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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

#331

Post by mschuster91 »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #288
AussieWog93 wrote: post #266

Reddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed. A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever. The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming kar…

It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the…

> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.

And on top of that, some of said "volunteers" are power-hungry, petty, useless fucking morons. Especially the large subreddits tend to be run by people I wouldn't trust to boil some pasta without triggering a fire alert, and yes I know people who manage that.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#332

Post by mastazi »

esperent wrote: post #312
alwa wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.

I've wanted to join lobste.rs for several years but don't see any way to do so. I think that might be a bit too far in the other direction.

Same here, I don't know anyone who might send me an invite unfortunately. It's unlikely for this topic to come up organically in a conversation as in "hey by the way are you on lobste.rs" so my previous attempts were by sending messages in my company's notice board asking if someone is there. But in the last few years I have worked in smaller startups so the sample size is too small for this strategy to succeed.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#333

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> Many HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to distinguish between AI text and non-AI text.

And it's becoming more and more difficult - not just by AI getting "better" (and training removing many of the telltale signs), but also because regular people "learn" to write like an AI does. We're seeing it with "algospeak" - young terminally online people literally say stuff like "unalived" in the meatspace nowadays.

We're living in a 1984 LARP.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#334

Post by rmast »

alwa wrote: post #310
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what are the alternatives to HN? Because if new account restrictions create enough friction, you lose legitimate users who periodically rotate accounts for privacy reasons. At some point the annoyance tips toward just lurking, and a forum where only old accounts talk is a stagnant forum given enough time.

Lobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.

That looks interesting, but I feel like it’s likely to be close to impossible to join. Feels like it would be weird asking someone you know for an invite.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#335

Post by lagrange77 »

thutch76 wrote: post #248

I'm very wary of this request, though I understand it. I've been reading HN daily since around 2014. My involvement was purely passive (e.g., I have been a lurker) because I really didn't think I had much to contribute that wasn't already stated better by others. I didn't actually create my account until 2021? 2022? I can't remember. And I didn't make my first post or even comment until just last week. While I think…

> Furthermore, what does it matter if it's "AI generated"? Is some AI content ok? What's the pass/fail threshold on human vs AI generated text?

If a human put his effort into it, is proud of it and wants to show it to the world, i'm happy to invest some time to have a look at it and maybe provide some helpful feedback.

I'm not willing to invest my time into evaluating the more or less correct sounding ideas of a ML model.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#336

Post by mastazi »

trinsic2 wrote: post #196
magicalhippo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But sticking around doesn't solve the scenario mentioned by parent.

1. some interesting projects gets to HN main page

2. author of the project is not on HN so creates a green account and interacts

even if that person would have the patience to stick around, by the time they would be able to respond, it would be too late for it to be relevant to the (now stale) discussion.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#337

Post by lovich »

edanm wrote: post #298
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 disagree with this policy. Some people can really benefit from using LLMs to help them write. E.g. non-native speakers. LLM-assisted-writing doesn't have to be low effort, it can help people express themselves better in many cases. I'd argue that someone who spent their time doing multiple passes with an LLM to get their phrasing just write, has taken obviously more care than the majority of people on HN take befor…

> LLM-assisted-writing doesn't have to be low effort, it can help people express themselves better in many cases.

Hard disagree. I have been learning another language and wouldn’t pretend to write posts after an LLM rewrote it because it is literally lower effort than learning the language correctly.

Like definitionally, you are using a machine to offload effort. I don’t know how you could claim that is not “low effort” when that’s the point of the tool.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#338

Post by sfn42 »

BalinKing wrote: post #64
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?

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.

Can you show an example of "blatantly obvious"?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#339

Post by ajdecon »

mastazi wrote: post #332
esperent wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wanted to join lobste.rs for several years but don't see any way to do so. I think that might be a bit too far in the other direction.

Same here, I don't know anyone who might send me an invite unfortunately. It's unlikely for this topic to come up organically in a conversation as in "hey by the way are you on lobste.rs" so my previous attempts were by sending messages in my company's notice board asking if someone is there. But in the last few years I have worked in smaller startups so the sample size is too small for this strategy to succeed.

FWIW, folks on lobste.rs are (mostly) friendly and willing to extend invites if you seem like a real person. My understanding is that the invite system is primarily in use to avoid drive-by spammers and the like.

Feel free to send me an email (findable via my HN profile) mentioning that you found it via this thread, and I’m happy to extend an invite.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#340

Post by basilikum »

christofosho wrote: post #311
basilikum wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then. Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra Oh damn, that's the one who posted the…

Yikes. That account is like the epitome of LLM posting. It's a shame, too, because it makes me feel less inclined to read discussion on this forum.

Yeah, unfortunately there are bots here that are much better at hiding that and even do language mistakes on purpose.

It's still a small minority of comments, but it's definitely getting a problem and just the chance — even if it's small one — of talking to a bot, rather than a human causes inhibition. Finding out that one has been talking to a bot is finding out you've been scammed. You invest time and human emotions into something for another human to read, even if it's just a quick HN comment, just to find out that it was all for nothing. It sucks the humanity out of it and thereby out of oneself. You get tricked into spending your valuable limited human social energy on soulless machines with infinite capacity of generating worthless slop instead of on other humans.

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