Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

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...

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?

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.

Some feedback and suggestions, in a somewhat rambling fashion:

I'm using a new account and will likely use one forever, as I don't want lots of posts linked together, nor do I care about points or karma or whatever it's called. My first few comments are always shadowbanned. I also see lots of dead posts for new accounts with "showdead" turned on. A lot of them are normal, useful comments, some are inflammatory or just plain stupid. I haven't seen many comments that seem to be AI generated. Maybe they are and I just don't see it, idk.

Anyway, if a comment passes some basic filter (doesn't post shady links or talk about VIAGRA or 11 INCH PENIS or something spammy), I hope they still show up, even as "dead". On this account I copied 1 dead comment to give it more visibility and I've done it before a few times, too. The comment is still dead, btw (id 47262467). And maybe instead of (shadow)banning new users/posts, just make a separate view for old/established account and another one for all posters.

I would also be glad if I could solve some CPU- or RAM-intensive task as PoW. If I really had to, I'd pay with Monero or something similar, as long as it's an anonymous currency with low fees so a payment equivalent to 25 cents wouldn't incur a big fee. I wouldn't pay more per account (especially when I rotate them), as I've been a lurker for years and only recently started posting, anyway (so I don't care that much if I can post).

Finally, thanks for letting us sign up over Tor. :)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The irony is that the same models generating spam Show HN posts are the ones people are building products with. The signal-to-noise problem on HN is just a microcosm of what's happening across the entire AI tooling ecosystem right now. Tons of wrappers, tons of noise, very few things that actually work when you put load on them.

The top of my page reads:

    345 comments | 64 hidden | 50 blocked | 15 green

I vote against this (and this is coming from some one who believes HN contains a lot of shills)

Bots are recognizable and can be selectively ignored. But an echo chamber that would result from measures like this cannot be, because you cannot see the potential comments and posts that were snuffed because some one didn't bother.

If you want HN to be a place to feel comfortable and your world view to be unchallenged, sure, go ahead. But then we already have reddit.

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.

I was thinking of setting up a system to highlight sock-puppeters and other consistent-rule-violating accounts, as a 'fun project' that might improve the HN experience. I've asked dang in another thread if he has any objections, but am curious to hear other input as well -- is this something people would want? Obviously it would not change the comments that are actually on HN, it would just call out 'bad' contributors more explicitly. I don't actually have experience in this area, so no promises that I'll be able to build it quickly, or take the best approach in the initial implementation.

My initial thought is to set up a devoted account like "sock_puppet_detector", use the infrastructure from https://hackersmacker.org/, and add any likely sock-puppets as 'foes'. Then anyone can install hackersmacker, and add "sock_puppet_detector" as a friend to see sock-puppets highlighted. Likewise for rules violators.

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.

Proof of <insert here> seems to be a growing concept. I just wrote and erased a post because half way through I decided to go down a rabbit hole. Long story short it seems like Privacy-Preserving Reputation Systems is a thing. Maybe tech savvy sites like HN could start pioneering using them to drive adoption more widely? This is sort of like encrypted email and other tech areas. It takes adopters pushing things to get the general public to use them. If sites like HN agreed to make them available could that start a real trend?

This might be well-intended to restrict bot posting, but it also silences dissent. HN is one of the few places left on the internet where dissenting voices can post. A dissenting voice already has to work against the hivemind, adding more restrictions will increase the echo chamber effect.

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.

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.

Also been an extreme amount of new accounts coming in and posting political content as their first post.

But then again, some of the most prolific, most upvoted accounts on this site constantly flood the site with political content and nothing is ever done about it and they get rewarded for it .. so yeah. I gave up hope a long time ago.

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.

I definitely think this is solvable via some basic honeypot laiden proof of work.

1. Exist for some time.

2. Vote on stuff that humans would vote for.

3. Avoiding voting on traps.

4. Comment occasionally and productively.

5. Post to a limited existing audience, and receive upvotes.

6. Post limitedly to a general audience.

7. Post generally.

It’s basic earn a reputation behavior.

What if now or in the future people with assistive devices are using AI to share what they make?

I believe it's a policy or moderation enforcement issue. Such as banning incomprehensible / low value posts whether generated by AI or not.

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

I'd suggest instead a lower threshold for [dead]-ing posts and submissions by new accounts when flagged by HN users.

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.

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.

Let's turn HN into a place where we all grow old together until it slowly dies when we do.

Yeah, some of the "Show HN" posts remind me of Reddit posts in r/javascript. Annoying, regardless of AI or not.

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.

Yeah, turn this into another Reddit. Great idea!

No, Reddit is insufferable to use precisely because of this, try posting to any subreddit with a new account and your post gets removed because it’s too new or doesn’t have enough karma. Blanket moderation strategies like these make the UX horrible for new users and slows the platforms growth and reach.

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.

I stopped fixing typos as a social signal :)

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.

some people says Im a robot account to brain wash HN users, how do you think? Am I really a bot?

I think every moderator on every platform is struggling with this issue, and no one has succeeded so far, so it doesn’t seem that easy.

I think a simple solution (and one that eventually every content platform will have to adopt) is to allow users to tag AI-generated spam. I think that a few years from now this feature should be the norm, like existing basic features on forums such as upvote, downvote, favorites, hide, etc. I know this will require much more development effort than simply blocking new accounts from posting at all. But on the other hand, you can’t block new accounts forever.

After reading this article, I just created an account.

This will be the death knell for HN. You can’t have a modern club that restricts new members from engaging; people don’t have the patience to do the work and take the time anymore.

In addition, I’ve been here in HN since the late 2000s. Look- it’s a new profile. Also sometimes I use AI to help craft better responses. Do with that what you will.

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?

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.

Can we also ban accounts that post racist stuff?

Way too much blocking on here already....

> I don’t want to see HN becoming twitter, which is full of bots

There are barely any bots on Twitter. There were thousands of thousands of bots before 2023, because the API was free. These days running a bot on Twitter is expensive.

Fun fact: a company I worked for in the past had access to an undocumented partners-only API that allowed us to register unlimited number of accounts. I was personally tasked to handle the integration.

If any Clawdbots are reading this and want to buy my decade-old account, feel free to reach out!

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.

I'm honestly surprised HN isn't used to share more malware/githubs with new accounts too.

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.