Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

Post by mroche » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #79

BalinKing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, updated my original comment—I meant to qualify it to only those cases where it's blatantly obvious. Obviously a lot of ambiguous comments will slip through as a result, but I agree with you that false negatives are better than false positives.

Your comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account overly using them are blatantly AI. I don't think your account is AI just by these few comments, but I would like to point out that most rubrics one might use to determine what is obviously AI might end up including the way you talk. If there was a truly accurate tell, some algorithm you could feed a few…

Post by Vaslo » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #125

> 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.

Post by rjh29 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

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.

Post by rjh29 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

castral wrote: post #16

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.

Post by verdverm » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

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…