3 ms·

That might raise the initial barrier, but it assumes every user behaves appropriately. All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.

Bombthecat 7mo ago
Then we go back to torrent sites. Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so
throwaway94275 7mo ago
Blog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks that account and any invited by it.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
  I invite myself multiple times in addition to other real humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.
  - throwaway94275 7mo ago
    I'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.
    - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
      Getting unique IPs in any country you want is trivial for anyone but people building toy bots. How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned. Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
      - throwaway94275 7mo ago
        That's fine. If it is understood that you might be permanently banned because someone you invite starts doing bad stuff, maybe you'll be careful about who you invite.
  - vintermann 7mo ago
    Inviting people who invited bots chould also hurt your "social credit" score in various ways. Your tree could for instance be pruned - you can still invite people, but the people you invited can no longer invite people. There are not a lot of sites which have tried this and failed. Those which have tried to be even a little bit clever about it, have succeeded pretty well (Advogato was a really early example). What there have been, are sites which rejected such restrictions after a while, because they would rather have a big number to show to investors than real people. Many have even run the fake accounts themselves (e.g. Reddit).
dehsge 7mo ago
Because you have an initial user who invited the bots. The whole invite tree of this user can cull all invites given by the user who added bots.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
  Yes but I think bots can be very good, and many people have legitimate online-only relationships. It gets hairy quickly, with real users getting culled and bots slipping through. Also, if the bots are smart, they'll add real people too and take them down with them.
  - dehsge 7mo ago
    Yeah that’s the trade off of this implementation. Lobste.rs already uses this implementation https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations The comments are considerably better. I’m not even a member but get more out of reading those comments than hn, and I’ve worked at multiple YC’s. This place is not what it used to be.

Bombthecat 7mo ago

Then we go back to torrent sites. Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so

throwaway94275 7mo ago

Blog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks that account and any invited by it.

MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
I invite myself multiple times in addition to other real humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.
- throwaway94275 7mo ago
  I'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.
  - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
    Getting unique IPs in any country you want is trivial for anyone but people building toy bots. How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned. Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
    - throwaway94275 7mo ago
      That's fine. If it is understood that you might be permanently banned because someone you invite starts doing bad stuff, maybe you'll be careful about who you invite.
- vintermann 7mo ago
  Inviting people who invited bots chould also hurt your "social credit" score in various ways. Your tree could for instance be pruned - you can still invite people, but the people you invited can no longer invite people. There are not a lot of sites which have tried this and failed. Those which have tried to be even a little bit clever about it, have succeeded pretty well (Advogato was a really early example). What there have been, are sites which rejected such restrictions after a while, because they would rather have a big number to show to investors than real people. Many have even run the fake accounts themselves (e.g. Reddit).

dehsge 7mo ago

Because you have an initial user who invited the bots. The whole invite tree of this user can cull all invites given by the user who added bots.

array_key_first 7mo ago
Yes but I think bots can be very good, and many people have legitimate online-only relationships. It gets hairy quickly, with real users getting culled and bots slipping through. Also, if the bots are smart, they'll add real people too and take them down with them.
- dehsge 7mo ago
  Yeah that’s the trade off of this implementation. Lobste.rs already uses this implementation https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations The comments are considerably better. I’m not even a member but get more out of reading those comments than hn, and I’ve worked at multiple YC’s. This place is not what it used to be.