361–370 of 559 posts
There are barely any bots on Twitter. There were thousands of thousands of bots before 2023, because the API was free. These days running a bot on Twitter is expensive.
Fun fact: a company I worked for in the past had access to an undocumented partners-only API that allowed us to register unlimited number of accounts. I was personally tasked to handle the integration.
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...
It's easy for people to game but it's at least one more effort-based hurdle.
345 comments | 64 hidden | 50 blocked | 15 green
But then again, some of the most prolific, most upvoted accounts on this site constantly flood the site with political content and nothing is ever done about it and they get rewarded for it .. so yeah. I gave up hope a long time ago.
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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.
Like, why would my comment (or yours, or any other comment) pass or fail the LLM check the I/you/someone else used specific prompts or another LLM to edit the output? It seems like these tools would work on 99.9% of the outputs, but those outputs likely weren't created in an adversarial way.
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…
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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"?
I think a simple solution (and one that eventually every content platform will have to adopt) is to allow users to tag AI-generated spam. I think that a few years from now this feature should be the norm, like existing basic features on forums such as upvote, downvote, favorites, hide, etc. I know this will require much more development effort than simply blocking new accounts from posting at all. But on the other hand, you can’t block new accounts forever.
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It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20 new HN users so they're ready to shill". It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
If someone is going to put that much effort into to it, let them. I think the ideas here are to try to get some low hanging fruit to see if that works “good enough”. You’ll never block all AI generated accounts, but you may not have to and still have the desired effect. But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting, there are probably other ways to det…
We rely on friction for most of our social norms.
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That's indeed the problem with restricting new users. Existing community members always want to do that, but it's a recipe for not surviving.
I'm hoping to do a show HN soon on something I've been working on, but my account is currently only 6 days old. Tips? Btw, restricting new accounts (based on karma/age/whatever) could be combined with the option to ask mods for permission somehow, although that'd have to be done in a way that that doesn't become too much work.
The system has long been that anyone can email the mods and ask us to review their project, but the volume has grown so much in recent weeks that it’s hard to get much else done.