4 ms·
Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?
I love HN and I don’t want to see it die.
But bot accounts are growing everyday. Something more radical needs to be done.
- randyrand 6mo agoPersonally, I think new accounts should cost $300. It’s not a perfect solution, clearly. But it should hopefully reduce the floodgates.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoBut that is the cost for an old account!
- chistev 6mo agoSo punish real users who just discovered HN, or old lurkers who finally decide to join? Great idea.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoAlso, most users (actually everyone I know personally) have multiple HN accounts which is natural for an anonymous platform, so it's not abnormal for long-term users to remake accounts regularly. I believe most of us don't access their oldest account (probably due to post history, beliefs that have changed...)
- mettamage 6mo agoYea, I have 3 type of accounts (and the HN mods know this and they tell me I'm not the only one). 1. This account, an account where I'm fully myself, honest and is a pseudonym as to who I really am. I do not want this to be linked to my actual real identity but if it happens to be linked to my real identity, it's fine. Well... fine-ish... fine enough anyway. That leads me to account type 2. 2. Some takes I have are simply too spicy. I know this, but I still have those takes [1]. In very rare situations, I find it important to share these takes as they are actually relevant. For this, I either create a throwaway account or access whatever throwaway account is available because my browser auto logs in on them (certain browsers I use so little that my throwaway account auto logs in on it). But then we have the flipside of this, which is account type 3. 3. An account with a username that is actually traceable to me if you know how to search. On this account I am still myself, but I do ask myself if my take is a "clean take" that under any circumstance or reality is still a nice clean take. I don't put anything on here that is even remotely controversial. [1] Here's a simple "spicy take" that I daresay on this account, so the actual spicy takes I have are a little more wild than this. Here it is: in 10 years from now we'll have so much cybersex you can't even fathom it. We'll have 3D models that will look almost indistinguishable, those 3D models will be more intelligent than you are on many things. You get the idea, a spicy take.
- sdwr 6mo ago[flagged]
- pixel_popping 6mo ago[dead]
- embeng4096 6mo agoIf it wasn’t a spicy take in some way nobody would be commenting on, quoting, or mocking it
- dang 6mo agoCan you please stop posting swipes and putdowns? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- verve_rat 6mo agoMaybe, if you're to ashamed to risk your real name being linked to something you say, you shouldn't say it? No every opinion needs to be heard, not every thought needs sharing. If you are embarrassed by what you type, then why do you think other people need to read it?
- randyrand 6mo agoThat's the wrong framing. It's to protect yourself against unhinged people. Nearly every group of people has been persecuted at some point.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoAbsolutely not, you should say it if it makes sense, anonymity is very important for free speech, it has nothing to do with being embarrassed, sometimes there is legal consequences possible as well in what you say, or potentially doxxing and such.
- randyrand 6mo agoI'm all ears if you have a better idea. Paying money for something valuable is not punishment. HN is easily worth the money to me.
- MaxwellJensen 5mo agoI wanted to share a free software project (licensed under EUPL-1.2), but unfortunately I cannot, because my account is brand new.
- chistev 5mo agoSorry
- sovenyr 6mo agoit should be better bot detection system - especially because of ai generated comments - and that's all
- late_night_fix 6mo agoInstead of banning and charging,HN could double down on trust signal,like device reputation,posting velocity limits,and stronger weighting of upvotes from long standing accounts.
- thegrim33 6mo agoI analyzed multiple months of submissions for rule breaking / political content and the vast, vast, majority of them came from the same ten or so 50-200k upvotes power user accounts. The most "trusted" accounts on this site are the worst offenders.
- plytow 6mo agoThere are some users that 100% are protected by mods. Users will get threatened and scolded for getting mildly confrontational on a tech topic, but plenty of user can flamebait endlessly in political threads unimpeded.
- dang 6mo agoYou guys may have unrealistic expectations. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you're asking for something humanly impossible, remember that there are only 2 of us.
- wglb 6mo agoHere is a typical day's posting tally job 2 flagged 204 dead 336 story 1664 delayed 687 comment 12312 That is approximately 513 comments each hour or 8.55 each minute. Not humanly possible for two moderators to view and make judgement on even a small fraction of these comments.
- bttfuchsia 6mo agoBut if you say anything against it, you get downvoted and dang reminds you to read the guidelines which are intentionally vague and are misused all the time for vendettas. It’s a rigged system to start with.
- asxndu 6mo agoIts the same Claw Agent garbage funded by YC
- gucci-on-fleek 6mo agoPart of the magic of HN is that it's open to everyone, and everyone is treated equally. I'm not aware of anywhere else on the internet where a farmer from a poor country, a college student, and a CEO of a billion-dollar company can have a meaningful conversation, and I think that it would be a real shame to lose that. I agree that the bot accounts are annoying and getting worse, but I don't think that making it more difficult to create an account is a good solution here.
- joshribakoff 6mo agoNo the magic was the community’s ability to weed out garbage so we can have meaningful conversations. Garbage is garbage no matter who wrote it.
- randyrand 6mo agodefinitely. signal to noise on HN has always been incredibly higher than most other platforms.
- bttfuchsia 6mo ago[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 6mo agoI'm not sure about that. Yesterday we had a discussion about an experiment using radio to look for cosmic rays, where the detectors are under the Antarctic ice. One of the paper's authors showed up to answer questions. If that does happen elsewhere, it doesn't happen as often as it does here.
- bttfuchsia 6mo ago[dead]
- Worf 6mo ago
- dude250711 6mo agoI would not call LLM users outright "bots"... That being said, perhaps some captcha requiring human empathy could weed them out?
- Kim_Bruning 6mo agoAre we going all voight-kampf with this? Or something non-fictional? Either way, you might be surprised to find in 2026 that it'd filter out more humans than agents; depending ;-)
- sdevonoes 6mo ago90% of the stories on HN are AI related. It’s normal to have so many bots nowadays. If HN dies, wouldn’t be the worst thing tbh
- pjc50 6mo agoMetafilter charged $5. Of course, putting a barrier to entry is also more likely to make a site die. Perhaps this is unavoidable. In the end maybe somewhere has to be slightly "underground" to be good, lest the bots trampling the surface like the opening scenes of Terminator find you.
- ChoGGi 6mo agoYou could always join Kuro5hin it's only a one time payment.
- ipaddr 6mo agoWhy wouldn't bots pay?
- randyrand 6mo agoSome would! But it changes the value proposition significantly. That's why it needs to be a reasonably high amount.
- fuzzfactor 6mo agoExactly. Plenty of them can probably afford it easier than averge people.
- Ekaros 6mo agoI wonder what would reasonable level be. Say 1% of gross income or gross wealth. Whichever is higher. That would equalise the burden. So rich people who can afford it can pay more and poor people still pay, but might struggle a bit.
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo agoWe're still talking about HN accounts, right?
- gus_massa 6mo agoI own my home... so that would increase the 1% compare to people that only rent. What about people with mortgage? Should I pay for my full home or only a half because my wife owns the other half? How would be possible to avoid frauds?
- Ekaros 6mo agoExactly. You own more than people who rent. But still if only half is yours that would be fair to consider. Maybe AI would be solution. Feed it all bank statements, private records, emails, tax records and so on from say past 10 years. Then it can come up with correct figure...
- arjie 6mo agoEvery group has always claimed that Eternal September has come right after them. It happens in San Francisco and New York City. It happens on Digg, and Reddit, and Hacker News. It only doesn't happen on Lobste.rs because it's too small. I think the reality of most social networks is that communities shift and change over time. Physical places have the constraint that you and I cannot be in the same place because we exclude each other. Our groups cannot be in the same place because two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time. Virtual places allow overlap. We should lean into that advantage with virtual communities and provide a means for people to share the space while speaking within their own contexts. Rather than requiring total community norms match our preferences, we have the ability to enforce our preferences for ourselves. Ideally, I'd like Hacker News to come up with a block functionality and some way to turn on in-network commentary only, but until such a feature arrives I've made a trivial Chrome extension that hides people's comments and allows hiding green comments by default: https://overmod.org/ https://overmod.org/
- ddactic 6mo ago[flagged]
- bttfuchsia 6mo ago[flagged]
- tim-tday 6mo agoIf the problem is bots ban bots.
- dang 6mo agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- Alex-Aachen 6mo agoFrom my own experience, I can confirm that new users currently can’t just post (or at least I couldn’t). So I’d appreciate it if there were some way to prove you’re not a bot and that you have at least a genuine question or perhaps an interesting post.
- gus_massa 6mo agoIs it fixed? The HN server has a few anti-spam secret features that dang/tomhow never published (and I guess they are added, removed and tweaked from time to time). Sometimes they have false positives. If you still have problems, you can send an email to the address in the "contact" link at the bottom.
- Alex-Aachen 6mo agoThanks for your tip. It worked out in the end; I guess it just took a little patience with HN. I can see why.
- MaxwellJensen 5mo agoNew users cannot post in Show HN, at least when I tried to post.
- dang 6mo agoHN would die without new users, so that's not an option! We're doing lots of things about bots and are actively working on this. I'd like to see links to what you (or anyone) are specifically worried about.