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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

#371

Post by intended »

localuser13 wrote: post #329
sdenton4 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any amount of friction reduces the amount of slop. What proportion of clankers are going to realize that they need to warm up the accounts two weeks in advance? Answer: a proportion that your never going to see with that barrier in place. With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.

With enough layers you will also weed out almost all of the good actors. Normal people are busy and don't have time nor patience to jump over too many hoops to promote their cool new research, or to respond in a thread where someone linked it.

You don’t have a choice.

We live with GenAI, and the human to bot ratio is now leaning in a different direction. The old norms are dead, because the old structures that held them up are gone.

This idea that theres “more hoops - losing participation” on this thread keeps assuming that the community is unaffected by the macro trends.

It’s weirdly positing that HN posts and users, are somehow immune/unaffected by those trends.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#372

Post by kelipso »

arttaboi wrote: post #368

I think every moderator on every platform is struggling with this issue, and no one has succeeded so far, so it doesn’t seem that easy. 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, hid…

It’s going to end up like the flag button. Disagree with opinion in the post -> tag as AI-generated spam. Not that I disagree with the idea necessarily, probably a few safeguards around it like only certain users can tag and pattern over time would fix it.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#373

Post by intended »

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…

These changes aren’t being suggested in a vacuum.

It’s perhaps unintentional, but your framing makes it seem that this is a baseless whimsy.

At this point, it appears that we will be talking to bots more than humans.

It’s a brave new world, and not adapting to it will see the humans leave.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#374

Post by xeromal »

QuantumGood wrote: post #278
rdevilla wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wary about new accounts such as yours wanting to censor and shape discourse by antagonizing people who hold diverse views that differ from your own here. The HN culture has shifted drastically over the past 5 years.

user: pinkmuffinere created: August 8, 2021 karma: 2686

This is excellent. lol

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#375

Post by xarope »

neom wrote: post #12

I almost emailed dang this morning to offer to help out tho I'm not particularly technical. Few solutions I thought of: 1 - honeypot, hide some links llms can follow if stuff gets posted in it, unlikely to be a human. 2 - Make an captcha that only llms can answer, I recently made 2 social networks, one that humans couldn't join by making the submission question too difficult to figure out quickly. 3- Use an LLM to de…

you may have a point, i.e. some mechanism to invoke a behavior that only a bot or LLM could do, that a human would not, e.g. click on this button now in a hidden div/transparent color or measure response time within page load.

the problem is that once this is found out, the circumvention is easy enough to program into bots/LLMS.

are we going to reinvent the voight-kampff test from bladerunner?!?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#376

Post by toraway »

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…

Sure, it's obviously impossible to ID any single piece of writing as from an LLM without significant false positives.

But in practice, I frequently encounter a comment that either screams generic LLM slop or even just as a vague indefinable "vibe" due to one or more telltale signs, so that's red flag #1. Then, I go to the comment history, at that point if it's really a bot/claw/agent or a poster heavily using LLMs I'll usually find page after page of cookie cutter repeats of the exact same "LLM smell" (even if that account has been prompted to avoid em-dashes/lists/etc, they still trend towards repetition of their own style).

At that point a human moderator would have more than enough evidence to ban an account. It's not like we're talking about a death sentence or something. If no clear pattern of abuse from the long term commenting activity, then give them the benefit of the doubt and move on.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#377

Post by bombcar »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #353
jtchang wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading slashdot but what is their system? Is there a separate set of mods that moderate the moderators?

You get points to mod other people and other people can meta-mod your posts.

The key is that both were randomly assigned to users - you’d never know if you’d open a thread and be a moderator. If you posted in the thread you couldn’t moderate.

And about the same frequency you’d be assigned to metamoderate, basically being asked if a moderator’s “vote” was a good one or not (you didn’t have to fully agree you’d do the same, just that it wasn’t bad).

Someone who scored low in meta moderation would get less or no moderator chances.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#378

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #296
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 you need (at least) one exception to that rule. We have many people here whose first language is not English, and this is an English-only forum. For at least some of those people, an AI translation may give better clarity than their own attempt at writing in English. So I would propose that, in the ideal world where we could perfectly enforce the rules that we chose, that the rule would be "AI for translation…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#379

Post by rukuu001 »

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…

Absolutely this:

> Some people can really benefit from using LLMs to help them write. E.g. non-native speakers.

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