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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#91

Post by bakugo »

Oras wrote: post #25
castral wrote: post #16

I don't understand how this is supposed to solve anything, and I've seen it suggested as a solution multiple times. If you restrict comments to older accounts, all it's going to do is make the bot creators speculatively open and proactively age accounts for future use.

I wish for karma based too if we managed to get filters. I want to see posts only by accounts with {x}+ karma points.

Have you taken a look at reddit recently? It's absolutely infested with bots farming karma, either by reposting old popular posts, or simply posting AI generated comments.

Actively encouraging this will only make things worse.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#92

Post by ai-psychopath »

vivid242 wrote: post #82
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…

We need new ways to prove our humanness.

in a world of smart LLMs acting dumb is human proof

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#94

Post by xpe »

andai wrote: post #49
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?

Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even more concerning!) Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button? Then again it's a nuanced issue. I see AI used in a large percentage of writing now, so would this rule apply to the article as well?

> Yeah it's weird, there was one case where I thought it was AI but wasn't sure. Several other comments pointed it out, too. Author claimed he wrote it manually. (Which is honestly even more concerning!)

I find the above comment concerning, so I ask: to what degree is the above commenter calibrated to ground truth? How would they know? How would we know?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessm...

It seems to me comments like the above are overconfident in the worst ways.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#95

Post by laborcontract »

dang wrote: post #34

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...

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.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#97

Post by sowbug »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #72
heavyset_go wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without engaging in more ad hominem, that are wrong by the way, what's the issue with labeling AI content with what it is?

It's one thing to have an AI-label. It's another to completely derail a conversation with a likely false AI accusation. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122272 You have to scroll a few pages before the actual article is discussed. "This was LLM generated" is likely to float to the top of an article. That's where the best comments about the article deserve to go, not an off topic comment. An AI label sh…

Join me and downvote them relentlessly.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#98

Post by xpe »

Lots of social media platforms need better ways forward. Let's focus on things we can measure and enforce. Let's be honest to ourselves about we know and what we don't.

Think back to prohibition. Just because we want less public drunkenness doesn't mean it is wisest to ban alcohol. One has to ask: what is the chance the ban is successful? What happens when it cuts the wrong way?

To what degree do we care about (1) "human" versus "AI"; (2) comment quality; (3) sensible methods for revealing social preferences? I care a lot more about the latter two than the first. It doesn't have to be a zero sum tradeoff, but I think it is a good starting question.

Let's have that discuss and not try to solve the human vs AI classification problem.

Re: Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

#99

Post by carra »

neural_thing wrote: post #42

Eventually HN is going to need to charge people $1 to post, just for spam filtering. Maybe donate the money to open source or something.

Charging money does not seem a very good idea in a site like this where you expect users to upload all the content. Also this would require credit card info which is a massive barrier, even if you were to charge just 1 cent.
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