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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#111

Post by starkparker »

bdcravens wrote: post #69

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 submissio…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#112

Post by esseph »

heavyset_go wrote: post #54
mapontosevenths wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more annoyed by the anti-AI luddites filling the comments with low value complaints than I am by quality content written partially by an LLM. Those low value complaints add nothing to the conversation, and the content didnt make it to the front page because it was bad. If the sole objection is "AI bad", keep it to yourself....its boring.

Without engaging in more ad hominem, that are wrong by the way, what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it is?

> what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it is

1. Your guess is not always correct

2. Over time, AI content will get harder to guess until it is indistinguishable from human content

3. You're not helping anyone by posting "this is AI". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's not helpful. It just adds to the noise.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#113

Post by jimnotgym »

shimman wrote: post #89
delichon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Something we need to remember that AI was trained on every public internet comment, the vast majority of which are legit terrible. The biggest tell that someone is using AI is having multiple paragraphs saying the same point over and over again. Even trolls are more succinct.

Dammit, am I going to get banned for rambling?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#114

Post by tomhow »

mmaunder wrote: post #63

That's one way to block those pesky young innovators from trampling our lawn.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#115

Post by layer8 »

rerdavies wrote: post #101
BalinKing wrote: post #7

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 o…

I think all submissions to HN should be submitted via snail-mail, and must be handwritten. That would solve the problem. /heavy sarcasm That being said, my mother used to insist on hand-written cover letters from job applicants. Her rationale: it takes effort, so it weeds out all the applications from people who are just randomly spraying out applications for jobs they are not qualified for.

Unfortunately I don’t think that it would solve the problem: https://www.google.com/search?q=handwritten+mail+service&udm...

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#116

Post by fubdopsp »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#117

Post by layer8 »

andai wrote: post #49
delichon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even more concerning!) Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button? Then again it's a nuanced issue. I see AI used in a large percentage of writing now, so would this rule apply to the article as well?

> Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button?

We already have flagging and downvoting?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#118

Post by Jtsummers »

Kwpolska wrote: post #87
bmacho wrote: post #29

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.

Comments should be allowed from day one, but submissions should require some experience and karma.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#119

Post by Supermancho »

fubdopsp wrote: post #116

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 also do this. Pretty much every time I move.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#120

Post by gozucito »

delichon wrote: post #28

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 f…

Agreed. Merit is the only fair solution. If OP noticed a garbage post, that means they evaluated a post on merit and decided it was garbage. So it works.

We have genAI generating videos and the quality sucks compared to human produced and filmed content. People call it out and nobody is going to watch a genAI movie at the theater or binge a genAI TV show. Merit based filtering.

GenAI for music is not as good as human-generated music either. Not a single AI song from Suno or Udio has reached the top40. Not even one. 100% of the songs are human because they are evaluated on merit.

We have SWE and agentic benchmarks to evaluate coding LLMs on merit.

Disclaimer: I am a new account.

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