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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what a second HN with a $10 fee would look like.

That would just kill off the community, since there is some natural attrition that always happens in a given community that has to be compensated for with new users (and moderation to guide these new users).

The problem facing HN IMO is not so much about spammers but low-effort comments and jokes (what dang calls reflexive vs reflective[1]).

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Like thinking fast vs slow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

X did the same experiment last year. $10 won't stop spammers and trolls

The $10 barrier only works if users are actually at significant risk of getting banned for breaking the rules, Twitter just let the bluecheck spambots run rampant.

Yes. Twitter is rampant with people posting outright Nazi praise among lots of other social ills.

I spent a few hours reporting the obvious ones on 4/20 just to see if anything would happen, mostly out of curiosity to explore the rabbithole and chain of accounts. Out of 50 reports: 0 bans, suspensions, or deletes.

The posts were all consisting out of direct threats to other users or support of genocide. I didn't even bother reporting the Hitler praise because I knew that wouldn't cross the line for X.

It needs to be coupled with effective and merciless moderation towards that behavior. When your single spam post costs you $10 and it was deleted and you were permabanned within a few minutes, the only thing it's effective at doing is draining your wallet. That's not so say you don't see that behavior on SA, but it's pretty unnoticable unless you go looking for it (and it keeps the lights on there).

twitter has created the problem for themselves of few moderators relative to users, allowing spam, and giving the benefit of the doubt to suspected bots

>$10 won't stop spammers.

Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.

I think the argument you want is that it discourages desirable signups too much.

> Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.

I talked to someone who worked at a PR firm that used puppet accounts and voting rings to get things upvoted on sites like Reddit and HN.

$500 would be a relatively small part of their budget from what they charge clients. An obstacle, yes, but not a show stopper.

Dunno - here's a list of 38 bots currently (last 4 hours) active on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612

part of a larger network. The cost is perhaps $500 to have a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts (for marketing and other reasons), to downvote | flag negative coments, etc.

With AI such things can fly more and more under the radar and will be seen by some as a valid expense for the gain they seek.

> a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts

Are we calling that spamming now?

That is called "warming up" spammer accounts, a technique most spammers use and the warmup method and timing will vary by the intended use. Some spammers don't really know how to do this correctly.

I did something similar to this a long time ago on IRC when channels would be operated by "power trippers". I made a bunch of accounts spread out over months, then would slowly join them to a channel with a power-tripping operator. When they would kick/ban myself or others for disagreeing with a statement, a warmed up account would reply. They would kick/ban and another account on another IP would reply ... and so on. So there are multiple use cases for warming up accounts. Sometimes I could get another operator to kick/ban the power tripping operator and sometimes it was just entertainment. Eventually they would realize that 65+% of their audience they were power tripping in front of was just me and they would never know if they kicked all of "me".

Read the comments made by the listed accounts in the past few hours and describe their content.

Sometimes that part is called "astroturfing"

If anything the spammers and trolls are the main people buying the blue checkmarks to try and make their obvious 10-min-mail-ass account look at least partially legitimate at first glance.

It was always free to sign up and participate. The $10 is for a checkmark and some premium features.

I’m on some Substack forums where everyone is a $5/month paying member. It helps a bit.

Maybe something like https://lobste.rs/ where you have to get vouched by another poster before you can comment.

I never really understood, how lobster is working or is supposed to work. I don't know any other HN posters, let alone lobster posters personally. How would I ever find someone to vouch for me? And why should anyone, since they don't know me personally either? Do people just randomly vouch for others then? Or is it like a closed society kind of club? Or do people do some vetting procedure, that they personally like, and then vouch for others, that they vetted?

it's just an online forum, so "vouching" is not a particularly big deal. So if someone is vaguely aware of you from somewhere else online they'll probably give you an invite, or even if they've never heard of you but you have some kind of public footprint they can look at. Or if something you've built or written ended up on the site, that's pretty much an automatic invite since people should be able to participate if something made by them is discussed.

I think there's been some people who have had e.g. multiple successful articles on HN that got them vouched for on lobste.rs (and presumably had some sort of public contact to let them know to create an account), but there's also been people that just invited all their coworkers. So defacto it's sort of like a members club with occasional honorary membership.

Just ask on their IRC channel. The bar is set very low.

How does one get an account on that site? I saw a project of mine get submitted there and wanted to participate in the thread but signups were closed. Do you have to be invited?

https://lobste.rs/about

> The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat room.

Thank you!

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