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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

#411

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

When I read comments like this, I think about the average Joe who says: "Most people are terrible drivers." Then, someone asks them: "Are you a terrible driver?" They respond: "Of course not. I am an excellent driver." A few people roll their eyes.

    > worthy of an instant ban
First, it is not always possible to identify an LLM-generated comment. There are too many false-positives. Imagine if this system was implemented, and one of your comments was identified as LLM-generated and you were instantly banned. How would you feel about it?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#412

Post by shagie »

lagrange77 wrote: post #325
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.

Wow, i just noticed, that they block access from Brave Browser.

What's up with Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42353473 (93 comments, and linking to https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking... which is about that, though if you browse with Brave you might have trouble with it)

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#413

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#414

Post by deaux »

gnabgib wrote: post #401
HendrikHensen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.

You are aware of the guidelines? (You are not fostering community) > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just like how HN itself can't be immune from macro trends, neither can its users, and macro trends have unfortunately made this a necessity for many of them.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#416

Post by pinkmuffinere »

vunderba wrote: post #388
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of setting up a system to highlight sock-puppeters and other consistent-rule-violating accounts, as a 'fun project' that might improve the HN experience. But it strikes me that the HN staff probably already does something like this, they may not welcome a side-loaded project of this sort, and it would require some automated crawling of HN (which again may be unwelcomed). Finally, I don't actually have…

It'd be pretty easy to spot too, because most people don’t even bother trying to hide it (either out of laziness and/or ineptitude). A lot of users don’t seem to realize that anyone can click on the domain in a "Show HN", and Hacker News will show you all the times that domain has been submitted. So you’ll see four or five different low karma sock puppets accounts that have all submitted the same site.

Oooooh that’s a great idea!

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#417

Post by jedberg »

dang wrote: post #347
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…

Indeed. Here is a recent litmus test: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 . How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these? (a bit more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384 , with a reply from the OP)

One thing we did at reddit for a while was put posts from new people in "jail". They would show up in a special yellow box at the top of the home page to accounts that tended to be early upvoters of things that became successful later (our Nostradamusus so to speak), and then if it got enough upvotes from that group it got out of jail and placed on the regular /new page.

So maybe some sort of filter like that? Only show it to those kinds of accounts at first?

The downside is that if that group isn't big enough you get a lot of groupthink, but if your sample is wide enough, it can be avoided. To be honest, I don't recall why we stopped doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#418

Post by fubdopsp »

imiric wrote: post #323
fubdopsp wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you, but... > Blogging, sharing blog posts, reading them, commenting on them--these are all acts of human communication. Not anymore. Bots are now the majority of producers and consumers of all content on the internet. The social contract you mention has been broken for years, and this new technology has further cemented that. Those of us who value communication with humans will have to find other platfo…

It's in a lot of people's interest to keep platforms like HN free of LLM spam, frankly. It's in our interest as people who want to keep our discussion site for actual human discussion (though from the other comments in this thread, this sentiment isn't universally shared, god knows why). It's also in the interest of AI companies since if they destroy internet spaces like this they lose valuable future training data. So I'm (perhaps foolishly) optimistic--or at least not completely pessimistic--that there's hope yet for us.

Incidentally I foresee similar issues to this training data pollution arising with LLM coding taking over software engineering--which it inevitably is going to continue to do, at least in the short term. If LLMs torpedo human engineering, who is going to create the new infrastructure (tools, frameworks, programming languages, etc) that LLMs are making such good use of today? It feels to me like we risk technological stagnation as our collective skills atrophy and the market value of our skills plummets. Kind of like airplane pilots forgetting how to debug planes or handle edge cases because they just rely on autopilot all the time.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#419

Post by anonzzzies »

qingcharles wrote: post #405
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.

I must be old and naive but you can make money with subreddits?

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#420

Post by mudkipdev »

gorgoiler wrote: post #391
dang wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Here is a recent litmus test: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 . How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these? (a bit more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384 , with a reply from the OP)

I have often heard that vote rigging is detectable on HN because the site software penalizes voting from accounts at the same IP address. Rumor had it that there is also some kind of social-network metric detecting when socially adjacent accounts (or alts) are engaged in astroturfing, the practice where a small cabal tries to pass themselves off as a broader grassroots campaign. Flip that around though and the same m…

I think vote rigging detection might be based on the length of your session
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