The value of an HN post or comment that people actually see is so much higher than the value of a CAPTCHA-solve that there's no point in even talking about this.
Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#32I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory. I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to…
That kind of feature would be welcome.
Blocking domains would be nice too. Like substack or medium. I'm happy to just ignore them, but it sure would be nice to filter them out if possible.
I get that it's complicating the system and keeping it simple is perhaps for the best.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#33I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory. I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to…
This is an anti-goal for HN. There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you can get without any of those kinds of features, with a single global pool of conversations and participants. That's not to say there's no value in siloing, just that it's specifically not what HN is exploring.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#34I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory. I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to…
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Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#35Captcha is only effective at annoying legitimate users. If there is any incentive to do so, bots have no problem bypassing/solving them.
Is this your experience as a sysadmin or a user? As a sysadmin, this is an absurd statement in contradiction of my everyday reality.
I think it depends on how determined the actor is. I see all the range from your simple scripts to full on mimicking real user behavior that I can only really spot from the honeypots they hit.
You'd probably catch most the low hanging fruit for sure, but you would cause friction for real users.
I say this as someone who has enabled captcha on some of our more critical endpoints, there's definitely a place for it.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#36I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory. I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to…
This is an anti-goal for HN. There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you can get without any of those kinds of features, with a single global pool of conversations and participants. That's not to say there's no value in siloing, just that it's specifically not what HN is exploring.
>There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you can get without any of those kinds of features,
Normally I'd agree, but we have shadowbans, which really irks me.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#37I just realised that one day, an AI moderated board will receive such a post from an AI, not a human. And then a captcha only an AI can solve will appear, and the board will be rid of all "human slop"
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#38The value of an HN post or comment that people actually see is so much higher than the value of a CAPTCHA-solve that there's no point in even talking about this.
Totally. Captcha should be thought of as rate limiting, not anti-spam.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#39That is a losing battle. Even if you manage to make bot usage more expensive, which is all a captcha can do, the content posted by humans in discussions and shared links is increasingly generated by machines. It's ironic having a community of people object to the same technology they helped build. Enjoy the show, and learn to live with it. It's going to get much worse before it gets any better, if at all.
> "they helped build"
The overwhelming majority of developers have never worked anywhere close to LLM tech. AI is a very small field requiring specialized expertise.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
#40I've been thinking the same. I'm actually building a little site that presents a textarea that you can type your comment into and it will track its changes over time (typing, editing, pasting, etc) and provide a little playback widget so someone can see the composition of the comment. The idea being you can include a link to the playback in your comment that you post here and someone can eyeball it and see if it look…
I don't know why more school districts don't force this for essays. It's so straightforward with Google doc editing history too. And yeah, sure, you can get around it if you _really_ want quite trivially, but I imagine it would solve for 99% of students, and force them to actually engage with whatever AI-generated stuff they inevitably type by hand more than they were before.
I have no problems typing an essay out.