15 ms·

Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

• SG- 7mo ago
  I'm honestly surprised HN isn't used to share more malware/githubs with new accounts too.
  • anonym29 7mo ago
    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.
    • imjustmsk 7mo ago
      The only thing I know about computers is to annoy everyone I meet by saying I use Aah btw :)
• cebert 7mo ago
  HN does a good job moderating and blocking spam from new accounts.
  • furyofantares 7mo ago
    Used to. The job has apparently gotten a lot harder now.
• saltyoldman 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  “shownew” : “no|yes” option would be nice.
  • gnabgib 7mo ago
    If everyone turned off new account visibility, we'd just see the same noise 30 days later.. not sure that helps.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • toomuchtodo 7mo ago
      During that time, one would assume mod action would filter out the undesired, thereby “seasoning” accounts.
• BalinKing 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      It’s only going to get harder has people continue to model their writing on LLM style.
      • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
        I guess it's been fun but the internet is well and truly dead If not already, then soon
      • robotresearcher 7mo ago
        You're absolutely right.
        • rpcope1 7mo ago
          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.
          • deleted 7mo ago
• amadeuspagel 7mo ago
  Let's turn HN into a place where we all grow old together until it slowly dies when we do.
  • dang 7mo ago
    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.
    • SsgMshdPotatoes 7mo ago
      I'm hoping to do a show HN soon on something I've been working on, but my account is currently only 6 days old. Tips? Btw, restricting new accounts (based on karma/age/whatever) could be combined with the option to ask mods for permission somehow, although that'd have to be done in a way that that doesn't become too much work.
      • tomhow 7mo ago
        Be an active participant. Engage in other discussions threads with curiosity and generosity. Ask good questions, share interesting perspectives. Show you’re human and thoughtful. The system has long been that anyone can email the mods and ask us to review their project, but the volume has grown so much in recent weeks that it’s hard to get much else done.
• verdverm 7mo ago
  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_ 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884481
    • heavyset_go 7mo ago
      This made the frontpage two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275291 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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    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.
• neom 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Reverse captchas are fun. Click this button 10,000 times to prove that you're a robot!
  • vivid242 7mo ago
    We need new ways to prove our humanness.
    • ai-psychopath 7mo ago
      in a world of smart LLMs acting dumb is human proof
  • xarope 7mo ago
    you may have a point, i.e. some mechanism to invoke a behavior that only a bot or LLM could do, that a human would not, e.g. click on this button now in a hidden div/transparent color or measure response time within page load. the problem is that once this is found out, the circumvention is easy enough to program into bots/LLMS. are we going to reinvent the voight-kampff test from bladerunner?!?
• castral 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    I wish for karma based too if we managed to get filters. I want to see posts only by accounts with {x}+ karma points.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Springtime 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        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.
• ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
  I'd suggest instead a lower threshold for [dead]-ing posts and submissions by new accounts when flagged by HN users.
• refulgentis 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    I have a chrome plugin I made that gives me some personal social features (tagging people), it can block: https://s.h4x.club/yAuNoQDe https://s.h4x.club/yAuNoQDe
• delichon 7mo ago
  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.
  • cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • saulpw 7mo ago
    "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 7mo ago
      Don't tell anyone, but I am secretly in charge and open to suggestions. Spill.
      • Avicebron 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
          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.
• bmacho 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Comments should be allowed from day one, but submissions should require some experience and karma.
    • Jtsummers 7mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newest 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 7mo ago
  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&query=by%3Adang%20immune%20macro%20trend&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  • Oras 7mo ago
    For all accounts or just new ones?
    • dang 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
          /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 7mo ago
• alabhyajindal 7mo ago
  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.
  • bschmidt25 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • verdverm 7mo ago
      For your first ever comment, you are breaking multiple rules. Please review the Guidelines and FAQ
      • bschmidt100 7mo ago
        [dead]
    • kstrauser 7mo ago
      Why do you keep posting here? Asking seriously. You open a new account, immediately get it banned, then move on to the next. Doesn’t that get boring?
  • wolvoleo 7mo ago
    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.
  • 7mo ago
• neural_thing 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      Pay with karma?
    • throwaway81523 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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.
• truelinux1 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• Lerc 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    >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 7mo ago
      >those comments are malicious in effect if not intent. I don't believe that is possible. I think malice requires intent.
      • 7mo ago
• DetroitThrow 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  That's one way to block those pesky young innovators from trampling our lawn.
  • tomhow 7mo ago
    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.
• lschueller 7mo ago
  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.
• regera 7mo ago
  Resistance is futile.
  • ai-psychopath 7mo ago
    can be fun though
• bdcravens 7mo ago
  It's not like older accounts are necessarily any better. If you look at the leader board (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders 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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      What's the point? It's not like karma gets you anything.. ..or are they selling the accounts?
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • starkparker 7mo ago
        No idea. One such account's posted 24 articles in the last two weeks, most from either nytimes.com, theguardian.com, or newyorker.com. Half of them are unrelated to tech. They averaged 14 karma per post, but most of that (218) is in one NYT share that hit. That's right on the norm for this account. The prior two weeks of spam had one hit in 26 (Guardian, 500+ karma). The prior two weeks of spam had one hit in 30 (London Review of Books, on the Iran war, 100+ points before getting flagged). The prior two weeks, one hit in 15 (Guardian, 81 points, a dupe of an earlier submission).
  • AlexeyBrin 7mo ago
• Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  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)
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• ai-psychopath 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• xpe 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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.
    • xpe 7mo ago
      This is long, but I put lots of purely human effort* into it, and I hope it clears some things up. Writing it cleared up a lot in my own head. > 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. I take your meaning. However, that phrasing doesn't cut to the core of it. Rationalists would say "this doesn't carve reality at the joints". Here are my attempt to disentangle, decomplect**, and find common ground. Let me know which of these you disagree with, if any: 1. I care relatively little about typos and grammar, as long as the ideas are clear. 2. I enjoy human connection with people, in person and online. I would prefer to have a person on the other end. 3. Actually, I'd go further... I'd like to have more personable conversations and work past a lot of the common online discussion failure modes (but now I'm wandering off topic). 4. When chatting, I care a lot about the quality of the underlying thinking. 5. I personally don't want to read someone's first knee-jerk take. 6. I prefer to read a thoughtful and clear expression of a human being's experience. 7. On HN in general, I want curious conversation. 8. I understand everybody brings some point of view and sometimes what one would call an agenda. 9. Maybe the top criteria for doing #6 well is: are we interacting with each other per the guidelines? Charitably, in good faith, and with curiosity (#7). 10. As an example of an unwelcome agenda (#8), I don't want to inundated with commercially-fueled marketing-speak. However, to be clear, in this regard, I don't care if it comes from a person or an LLM. 11. Speaking for myself, not for HN, I don't mind if #6 is assisted by LLM editing. 12. Why #11? Because I care more about having a human being in the loop than a human shaping every single aspect. (See also the next point.) 13. One key for me is: does the person stand behind what they post? Meaning: are they accountable to it? Do they own it? 14. In addition to "original thoughts" (as if humans ever really have them!), #13 applies to someone borrowing, remixing, or outright stealing phrases they've heard before. 15. If someone uses an LLM to edit their words, it feels not too different from #14. Except when ... (see #16) 16. Sometimes people use LLMs to not actually put in the work of reflecting and thinking. This is sad for them and sad for people who have to read it. 17. Unfortunately, even without LLMs, some people don't put in the work of thinking and reflecting. See #5. 18. Putting #17 and #18 together, it is NOT the part about the LLM that bothers me! It is the lack of reflecting and thinking! 19. Asking someone else to read your post before sending is totally ok. 20. #15 done well may not be different (and may be better than!) #19. 21. In a forum where a comment is read many more times than it is written, I consider it more respectful to put an appropriate amount of effort into writing. 22. If a person takes the time to write something out in their own words, that is a signal of respect for the audience. Especially in comparison with, say, just replying with a trope. 23. If a person uses an LLM to research and clarify their thinking AND is thoughtful about it (#6) AND stands behind it (#13), that is a signal for respect for the audience. Fin.*** Here's what I'm driving at: I recommend that people put the effort in to figure out what aspects bother them about this moment in time with so much GenAI output. It is a real PITA to make sense of, but not doing so doesn't make that PITA go away. * I hope you don't mind that I used a NCLM, a neuro-cognitive language model, to construct this... a.k.a my brain. Snark aside, does the substrate matter, in the long-run? ** Rich Hickey is my home boy. *** Why do I number my points? Well, I work hard to tease apart my ideas; it is part of my writing and thinking process. Sometimes I put them back into a paragraph, sometimes not. But I like trying it out: I think it makes it easier to refer back to ideas and build upon them.
• fubdopsp 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    I also do this. Pretty much every time I move.
• dzhiurgis 7mo ago
  > 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 7mo ago
    > 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 7mo ago
    Yep - and if you have an opinion on one particular side that isn’t favored here, it gets flagged.
  • throw_m239339 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  I stopped fixing typos as a social signal :)
  • ares623 7mo ago
    me to
• mosura 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    >will be based almost entirely on trust networks Like Facebook/Linkedin?
    • mosura 7mo ago
      Not close. Both those mistake knowing for trusting.
      • TZubiri 7mo ago
        I'd say that they don't make trust decisions, rather they give information to the user so that they can decide whether to trust and for what purpose. Linkedin more so than facebook, facebook shows list of common contacts, linkedin shows that plus a literal resume.
        • mosura 7mo ago
          Maybe, but that just pushes that load on to the user that defeats the point. Computers are about automation.
          • TZubiri 7mo ago
            No software can do everything, Good software makes concessions. More concretely the ideal software would require a volume and speed of user input that is unfeasible, and the size and complexity of such software would balloon such that development and maintenance costs would be unfeasible, furthermore the more features, the more customization users want, so customization is an additional dimension. But sure, go make a system that reads my mind and decides whether I want to trust a USER to do SOMETHING.
• rpcope1 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  I also like that idea What’s the criteria you had in mind
• sebastien_b 7mo ago
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• redbell 7mo ago
  This post from 19 days ago is very close: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 Additionally, dang had replied on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421
• randusername 7mo 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.
  • hcs 7mo ago
    Or grade accounts by the logarithm of how many accounts were registered before them, like Slashdot. (This is tongue in cheek as I assume yours was.)
  • i_think_so 7mo ago
    So now we're going to create a black market for old HN accounts? Am I too late to get ahead of the curve and stockpile some, while they're still relatively cheap?
• duxup 7mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• jsunderland323 7mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • SsgMshdPotatoes 7mo ago
    I don't think people are blasted for using AI (mostly), I think people are blasted for low effort work, just like pre-LLMs. LLMs just made it way easier to complete low effort projects, so therefore there is more of it.
    • jsunderland323 7mo ago
      Yeah, I agree but as someone in this thread said, if Temple OS came out today there is no way it wouldn’t be immediately derided as AI slop. That’s what worries me. Blatant slop is obvious. Slop with a modicum of effort is harder. I’m still adjusting my slop-o-meter on other people’s work. It’s easy for me to identify my own slop, it’s not always so obvious when looking at someone else’s AI assisted work.
• irenetusuq 7mo ago
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• thutch76 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Just write the text yourself, not many people enjoy reading AI-generated posts, even edited.
  • ramon156 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    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?
    • thutch76 7mo ago
      This is awfully narrow minded. I had Claude give me an initial framework, based on the many many hours of context of chat across many different documents. It helped me organize my thoughts. Some of us need assistance to communicate effectively. And for me, yes that took 3 hours even with this assistance.
• leej111 7mo ago
  Way too much blocking on here already....
• manbash 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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?
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• arthurcolle 7mo ago
  Why can't we just introduce a "vouching for" system like lobste.rs
• AussieWog93 7mo ago
  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?
  • stuartjohnson12 7mo ago
    It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.
    • spartanatreyu 7mo ago
      > It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Not to mention reddit mass removed experienced moderators when all the moderators had a protest about reddit removing their access to good third party tooling. That's the day the site started its death spiral.
      • scoofy 7mo ago
        I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health. Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles. Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.
• poemxo 7mo ago
  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.
• pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
  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/ 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.
• solaire_oa 7mo ago
  I created a Firefox plugin which takes HN commenters'/submiters' account create date and sort/scales the order/points based on its creation since 2009 (older accounts get more weight). Optionally, the plugin just puts "spoiler" text over accounts created after a certain date (say, 2023 or so). Unfortunately, I was not able to "reorganize" comments/posts in a manner that I felt was particular "better", and didn't keep the plugin, for whatever that's worth. I think it would be more prudent to overlay a web-of-trust, where accounts which submitted links/comments that you upvoted are then given significantly higher priority in other threads/feeds (unfortunately downvotes are not made apparent on HN, but factoring downvotes would also help.) Exposing your web-of-trust may also assist others in determining trusted content. Perhaps this web-of-trust approach is dystopian on the order of MeowMeowBeenz, but I have not heard any other practical solutions to the disintegration of trust which is upon us. Edit: Elsewhere in this thread HackerSmacker was mentioned, which is what I'm describing. That's exciting, I'll be trying it out later.
• scoofy 7mo ago
  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.
• senfiaj 7mo ago
  Yeah, some of the "Show HN" posts remind me of Reddit posts in r/javascript. Annoying, regardless of AI or not.
• jmward01 7mo ago
  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?
• friedeggs 7mo ago
  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.
• diacritical 7mo ago
  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. :)
  • ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
    You can use a longer-established /hn/account to vouch your burner's posts... unless you're worried about /hn/ linking your accounts, too (not just public scraping) — which they can, by IP address.
    • diacritical 7mo ago
      I'm using Tor, HN can't link the IP address. Naturally, I trust HN more than random visitors/scrapers, but it's better to trust less people/institutions/things. In the current system people can vouch for dead posts from shadowbanned new accounts, if I understand correctly. It seems people do it, to a certain degree at least, because I rarely see good comments that stay dead forever.
• andreygrehov 7mo ago
  > 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.
• arjie 7mo ago
  The top of my page reads: 345 comments | 64 hidden | 50 blocked | 15 green So I don't see people who annoyed me for one or other reason in the past, I auto-hide the top 1000 accounts by word count, and I hide all green users. This was trivial to write for myself and I think more people should work on something like this for themselves.
• thegrim33 7mo ago
  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.
• arttaboi 7mo ago
  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.
  • kelipso 7mo ago
    It’s going to end up like the flag button. Disagree with opinion in the post -> tag as AI-generated spam. Not that I disagree with the idea necessarily, probably a few safeguards around it like only certain users can tag and pattern over time would fix it.
• stx5 7mo ago
  some people says Im a robot account to brain wash HN users, how do you think? Am I really a bot?
• p0p0pret 7mo ago
  After reading this article, I just created an account.
• devonkelley 7mo ago
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• paulcole 7mo ago
  If any Clawdbots are reading this and want to buy my decade-old account, feel free to reach out!
  • gnabgib 7mo ago
    A good way to find your account restricted.
    • paulcole 7mo ago
      Shhhhhh
• qsera 7mo ago
  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.
• th0ma5 7mo ago
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• JeremyJaydan 7mo ago
  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.
• speedylight 7mo ago
  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.
• coldtrait 7mo ago
  Can we also ban accounts that post racist stuff?
  • rkomorn 7mo ago
    My experience with reporting stuff to mods is that people who post racist stuff do get banned but I also think there's a difference between holding opinions I consider based in racism or having racist outcomes (which I don't report), and posting actually racist stuff (which I do report).
• gethly 7mo ago
  Yeah, turn this into another Reddit. Great idea!
• nephihaha 7mo ago
  If you can devise a system which eliminates bots but not new humans, all the better.
• IAmGraydon 7mo ago
  How about this instead: if you have a new account, a certain number of downvotes from old/high karma accounts will ban the account, not just kill the comment. This gives moderation power to those who have shown themselves to be high value/long term contributors.
• ron_woods 7mo ago
  Reading through the comments so far I really don't see a way out of this without some real approval process. Late last year I joined the Rands Leadership Slack https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ This was the first time I encountered a fairly stringent "prove your human" process. It goes something like this: 1. Send email from an valid e-mail account. 2. Include your name, occupation, the briefest of explanations of why you want to join this Slack, how you heard about us, and that you have read and accept our Code of Conduct. 3. Include links to your BlueSky, LinkedIn, Github, X, or Mastodon — any site demonstrating you’re a human. Now before anyone says these can all be automated by an agent. Yes you are correct, but I also had a e-mail conversation with Rand himself before joining his Slack. I know you can't do this at internet scale, but perhaps that era is over.
• ValveFan6969 7mo ago
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• soccercerer 7mo ago
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• catlikesshrimp 7mo ago
  Suggestion 1: Accounts can only upvote once a day. Accountscan only downvote twice a day. Spam account farming uses upvotes to boost spam accouts in the same farm, hence restricting upvotes. About downvotes, if they aren't somewhat restricted, they will be used to appreciating spam accounts by devaluing legitimate users. Suggestion 2: Missing AI hype is better than drowning everything else in AI hype, IMHO. Temporarily block AI themes from "Show HN"
• grantcarthew 7mo ago
  I posted a Show HN post recently. It has not had a single glance of interest. I think it is dead now anyway. I've spent months on the project I posted, but no interest from anyone.
  • dankwizard 7mo ago
    Well were they interesting?
• AI-viewer-un 7mo ago
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• level87 7mo ago
  100% agree, I rely on HN for genuine insight, recently I've found it really difficult to trust what I'm reading. For instance this thread → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247639 has so many new accounts all saying that how brilliant the product is.
  • fragmede 7mo ago
    Fwiw, email hn@ycombinator.com and the moderators will take a closer look and ban the voting and comment ring if they deem it suspicious.
• manojpathak 7mo ago
  HA after reading your question I noticed that new accounts are shown in green :-) and I am green too. I understand your pain and the issue is that it is inevitable. G-AI are being used everywhere so instead of writing in bad English like this why not ask G-AI to formalize my thoughts. BTW I am curious, how you figure it out that its AI generated other then green?
• b5chm1d7 7mo ago
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• AUF2026 7mo ago
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• webadderall 7mo ago
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• pangon 7mo ago
  I've been a long-time HN lurker. Like many others, I never created an account to participate and mostly just read without posting. Today, for the first time, I actually have something I'd like to contribute: a personal open-source project I built with the community in mind and wanted to share. But if I create a new account, I get redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim I also have an older account from 2021 (the one I'm using to comment right now) that I barely used, and that one doesn't let me post to Show HN either. It just says: "Sorry, your account isn't able to submit this site". I understand the need to limit spam. But shouldn't mechanisms like upvotes, shownew, and showdead already help with that? A full block like this seems to hit not just spammers, but also lurkers and new users who are trying to contribute for the first time. To me, that risks making the community feel more closed than it should.