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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

#221

Post by throw_m239339 »

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.

HN has mostly turned into a reddit bis since 2023, with tons of topics that have absolutely nothing to do with startup, tech or programming but are directly taken from of r/news ... I'll take bots spamming fake projects over petty divise partisan politics.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#222

Post by wolvoleo »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #37

100%. Not sure what the solution is but I have lost interest in Show HNs these days. Part of it is because when someone posted before, it usually meant they spent a fair amount of time thinking, and found it worthwhile to spend energy on the project. This was a nice first filter for bad ideas and now no longer exists. Even for posts that are interesting to me, I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because…

I'm not sure if LLM projects doesn't mean they were not made with love. It just makes programming accessible to more people, but essentially it's still just a tool.

It does take the handcraft out of it, in that sense an LLM-made tool would be more akin to IKEA stuff compared to a handcrafted work of art (though I struggle to call even hand-made electron crap a work of art, lol).

But yeah I know what you mean, they are usually half-finished solutions.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#223

Post by SauntSolaire »

echoangle wrote: post #157
hamdingers wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusing the flag button by reporting LLM generated posts and comments (which are not breaking any current guidelines) seems like a good way to get your flags ignored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290841 It is against the rules though

I would be worried the reason for the flag wasn't _immediately_ obvious. Maybe if there was a drop-down for the rule being violated it would help.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#224

Post by zahlman »

echoangle wrote: post #157
hamdingers wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusing the flag button by reporting LLM generated posts and comments (which are not breaking any current guidelines) seems like a good way to get your flags ignored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290841 It is against the rules though

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261561 seems like a better source for the policy.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#225

Post by moralestapia »

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…

Totally.

I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from dang and tomhow's great work.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#226

Post by wolvoleo »

lich_king wrote: post #197
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…

Hmm, some LLM text is hard to detect, sure.

Some is also horribly easy. If the text is full of:

- Overly positive commentary and encouragement

- Constant use of bullet point lists, bolding and emoji

- This quaint forced 'funniness', like a misplaced attempt at being lighthearted

- A lot of blablah that just missed the point

- Not concise and to the point, but also not super long

Then that really screams ChatGPT to me.

I think it's because this seems to be the default styling of ChatGPT. When people tailor their prompt to be more specific about style it's a lot harder to detect but if they just dump a few lines of instructions about the content into it, this is what you'll get. So the low-effort slop is still pretty easy to detect IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#227

Post by scratchyone »

BalinKing wrote: post #70
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.

I think a steelman interpretation of the parent is that entirely LLM-generated projects should be disallowed. There's a lot of submissions on Show HN that seem completely vibe-coded to me (like, including the README), which is a very different situation IMO from someone who simply used Claude to write some—or even most—of the code. When even the human-facing portion of a submission is LLM-generated, it bothers a lot…

Agreed. Having some level of human input makes a submission at least meaningful. If the entire repo and all text is generated by an LLM, does it really matter if the human is the one posting the link? It's functionally indistinguishable from automated spam.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#228

Post by mapontosevenths »

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…

> it establishes a norm that AI-generated blogspam is, well, spam and unwelcome.

It is welcome though. Being on the front page regularly is evidence that people enjoy it or find it informative.

You may feel that others shouldn't be ALLOWED to enjoy it, but that's just your opinion and is almost always tangential to the actual topic.

Worse, you seem to believe that it needs to be labeled to help you identify it. Why? If its good enough that you need help to spot it then its obviously of sufficiently high quality.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#229

Post by zahlman »

scratchyone wrote: post #217
vel0city wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For what it's worth, there are modern LLM detectors with extremely low false-positive rates. The tech has advanced quite a bit since the ZeroGPT days. Personally I've gotten very good results from Pangram Labs. Still can't directly ban people though because false positives are always possible.

Is that false-positive rate from your own testing, or the author's claims? What is the source of ground truth?
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