Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

I'd suggest instead a lower threshold for [dead]-ing posts and submissions by new accounts when flagged by HN users.

Do this with submissions, too. Or at least put some indicator that it's AI generated.

I'm honestly surprised how well it's going.

From the perspective of usually just swinging into a post from the front page, when I do see green, it's usually overtly political trolling, and dead from the start. So I had assumed new account = everyone sees your post in gray, at least for a week or two.

I don't envy the "Show HN:" case. It can be intractable, story time:

Last week, there was a "Show HN:" post for a GitHub link, made it all the way to #2. It was a Flutter app, written up as if it did all the stuff you'd want from an open source LLM client. I said to myself "geez, I knew I took too long to deliver the thing I've been working on for 2 years. the MVP version is insanely popular."

-- only after digging into the repo for 10 minutes, with domain expertise, did I realize it was a complete Potemkin village, built by Claude. And even then, I was afraid to post something pointing this out because it required domain expertise, and it could have read as negative rather than principled.

All that to say, some subsets of The AI Poster Problem now require having intimate domain expertise and 10 minutes to evaluate it. :/

Additionally, the Claude 4.6s and GPT-5.4s are better than me at posting on HN now. :/ And I've been here 16 years. The past couple days, any comment I write involving some sort of judgement or argument is by Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4, via: 1) dump HN post into prompt 2) say "I feel $X about this, write me an HN post that communicates this but not negatively".

I'm a little ashamed to admit if you look through my post history, you'll definitely see a repeated pattern over 16 years of someone who is very negative and has a hard time communicating it constructively. They're smart enough now to extrapolate observations in the way I want to, while avoiding my own tarpits.

There is an epistemic silver lining. This is in fact a Red Queen's race that cannot be won. So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on its own merits without reference to the writer's status, because that status can no longer be reliably detected. For a public feed like this one, the only alternative is to ignore it. The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.