| where the content doesn't cause a "disgust" signal - so wouldn't
| it be useful instead to have a flag as AI feature?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Why can't we just introduce a "vouching for" system like
| lobste.rs
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Reddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed.
|
| A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and
| helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been
| removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get
| disheartened and walk away forever.
|
| The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so
| will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days,
| farming karma).
|
| The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater
| proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would
| jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?
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