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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

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Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#191

Post by brewdad »

vunderba wrote: post #103
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.

This already happens now. Go look through a few of the "Show HN" authors - you'll inevitably see around several accounts that are 50-100 days old with a karma of 1 to avoid a green label. The OP is talking about posts, not comments. The simplest solution might be to prevent someone from posting a "Show HN" until they’ve earned twenty-five or fifty karma, to demonstrate that they’ve been actively participating on Hack…

This leads inevitably to karma farming bots who upvote each other’s submissions à la Reddit.

It’s a speed bump at best.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#192

Post by gpm »

neural_thing wrote: post #42

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.

$1 is an incredibly low price to pay for advertising and an incredibly high price to pay for legitimately interacting with a community. This would have the exact opposite of the intended effect.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#193

Post by Aurornis »

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…

This comment uses a lot of big words but it’s full of fallacies.

The HN user base is not perfect at detecting LLM content but a lot of it does get flagged and downvoted eventually. About once a day I’ll click on a link, realize it’s AI slop, and go back to HN to flag it but discover that it’s already flagged.

If you turn on showdead you can see all of the comments from LLM bots that have been discovered and shadowbanned.

The fallacy in the comment above is simple: It’s taking the current situation and extrapolating to an extreme future, then applying the extrapolated future prediction on to the current situation. The current situation does not represent the extreme future predicted. A lot of the LLM content is easily spotted and a lot of it is a waste of time to read, therefore it’s right to police and ban it. Even if imperfect.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#194

Post by toomuchtodo »

gnabgib wrote: post #14
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

“shownew” : “no|yes” option would be nice.

If everyone turned off new account visibility, we'd just see the same noise 30 days later.. not sure that helps.

During that time, one would assume mod action would filter out the undesired, thereby “seasoning” accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#195

Post by Springtime »

fubdopsp wrote: post #109
ryandrake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every single article's comments now, there's always someone coming out of the woodwork to post "This article is written by LLM." These comments are about as useless as "The website's color scheme is annoying" and "The website breaks the [back button | scrollbar]." (which, by the way, are not allowed per the HN guidelines[1]) If anything should be banned, it's low-effort "This is AI" commentary. It adds absolute ze…

It's much more than a "tangential annoyance" and it adds a lot to the conversation--among other things, it establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is, well, spam and unwelcome. Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication. Farming any of these steps out to an LLM completely breaks down the social contract involved in participating in an online forum l…

To provide a heads up to others for who feel similarly for whether something is worth spending time with there isn't a problem speculating if something is produced by AI if there are indicators of insufficient human authorship but that's a big if. If incorrect such comments themselves become noise.

In its worst form I've seen now many times in other communities users claim submissions are AI for things that are provably not, merely to dismiss points of view the poster disagrees with by invoking calls to action from knee-jerk voters who have a disdain for generative AI. I've also seen it expressed by users I expect feel intimidated by artwork from established traditional artists.

Thankfully on HN it hasn't reached that level but I have seen some here for instance still think use of em dashes with no surrounding spaces is some definitive proof by pointing to a style guide, without realizing other established style guides have always stated to omit the spaces (eg: Chicago Manual of Style). This just leads to falsely confident assessments and more unnecessary comment chains responding to them.

What one hopes for with curated communities is that people have discriminating taste at the submission and voting level. In my own case I'm looking for an experience from those who have seen a lot of things and only finds particular things compelling and are eager to share them. Compared to some submission that reaches the front page of say popular programming language docs that just provide another basis for rehashed discussion (and cynically since the poster knows such generalized submissions do this and grow karma).

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#196

Post by trinsic2 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #149
laborcontract wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.

The problem is that we might lose some gold. Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they were alerted by the story being posted here one way or another. And usually when they do it's very interesting. As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too long so the thread dies bef…

I think the right people will stick around. There is a certain kind of indivudal that has the paitence to understand that a system that restricts new accounts from post is a good thing. Of recent, there have been a lot of posters that come here from the open web just to try and slant opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#197

Post by lich_king »

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…

Many HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to distinguish between AI text and non-AI text. Some of it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to some of the occasional, one-sided stories of people who were accused of using LLMs and fired from their jobs. And some of it seems to be just hedging so that we don't develop a culture that could penalize their LLM-generated posts or code.

We had people defending the fired Ars Technica guy, even though he admitted to using an LLM in some sort of a contrived non-apology along the lines of "I did it because I had a cold".

My main problem with that is that you can just generate an infinite supply of LLM op-eds about LLMs, and is this really what we want to read every day? If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks about the risks or benefits of vibecoding, I'll just ask it.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#198

Post by whh »

laborcontract wrote: post #95
dang wrote: post #34

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&que...

Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.

I echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today...

At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on Instagram, X and Facebook for years.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#199

Post by Aurornis »

dextrous wrote: post #102
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…

One way that I could imagine a human-only HN could evolve in the coming AI wasteland: motivated individuals join small local groups and are validated face-to-face at meet-ups. Local trusted leads gatekeep their chapter’s posts, and this scalable moderation works up the tree. Bad leaves get culled out reasonably fast, maybe there’s some controls at the top level that let you see more content “lower down the tree” if y…

In my recent experience, local meetups and groups are unexpectedly more prone to self promotion and low effort spamming.

Local groups have a problem where members admit their friends or pressure others into inviting their friends who are not a net positive, but it feels too impolite to refuse or to kick someone out. Meeting someone in person also develops a sense of a social bond that makes it harder to downvote or flag their posts.

Local groups have always been a haven for affinity fraud, too. Running a scam is easier when you can smile, be charismatic, and pretend to be a personal friend before springing your ask on to your victims.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#200

Post by trinsic2 »

rock_artist wrote: post #123
laborcontract wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.

I really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.

What would this proof of work scenario, instead of restricting new user content, look like?
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