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Comment by n_ary | Hacker News Reader

Why are these spam accounts not perma banned and removed?

For example, this[1] account mentioned in the article has 1781 packages of gibberish.

Also, the whole reporting process is onerous, there is a large form. Of course, gatekeeping on reporting is good, but there should be a possibility to report an entire profile of package publisher.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/~eleanorecrockets

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Isn't it better to leave accounts that correlate spam than to force spammers to obscure the connection by creating a new account for each piece of spam?

That's not how spammers work. There is this profile with thousands and there are still hundreds of spam profiles with just a handful of packages yet. If you let them grow unchecked, they grow, exponentially. The broken Windows theory fits well here

I am not sure I am following that this fits the broken window fallacy? That fallacy is 'if I break/destroy something I create value on other things'. I am actually curious how spamming a bunch of accounts with junk in them would fit that? Oh no doubt it is creating negative value but nothing is destroyed to do that. 'Broken window' is probably not the right pattern here? I can think of a couple of other terms that fit better but still do not seem right.

I think you are making a confusion about what's the broken windows theory, I suggest reading about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

The other commenter was actually just mixing it up with the broken windows fallacy[0]. Funnily enough, it's a common enough confusion that both of the pages reference each other at the top of the page.

>This article is about the economic parable. For the criminological theory, see Broken windows theory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

ah I see my mistake.

That primarily works if you can shadow ban the account. Otherwise the spam is still negatively impacting the community (ex. By polluting search results).

If you make them create a new account each time you remove a package, how does that help you find or remove pollution going forward? It seems to work in the moment, but if you have no plan to change the system the resulting equilibrium is worse than if you can identify a connection between packages from the same spammer.

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